> US having the highest percentage of population incarcerated of any first world country.

We have the highest incarceration rate, full stop.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcerat...

“The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons” -- Fyodor Dostoyevski

You are right. There are indeed various entities whose advocacy of their own self-interests and belief systems tends to promote the traditional failed American drug policy. Drug makers, religious zealots, etc... even individuals, small businesses, and schools (such as, say, those located where aggressive or even thuggish levels of law enforcement make that particular place safer on a local, short-term basis).

For-profit prisons, however, are the most direct beneficiaries of the (completely fucking insane) "war on drugs". For-profit prisons are one of the best examples of how an otherwise fairly functional democratic society can end up with a system of profoundly deranged incentives that visits grievous harm upon a staggering number of people.

These institutions conduct a program of systematic, industrialized dehumanization of millions of people -- including millions of people who have never harmed another person. In my view, this makes them evil, profoundly evil.

Although this sounds extreme to some people (especially those who have never paused to think it through), I put America's industrial prisons in the same league with the Nazi extermination camps. America doesn't actually starve people to death or gas them in ovens, but that's a matter of degrees. America does separate children from parents and force nonviolent human beings to live out their lives as caged animals. Millions and millions and millions of them.

There is not much about America so disgusting and disgraceful.