American prisons .... where inmates have to pay for everything they use ....

from clothes to toilet rolls.

The cartoon from Ted Rall, dated today tries to tell us how defeating is the justice system of modern day America. The article at Time from mid 2013 and the one from DailyMail from late 2011 will give you a better insight into the injustice of it all. A great many folks are making big bucks from the prison population and this has become a very profitable industry which,you can bet your bottom dollar, will only expand as does anything that's unhealthy and evil.

Nate Rawlings writing at Time :
Welcome to Prison. Will You Be Paying Cash or Credit?

Belt-tightening municipalities like Tennessee's Anderson County are asking prisoners to help pay their own way — but experts say it probably won't work out for convicts or taxpayers

Southern hospitality is famous, but the accommodations at Anderson County Jail will no longer be gratis. Inmates at this correctional institution northwest of Knoxville, Tenn., will soon have to pay fed-up taxpayers $9.15 for each pair of pants issued during their stay, $6.26 for each blanket and $1.15 for each towel. They’ll even have to shell out 29¢ for toilet paper.

A county of about 75,000 people, Anderson, like many municipalities across the country, has seen the cost of housing inmates rise in the past few years. And like many states, cities and counties facing tight budget constraints, Anderson has turned to the inmates themselves to defray some of those costs.

“Our taxpayers pay $62 a day to house one inmate,” says Jay Yeager, the Anderson County law director who proposed the program. “Our inmate care, medical care, housing care, all those budgetary codes have escalated over the past several years, and it’s an unreasonable burden on our taxpayers. What we’re trying to do is shift the burden off the taxpayers’ back, to the inmates.”

Anderson County is only the latest in a long line of cash-strapped municipalities to levy fees to help fund their criminal-justice systems. The practice is common in California, Texas, New York and Illinois. Since 1996, Florida has added 20 fees. And in 2010, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School surveyed the 15 states with the highest prison populations, which accounted for nearly 70% of all state prisoners in the country, and found myriad fees assessed both during and after prison stays: administrative fees, supervision and transportation fees, even a $60 fee in Pennsylvania just to enter the parole program...........

From DailyMailUK
Go to jail… and pay $140 a night: Inmates to be charged bed and board to help balance the books
    Means-tested initiative is the largest so far in America
    Officials become outraged after wealthy celebrities like Lindsay Lohan sent to jail at the taxpayers' expense
U.S. jails are to charge inmates up to $142 per night to stay there in an attempt to balance their budgets.

Those incarcerated in Riverside County, California, will have to pay for their bed and board under the means tested initiative, the largest so far in America.

Officials have become outraged after watching wealthy celebrities like Lindsay Lohan sent to jail at taxpayers’ expense..........