The War On (Some) Drugs was never about the evils of drug use:
(Ehrlichman said) "…We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
I’ve heard it referred to as the Prison Industial Complex, but yeah, they know on which side their bread is buttered.
There are towns in Texas that depend on those prisons in order to survive.
And the gulags promised by Lord Dampnut would be welcomed in some areas, just for the economic stimulus.
Not to mention that a sizeable number of those prisons are private, so the owners are a source of bribes campaign contributions.
