It's a dream to think that law was enacted to put an end to those kinds of troubles.
Law is made by the representatives to keep the problems in tact for various reasons by various people in the chain.
Politicians do not want to solve all problems and find out that since they solved the problems, they are not needed anymore.
The military and arms industrial complex certainly do not want to solve the problems, if they actually do, how will they get budget enlargements and lucrative deals?
The intelligence industrial complex thrives on laws that forbid things like drugs, if drugs werent lucrative and made expensive by these laws, then how would they finance their little and big schemes without having to be accounted for it?
Nobody in the rich class, the political class, the military class and the intelligence class is interested in solving these matters
Get real people!!
Law isn't about morality, it's about oportunity, don't let anybody try to fool you that it is about morality.
So politicians are in a conspiracy to not stop problems? Sounds unlikely to me, I think it's more like:
* Many politicians, like most people, are idiots. Partly because many voters are also idiots.
* Politicians don't have strong incentives to stop problems. (But they don't have strong incentives to preserve problems, either. They're only incentivized to be popular.)
* Principal-agent problems. Even if a politician comes up with a brilliant solution, the people lower in the chain won't execute it well, because they often don't have strong incentives to.
Anyway, there was a conspiracy to preserve problems, any particular politician could start solving problems. This would likely place him above his peers. Then his peers might backstab him, but they also might join him, since he'll have increased popularity. Essentially, we have a sort of iterated n-player prisoner's dilemma; or rather, at each step we choose m people (non-randomly) to together participate in an m-player prisoner's dilemma. It might be interesting to try to model this mathematically.
Inertia. It seems fairly established that privatized prisons pour lobbying money into political pockets to push for arbitrarily harsher sentencing. You can't just reverse this or you are painted as "soft on crime". Even when the actual social impact of these policies are tremendously negative and only benefit a small number of private investors.
I thought The Wire's "Hamsterdam" episode was a great parable on what would happen in America if an influential politician fought inertia and tried to implement socially responsible drug policies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamsterdam
I think the influence of the private prison operator while real is overstated. It makes a good story but they have less that 4% of US prisoners.
Much more influential are the prison guard and police unions and organizations. In California alone they oversee more prisoners than all the private prison operators combined and they are very active in strengthening sentencing[1].
But as stated by others the main problem is the politics. There are real problems and politicians can score points with naive voters by "doing something". On the other hand reducing sentences is a very risk position for politician to take.
Blame the politicians and voters as it is their responsibility to set the rules of the game. All the other parties are simply acting in their self-interest.
This report argues that private prisoner percentages are much higher if you include all forms of state detention[1], eg "more than half of Louisiana’s 40,000 inmates are housed in prisons run by sheriffs or private companies as part of a broader financial incentive scheme."
I don't think it's as easy as blaming the voters. The political system seems caught in a negative feedback loop, greased by lobbyist money and with no clear offramp.
That's a very black and white view of the world. I agree with many of your points though, that many problems are more profitable unsolved. However, many laws indeed have a basis in some (possibly twisted) form of morality (preventative or punitive).
Law is made by the representatives to keep the problems in tact for various reasons by various people in the chain.
Politicians do not want to solve all problems and find out that since they solved the problems, they are not needed anymore.
The military and arms industrial complex certainly do not want to solve the problems, if they actually do, how will they get budget enlargements and lucrative deals?
The intelligence industrial complex thrives on laws that forbid things like drugs, if drugs werent lucrative and made expensive by these laws, then how would they finance their little and big schemes without having to be accounted for it?
Nobody in the rich class, the political class, the military class and the intelligence class is interested in solving these matters
Get real people!!
Law isn't about morality, it's about oportunity, don't let anybody try to fool you that it is about morality.