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Taxpayers pay an estimated $50 billion annually to incarcerate an ever increasing portion of our population, including 2,225 adolescent offenders who are serving life without the possibility of parole.  The estimate reaches $185 billion when one factors in police services and court costs, including the price of public defenders for the indigent.  Of the 2.3 million imprisoned Americans, 1.25 million are mentally ill.  The cruelty of imprisoning mental patients is a growing debate.  Sixty percent of inmates in solitary confinement 23 hours per day are mentally ill, and 80% of prisoners in the “hole” are African Americans.
Besides the $50 billion per annum from taxpayers, many prisons earn additional capital of an unspecified sum by using inmate labor to manufacture marketable goods.  Profits could increase substantially as plans are being discussed to again use American prisoners as test subjects for pharmaceutical drugs. 
With discussions to again use prisoners as convenient lab rats for pharmaceutical companies, it appears that authorities finally found some “use” for mentally ill Americans. 

 In 2006, the prestigious Institute of Medicine has recommended that federal rules be altered to allow drug testing and other experimentation on prisoners (The Boston Globe 8/17/06).  Is this why families of mental patients have such trouble committing their sick relatives or getting community care under enforced treatment provisions when needed?***  Is the system just waiting on our mental patients to do some crime worthy of imprisonment, like vagrancy, disturbing the peace, substituting psychiatric medicines with street drugs, or worse?  A physically healthy 30-year-old schizophrenic man who remains untreated in his community, commits murder and is sentenced to life in prison may bring over $3 million dollars at $50,000 per year plus a conservative estimate for  treatment costs.

Are sick Americans being deprived of needed treatment and thereby preserved to eventually join their fellow mental patients warehoused in jail?  Is support for mental patients withheld in order to eventually enrich private prison profiteers?  Is this the plan for military personnel who are to be withdrawn from Iraq by 2011, many of whom suffer PTSD to varying degrees?  Have we got a monster under our beds?

Who profits?  More