The prison industrial complex is perhaps, at least domestically, the most striking example of us putting profit before people. It all stems from one basic misunderstanding: that the public good can be shepherded by private interests.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the prioritization of profits over the well-being of individuals within the prison system.
Eugene Jarecki's quote highlights the problematic relationship between privatization and the public good, particularly in the context of the prison industrial complex. He suggests that the focus on profit leads to a fundamental misunderstanding of how societal welfare can be effectively managed, implying that relying on private interests to oversee such critical public institutions erodes the fundamental values of humanity and justice.
In practice
In a discussion about the ethics of the prison system at a community meeting.
If we are made in some degree for others, yet in a greater are we made for ourselves. It were contrary to feeling and indeed ridiculous to suppose that a man had less rights in himself than one of his neighbors, or indeed all of them put together. This would be slavery, and not that liberty which the bill of rights has made inviolable, and for the preservation of which our government has been charged.
Death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident. It is as common as life.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.
Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man.
The law itself is on trial quite as much as the cause which is to be decided.
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