The New PIC

         First off, the acronym PIC stands for "Prison Industrial Complex". Just thought I'd get that out of the way. Secondly, many of you may be wondering "Why, what is the prison industrial complex?". Well my confused friend, the prison industrial complex, or PIC, is the idea that for economic reasons, state owners of prisons have been selling the majority of their prisons off to private companies. Those private companies have people invested in their stocks and those private companies need to make money. One of the ways to make money for them, would be to have a lot of people on prison, whilst cutting down on some of the "expenses". The result is that a lot more people are being incarcerated and given longer sentences for non-violent crimes, as well as the fact that the amount of prisoners in the U.S. has increased a lot.
I think that the show(on netflix, bear with me) "Orange is the New Black" does a really good job of illustrating how the American prison industrial complex works. I can jut surly using this show as a source because it was based off a memoir written by Piper Kerman about her experiences in a women's prison. She was given a 15 month sentence.

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The reason why I think this show illustrates the PIC so well is that it shows how difficult the PIC makes it stay out of prison once you've been in. *SPOILER ALERT*One of the supporting characters called Taystee(stop laughing) finally gets her case re-evaluated and is out of prison. She is super excited and practically dances into the van that will drive her away. However, several ekes later, she shows up in prison again to the shock of her friends. She said that she purposely put herself back into prison because it was better then living on the outside world as a former convict. She was working a minimum wage job and had no place to stay and at least in prison she had a bed and regular meals. Even when I applied for my first job last year, there was a section on the résumé where I was forced to answer whether or not I'd been in prison.
The prison industrial complex makes is easy to stay in the cycle of incarceration, even for those who want to stay out of it. Another example: I was watching "30 Days", a show where Morgan Spurlock, director of "Super Size Me", went voluntarily to a men's prison to see heat it was like. There, he met a man who said that he finally wanted to get out of his gang and find a job. However, in the end credits,  it was stated that the man was in prison once again.