Right? It sucks to disagree with someone and also know they've got bits right. :) I mean, the alternative to having uneducated people not be allowed to vote is to have some filtering system (read: a test) between people who are allowed to vote and people who aren't, and that's basically even worse. The last thing we need is a citizenship test between people and voting, because that shit is an -incredibly- slippery slope. Looking at the ridiculous lengths our somehow-elected officials have gone to re: gerrymandering, there's basically no bridge too far and no depth too low. I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that educating directly for jobs as a standard instead of an option is a net loss. I also think that there are people who just aren't going to benefit from higher education, and frankly I think higher education in this day and age is a pretty major sham from wall to wall. Extra points because everyone thinks it's absolutely necessary. At this point, it isn't. I also agree one hundred percent that education should be free. One of the great things about being in a society is that it's a system for taking care of each other and ensuring the success of a greater number of people; in our particular flavor of herd, we have the capacity and in some cases even the willingness to see to it that our counterparts succeed, or at the very least that said counterparts stay safe and have the opportunity to succeed. If we spent five percent of what we spend on stealth destroyers on keeping our own people alive and well, we'd be much better for it, but the very lack of education that's at the core of this issue is the same one that keeps huge masses of people ignorant enough to vote and vote often against their own interests. And one of those interests -is- education! Available, open, collaborative facilitation of learning is a big change and not an incredibly cheap one, but it could have an enormous positive impact on our country has a whole. But, after all, freedom isn't free, the immigrants cause all our problems, welfare is communism, the gays ruined my marriage, etc., etc. There is an enormous amount of negative emotional involvement when speaking of positive social changes despite the fact that those changes are[i] most[/i] beneficial to the very people who vote and rally against them at every turn. It's a sad state of affairs, and I don't know that -just- education is enough. A good start, surely, but a good start that's behind a huge wall of bigotry, xenophobia, and hatred... and it's education, life experience, and investment in others that would help to heal the kind of hurts that cause this breed of small-minded thinking. You have to understand it to want it, but you vote against it until you understand it, and you can't get it until you've voted for it. Poor and uneducated people are caught in a pretty -blam!-ing hideous Catch-22, and even so they feed the people that exploit them the most, and fight against change that would help them. It's not their fault, but it's definitely their problem. :/ That's not even entering into the fact that the prison system is a for-profit, and that it exploits and feeds off of the poor and uneducated in and of itself, and very often for minor infractions involving methods of escape that are both easy to find and relatively harmless. Shit's rough in here. Education will definitely help, but how do you [i]make it happen[/i]?

What hurts even more is: [quote]That's not even entering into the fact that the prison system is a for-profit, and that it exploits and feeds off of the poor and uneducated in and of itself, and very often for minor infractions involving methods of escape that are both easy to find and relatively harmless.[/quote] that I am a fairly integral part of this system- not that I'm profiting from it, because I don't profit worth squat, but that I am in fact a line officer who has dealt with the end result of the system every working day for the last 16 years. And it's a system that barely discriminates between harmless junkies who fell into petty crime to feed their habit; mentally ill people who were victimized by smarter criminals (used as mules to transport illegal goods and take the fall when caught); "sex offenders" who range from everything from child molesters to Romeo & Juliet lovers (he was 18, she was 15 and therefore a minor) to people convicted of indecent exposure for public urination, who failed to register with the police when they moved; and multiple murderers. All these prisoners are kept together. And instead of being rehabilitated, many of them treat it as a master class for how to commit more efficient crimes when they're released again. It's largely a warehousing system that only rehabilitates those who want to be rehabilitated.

I have nothing whatsoever against line officers who do what they can in these cases; there's plenty of room for a good person to flourish and make the best of a bad situation. You're essentially proving my point, though; you surely aren't profiting, since you're part of it rather than a beneficiary of it, but an awful lot of prisons are corporate enterprises at this point, or at the very least are exploiting the hell out of their captive humans for cheap labor. The state of prison today is pretty horrific. From how you speak about most issues, though, I have to imagine that you do what you can with what you have. :)