Rouge Economics: Selling music on cassette to people in jail
After recently reading the book Rouge Economics I can’t help but comment on this Reuters article.
As music retailers struggle to stay in business, a Los Angeles firm is doing nicely targeting a demographic that gets bigger every year — prisoners.
I’m not knocking the company per se. However, there are 2.3 million people in jail and that number is growing. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. A great number of those in jail are minorities. Also, the prison industrial complex feeds off of this and needs to maintain this captive audience. I don’t think we even really care about rehabilitation anymore. Recidivism numbers don’t look very positive.
The reason I equate this operation to rouge economics is because profit is being made off of an already bad situation. As in Loretta Napoleoni’s book we see many illegal, immoral or destructive businesses springing up in the midst of chaos or a economically depressed area. I guess a comparable business could be selling clean needles to drug addicts instead of giving it to them like many programs do or helping address the addiction problem.
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