CNBC's Billions Behind Bars: Inside America’s Prison Industry

“Billions Behind Bars: Inside America’s Prison Industry,” a CNBC original documentary, goes behind the razor wires to investigate the profits and inner-workings of the multi-billion dollar corrections industry.

With more than 2.3 million people locked up, the U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the world. One out of 100 American adults is behind bars – while a stunning one out of 32 is on probation, parole or in prison. This reliance on mass incarceration has created a thriving prison economy. The states and the federal government together spend roughly $74 billion a year on corrections, and nearly 800,000 people work in the industry.

From some of the poorest towns in America to some of the wealthiest investment firms on Wall Street, CNBC’s Scott Cohn travels the country to go inside the big and controversial business of prisons. He investigates the business model behind a private prison in Idaho, dubbed a “gladiator school” by inmates and former prison employees who cite its extraordinary level of violence. We also look at allegations of improper corporate prison industry influence over a tough immigration enforcement law in Arizona, and chronicle what happens when a hard hit town in Montana accepts an enticing sales pitch from private prison developers. In Colorado, we profile a little-known workforce behind bars, and discover that products created by prison labor have seeped into our everyday lives -- even some of the food we eat. We also meet a tough-talking judge in the law-and-order state of Texas who’s actually trying to keep felons out of prison and save taxpayer money, through an innovative and apparently successful program.

Reading some of the comments on this subject caused me to doa little research.

The Middletown City jail holds 80 inmates, in a city of 48K that’s not a lot of jail space. That alone makes it really hard to keep people in jail for the minor crimes. For most major crimes the inmates are sent to Butler County where they can hold close to 1,000 inmates. Both jails are at capacity as of today.  That means to lock someone up right now someone has to be let out. So who do you let out? I do agree that things should be much tougher on repeat offenders. But there is nowhere to put them.

The fact is that Middletown’s crime rate be it petty crime or the more serious crimes are a major issue. The problem affects everyone from business owners to home owners. Is section 8 the cause of all these problems? I have no doubt that the high numbers of vouchers have a played a serious role in the crime in this town. There is a bigger picture to look at.