Robocop revisited
I just watched Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (on Netflix Watch Instantly) again. I thought it held up very well indeed. Quite solid, and the money spent where it counted—the screen credits, for example, wasted not a cent.
What struck me most, however, was how very possible the idea of privatizing our police forces now seems. Think of it: profit-motivated cops, going for bonuses. How soon will be the first? And what trend could be more ominous?
UPDATE: To answer the second question: An even more ominous trend would be when corporations go for vertical integration: they have already privatized the prisons. Police forces might be next to be privatized, and then if the judiciary could also be brought under private control, you could have a very efficient system at rounding up the powerless, running them before one of your courts, and then into one of your prisons, collecting taxpayer money at each step. Then, to grow profits, the corporations just increase the number rounded up, probably by using their influence in state legislatures to make more things illegal and to make more crimes carry mandatory prison sentences. It becomes a money-making machine, with the “criminals” more or less the resource being mined. Extended legislation (new sort of crimes) can increase the available money-producing resource (people accused of crimes who can be caught, sentenced, and imprisoned). Of course, the Public Defender system would have to be undermined and underfunded and, ultimately, undone: the Public Defender’s office drives up corporate costs and also reduces corporate profits by getting “not guilty” verdicts.
I should point out that the first step—getting legislatures to attach mandatory minimum sentences to more crimes and get more people into prison for life (guaranteed income, from the corporation’s point of view) through “3 strikes” laws is already a fact and rather far advanced in California (and probably in other states as well: I live in California so I’m more familiar with its situation). Private prisons in California were so successful—and the corporations’ lobbying efforts were augmented by the prison guards’ union, which had the same objective (more prisoners, thus more work for prison guards), with the result that the state budget share claimed by prisons has ballooned.
Indeed, the first steps toward putting the judiciary under corporate control have already occurred in Pennsylvania, where a corporation running prisons for juveniles had two judges on its payroll: the judges made sure that juveniles who appeared before them went to prison, and in return were rewarded by the corporations (for which the juveniles represented profit-potential). I’m not sure whether the judges were on salary or paid as piecework, but in any event the corporate goals and methods were clear.
That’s the direction we’re headed: Privatize everything, promise lower taxes, and keep that taxpayer money flowing into the coffers of private corporations. Ah, the efficiency of free enterprise: people are going to moved so quickly from their daily lives into prison that they won’t know what hit them.
