prison reform

Note: This is a cross-post from my personal blog, The Bull in Full.

I linked without comment to a YouTube video, which was a fake drug ad for a compound called Incarcerex.  The ad promotes haphazard incarceration of drug users as a means to fix political ills, and is a brilliant piece of satire—I can't recommend it highly enough.

After posting that video, I was leafing through my print edition of the Herald-Sun, and came across the latest from Malcolm Berko in the business section.  I like reading Berko—he's certainly not handing out tips for socially responsible investing, but his irreverence for the icons of the financial world, like brokerage firms and Alan Greenspan, make him fun to read.  This week's column (linked from a paper with a more reasonable archiving system), though, was a tad disturbing.  A read wrote in asking about his shares in GEO, which used to be called Wackenhut, which Berko had recommended a few years ago.  As Berko notes, the company's revenues have gone up 450% in the past decade.  Why?  Because they run prisons.