Life for Pot

 This article from Mother Jones is just another story about government employee unions and their influence on mass incarceration.  

It may be more comfortable for progressives to place the blame on conservatives, but the financial incentives for mass incarceration clearly belong to those who depend on paychecks for prisoners. 

Big Labor's Lock 'Em Up Mentality

How otherwise progressive unions stand in the way of a more humane correctional system.

—By James Ridgeway and Jean Casella

| Fri Feb. 22, 2013 3:01 AM PST

Protesters rallied against a union campaign to save Illinois' notorious Tamms prison. Courtesty Tamms Year Ten

On January 4, the Tamms Correctional Center, a supermax prison in southern Illinois, officially closed its doors. Tamms, where some men had been kept in solitary confinement for more than a decade, was notorious for its brutal treatment of prisoners with mental illness—and for driving sane prisoners to madness and suicide.
The closure, by order of Gov. Pat Quinn, was celebrated by human rights and prison reform groups, and by the local activists who had fought for years to do away with what they saw as a torture chamber in their backyard. But it might have been accomplished sooner were it not for a competing progressive faction: Big Labor.