In a Channel 4 post about three Cleveland black men who were freed (on bail) late last month after spending 18 years in prison for a crime they may not have committed (the evidence against them is now seen to be weak and the investigators of the case didn't disclose key information to the defense during their trial), there is an interview with a man, Ricky Jackson, who served an astounding 39 years in prison before being released on November 21, 2014.

Jackson points out that the only thing that linked him to the murder of a Cleveland money-order collector was the testimony of a 12-year-old boy, Eddie Vernon, who as an adult admitted he had not told the truth to the police or court. Jackson, however, does not blame Vernon. It is the system that's to blame. And the central problem with this system is it's a business.

Jackson's words:

People are being exploited by the thousands, hundreds of thousands. And it’s not about crime and punishment any more—it’s about the bottom line.

And it's not just that large parts of this system have been privatized, with one corporation, the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America, even going as far as to sell shares in its profits on the stock market (the value of the company is up 0.3 percent today). The problem is even more profound than that.

It's important for Americans to realize that around the time the US government began to cut back on social welfare programs that were established during the Great Depression and strengthened and increased in the postwar years that suburbanized America, the early '70s, is also the time the prison population in the US exploded. Between 1925 and 1975, the prisoners per 100,000 persons was a pretty even 100, with a sharp and understandable spike during the Great Depression. But between 1975—indeed, the year Jackson was sent to prison—and 2000, it increased to nearly 500 per 100,000. It's as if the US switched from positive social spending to negative. Deep cuts in welfare were matched by steep increases in incarceration.

In fact, in some states, the yearly cost for an inmate is a $60,000—the salary of a school teacher or fireman, the tuition for an academic year at Harvard. This is the bottom line that Jackson is speaking of. This serious money, this is big business.