Times are getting tough for cities and counties who have been making big bucks off the yellow brick road of mass incarceration.

https://theintercept.com/2016/06/09/local-jails-profit-from-warehousing-...

These numbers, released today as part of a Prison Policy Initiative report on “jail leasing,” expose the extent of a practice that advocates say harms prisoners and raises ethical questions about public institutions profiting off incarceration. But as some states embark on efforts to reduce prison populations, local officials who for years have received financial incentives to house state prisoners in their jails are now faced with the threat of a loss of revenue.

The gravy train is running out of fuel and threatens to have a "devastating" effect on municipal and county budgets.

As states begin to reassess their incarceration practices, less state money makes it into counties’ budgets. In Mississippi, where the incarcerated population dropped by 15 percent in 2014, some counties that had come to significantly rely on jail leasing warned of the “devastating” effects of locking up fewer people. “It should be great news but instead it’s kind of a fight over who gets the remaining population,” Blake Feldman, an advocacy coordinator at the ACLU of Mississippi, told The Intercept.

In thousands of counties the county jail has become the primary economic anchor for the entire county.

“Local governments bought into this false economic promise of mass incarceration as this great way to make money and provide jobs,” said Feldman. “And now that our state is doing the right thing, the problem is local governments whose economies have been centered around the criminal justice system.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center is fighting the good fight:
https://www.splcenter.org/issues/mass-incarceration

This vast expansion of the corrections system – which has been called “the New Jim Crow” – is the direct result of a failed, decades-long drug war and a “law and order” movement that began amid the urban unrest of the late 1960s, just after the civil rights era.