In California, the "Three Strikes" law has caused hundreds of defendants to be sentenced essentially to life for shoplifting. So someone busted for joy riding twice as a teen, could get tired of waiting in line at the 7-11, lift a small box of donuts and and wind up spending their last decades in prison costing maybe $50,000 a year.  For-profit prison corporations, particularly the Corrections Corporation of America (which has just changed its name to "CoreCivic," to protect the guilty) has lobbied for decades for longer sentences which puts more money it its stockholders' and executives' pockets, at the ultimate expense of the taxpayers and of inmates' families. Hawai'i has never done a good job of monitoring the conditions of confinement and only retrieved women prisoners back to the Islands after they were raped in a succession of for-profit prisons in four different states. A CCA chaplain in Kentucky even joined the $7.35/hour guards assaulting women in the Otter Creek "rape room."