Prisons are a big business. The whole war on drugs is an industry in itself. I know a kid from a well-off family who was a coke addict and was jailed to punish him.
The county where he was incarcerated got money from DEA for the investigation, and more for the arrest. The lawyer who bargained down his plea got hundreds of dollars an hour. The boy was sentenced to a drug testing station weekly, where he would pee in a cup– at a hefty charge for each “service”. He went to “counseling” and this cost more money. He met monthly with his probation officer, and his family was billed for that, too. The jail he spent a short sentence in acted as a hotel for other counties and the state reimbursed for that.
The kid never got treatment, or hooked up with NA or AA, so to beat his addiction to coke he had to do it on his own. The court didn’t seem to care. Of course, if he’d been a poor kid who’d been caught messing with a marijuana, it’d be simpler. No money to pay a lawyer to ransom him? Then he’d have to rat out somebody else or be locked up for a long time. Prison lobbyists have been tremendously effective. Locking people up is very very profitable. Ridiculously long minimum sentences keep those tax dollars flowing.
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