h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have seen banners up on several websites. Large crowds of people are depicted holding marijuana and the caption quotes some statistics; arrests in the U.S. for drug related crimes during a certain time period versus the number of actual users of illegal drugs. The number is staggering; the States' federal government is barely making a dent, but it is trying hard. The caption ends 'where are you going to put us all?'

The States' federal government has recently announced it will be opening 32 new federal penitentiaries.

This is not to handle overflow in the current penal system. This is to provide storage for a renewed and vigorous effort to incarcerate people for burning a plant.

Recently, California passed legislation to allow the prescribing of pot for 'medical purposes'. The federal government's reaction to this was to step in and bypass the Californian legal system in pursuing those that the federal government considers to be felons. Several doctors have had to stand before Federal courts and vow not to prescribe the drug to their patients. A pot-legalization activist with HIV who used marijuana on a daily basis to combat the nausea that caused him to vomit up his medication was hauled before a Federal Court and is now awaiting sentencing. He was not allowed access to a lawyer, or given the opportunity to represent himself. He will die of AIDS in jail, regardless of the length of his sentence. It would be naive to assume that his case is unique.

Paranoid people will tell you that the CIA is actually selling drugs and making a hell of a profit doing it, hence the war on narcotics. The only reason I can see for the Federal government to be acting as it does is that someone, somewhere, is reaping some sort of gain. What form of gain, though?

It gets far more interesting. A popular program for convicts in the United States is 'behind bars' labour, managed by a certain corporation that shall remain nameless. Prisoners are paid thirty cents to a dollar per hour to work for this corporation, and this ostensibly saves the government a good deal of money in security measures and so forth, as there are no idle hands to do the Devil's work.

These prisoners work at manufacturing a variety of goods, including but not limited to bedroom sets, clothing, military fatigues, kevlar vests, patriot missile system components, and the like. Their employer's primary customer is the U.S. federal government. Their employer is expanding its operations quite rapidly because of the availability of cheap labour. The only thing holding this corporation back from providing even better service to its best customer is the supply of workers willing to work for thirty cents an hour.

Prisoners in the United States are not allowed to vote.

With new prisons opening all over the place, it seems rather difficult to avoid postulating a paranoid scenario here. Hrmm, the government is rounding up druggies, interring them without due process, putting them to work manufacturing weapon systems and support gear for the military-industrial complex, and has been so successful in doing so that thirty two new facilities will soon be brimming with new recruits into this scheme. What you have is a stultified class of society with no political or personal rights or freedoms performing the labour you yourself wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole, cheaply and efficiently. Sure, some of them are murderers and rapists and thieves. A good percentage of them are racial minorities. Many of them are homosexuals. None of them will reproduce, so the quota of workers must be maintained by continual infusions of new blood, but that will be easy enough... once the government runs out of druggies (ha) it can easily turn its sights on pornographers and sexual deviants. Plato's Republic is at last realized. Did something like this happen earlier this century?