Prisons and police are driven by money 

A federal judge has ruled that the Los Angeles Police Department can be sued under a federal racketeering law that was originally designed to prosecute the mob and other criminal enterprises.

This historic ruling is perhaps the fairest thing to ever come out of America's courts.

The police and the prison-industrial complex they serve are clearly a for-profit business. If the police were really concerned with crime, they would be hauling people off to school instead of prison, but then we would be living in a radically different society.

The police simply take as many people to prison as they can, and for this they get paid, the prison-industrial complex and the people they hire to run the prisons get paid, and the government and private companies get a pool of exploitable labor.

Prisons are one of the most profitable and fastest growing industries in the country. With the average prisoner's salary around the $0.25, it's the fastest way to make a buck and keep potentially revolutionary classes under control.

It's basically a scam, one that the white elitist nation tends to strongly support. Small, rural communities vie for prisons because they bring work to the population out in the sticks.

The last concern of the police is the welfare of people living in poverty, who are the most likely candidates to commit and be victims of crimes. While one in four college-age-black males languishes in prison along with 2 million other prisoners, the system continues to grow at an impressive rate.

The United States has the highest per capita rate of imprisonment in the world, more than China and more than Russia. In fact, U.S imprisonment rate has only been exceeded by one other country during one other time, back when Boris Yeltsin declared a state of emergency in Russia.

What is the LAPD but the organization that delivers prisoners like human cattle to the prisons, where they are degraded, exploited and further victimized?

No one can say we are striving for a crime-free society while the likes of the LAPD are free to roam the streets. The LAPD is just time, money and resources that could go to programs that would really alleviate the social conditions that breed crime.

Jason Kosareff is a print journalism major at Cal State Long Beach.