The US has a vastly greater proportion of people than any other nation in various stages and degrees of police and military confinement and state control. These vast government gulags–“prisons” and “labor camps” and confinement camps in Russian–in the U.S. range from death row absolute control, maximum security prisons, all the way down to juvenile detention camps, probation, parole, minimum security prison camps, indictments, trials, jails and so on.

In some large sub-cultures of America, such as Blacks with about 12% of the total population, over half of the young males are confined to varying degrees at some time, most probably more than once (such as arrest, jail, trial, detention, prison, probation, etc.).

There are many books and vast numbers of studies and articles giving the details on Prison State America.

Most of these look only at the more extreme forms of state controls, confinement, stripping of citizen rights and personal powers, control of wages (“garnishment,” etc.). Those numbers are huge. But most of America’s “state prisoners” are not at the extremes. They are being investigated and secretly controlled, on probation, on parole, have their children taken away by child “protective services,” are stripped of personal powers by incompetence decisions, imprisoned in medical detention centers, nursing homes, etc.

Some of these confinements and imprisonments are slave labor gulags. Some are medical monopoly confinements and controls using drugs, etc.

And, of course, the omni-spying of the vast police armies by federal, state, and local police, both overt and secret, and the vast bureaucratic controls over persons, wages, property, homes, etc., of the officials mean that in a general sense we are now all state slaves.

We are not “serfs,” as Hayek predicted we would become in The Road to Serfdom. Serfs had traditional rights and obligations that were generally well spelled out, except in Russia and in the Indian and other colonial populations in the U.S. and worldwide. We are legal slaves who can easily be stripped of all rights of citizens at any time and imprisoned or confined in many different ways at any time to any degree by police, judges, doctors, university bureaucrats, etc.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas