We were having ourselves a shiiteload of fun with the Mugshot Hairstyle Models feature when we received a polite e-mail from Operation PUSH that told us that our subject matter wasn’t as hilarious as we thought.
It seems that there are more young people of color entering the prison industrial complex than there are registering for college, let alone even graduating. In the last two years that trend has skyrocketed faster than an Israeli-made spy satellite.
We thought to ourselves how we might be able to reverse this movement before the U.S.’s minority population is filled with only criminals and immigrants (illegal immigrants being called crimigrants – our word bitches). The first solution was ingenious and simple enough that it wouln’t require the kind of overhead that makes so many other social programs doomed from the start.
From now on we will refer to prisons as ‘universities’ and we will call colleges by the name ‘penitentiaries’. In this manner you should imagine the pride of some jig mother from Detroit when her son is sentenced to 10 to 25 years at the state university. From a corresponding angle I can’t imagine some privileged parent in too much of a rush to refinance the family homestead or take a loan against the 401k when their child brings home the applications for jail. Hey, a rose by any other name will still be a dead flower in a vase.
The real problem is that no one with any capital seems inclined to invest money on making minorities smarter and better prepared to assume adulthood. It’s a risky investment I agree and one that requires you to wait about two decades for your return. Most people that play the market want the quickest bang for their buck, but you see where those tech stocks went in 2000. When the stock market hit critical mass the ‘dot com’ boon’s bubble burst. At some point in the near future we are going to reach that point in regards to our national prison population. There won’t be any people left to make our buy Starbucks or Chipotle because everyone will be in jail university or working as a guard professor.
Now is the time to reinvest in real public education. Not school vouchers or private school subsidies. All the kids need to be educated and if that means that less kids are inclined to listen to rap music and spend their waking hours having dreams of bathing in Cristal champagne so be it. There will be something else that is ridiculously expensive that we can sell to these smarter kids. How about Urkel Brand electric handwarming mittens?
Well if you are inclined to think that a change is too difficult to create here in the States then I suggest that you invest in Iowa Prison Industries. They make furniture for universities and penitentiaries.
