22 Comments so far

1. ezeflyer February 14th, 2007 12:31 pm

   Shut Down the
   Prison-Industrial Complex
   from the International Action Center

   The U.S. Prison-Industrial Complex (PIC) is the vicious, ever-growing, domestic component of imperialist globalization. Simply put, the PIC is the fusion of prison construction, prison labor, the profits both of them create and their impact on society.
   Since 1991, the rate of violent acts has decreased by 20 percent. But the number of people in prison has increased by 50 percent. The incarceration of such a huge sector of the U.S. population is rooted within the laws of capitalist economics — that is, the insatiable drive to make profits at the expense of human development.
   The U.S. has the largest prison population in the industrialized world — 2 million people — and it is growing by leaps and bounds in the current period of so-called economic prosperity. The destructive role of the PIC in the lives of poor people in the U.S. mirrors what the IMF is doing to destroy poor people throughout the world, especially in the developing countries.
   The expansion of private prisons is considered by many experts to be the most profitable industry in the U.S. today. The Corrections Corporations of America, the country’s largest private-prison conglomerate, generates huge profits by operating 46 penal institutions in 11 states, including seven juvenile facilities. Many of the most influential Wall Street firms and investment banks, from American Express to Smith Barney pour an estimated $35 billion annually into supporting prison bond issues, construction and the privatization of prisons.
   How do the prisons create profit? Many prisoners are paid only pennies an hour to build houses for the elderly and the disabled, wire schools for computers, fight forest fires, and so on. Between 1980 and 1994 the value of goods produced by prisoners rose from $392 million to $1.1 billion. The PIC is the second-largest employer in the U.S. Corporations, such as American Express and Microsoft, profit off prison sweatshops. This slave labor takes the jobs of unionized workers who could be doing the same tasks. Unions should make it their business to organize these prisoners into unions so that they aren’t used as scab labor.
   The unpaid labor derived from African slavery for nearly three centuries provided the platform for the accumulation of capital by a tiny segment of the U.S. population. U.S.-style apartheid continued legally for another 100 years after the abolition of slavery in 1863-65. Today the prison system is the institutional legacy for extreme racist repression.
   One in every four Black men is likely to be caught up in the vicious web of the criminal IN-justice system at some point during his lifetime. One out of 14 Black men is currently incarcerated. The number of women prisoners–80,000 of them–has grown 12-fold since 1970. Seventy-five percent of these women are mothers.
   The prison-industrial complex cannot be separated from the epidemic of racist police brutality sweeping the country. Nor can it be separated from the killing machine called death row. Almost 4,000 people will be executed in the coming years. There are no rich people on death row. Just as police brutality and police murder never effect affluent communities, the death penalty is an instrument of terror inflicted by those who hold power against working class and poor people.

2. Jaded Prole February 14th, 2007 3:28 pm

   Our prisons are packed and growing and one doesn’t have to look hard to note what the inmates seem to have in common. Primarily poverty and secondarily being non-white. The criminalization of drug use is an example of “good politics vs bad policy” and results in the largest percentage of prisoners. The destruction of mental health services under Clinton and Bush has left the prisons as a dumping ground for the mentally ill and just being Black can result in prison time. It is a joke that the US is called leader of the “free world” when it has the largest percent of its population behind bars (much of it used as veritable slave-labor).

3. John F. Butterfield February 14th, 2007 3:33 pm

   There seems to be a correlation,
   the more people in prison in a country
   the less security for its children.

   http://www.commondreams.org/headlines07/0213-03.htm

   http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Society/documents/2007/02/14/UNchildwellbeing.pdf

4. gsemsel February 14th, 2007 4:23 pm

   If one examines the prison population carefully one would quickly find that most of our prisoners would be best categorized as political prisoners. The so-called “war on drugs” is nothing more than a convenient system designed to deny African-Americans and other minorities the rights and privileges of citizens, including the right to vote.

5. eyesee February 14th, 2007 8:13 pm

   I just typed a loaded paragraph and it just disappeared!! Anyway, I couldn’t have said it better than those of you above me!! One of the first things Bush did after getting in office was to stop federal funding on our only coast to coast railway..then he took federal money from funding police and emergency responders on the state level, sucked the money out of our country AND gave it to the rich. This war is a crime, we are more and more unsafe every day. It seems that they WANT crime to spin out of control. Did anyone else notice how after Katrina, Bush gave Haliburton $275 Milliom to build “detention centers” from coast to coast??? Why??? Well,put it all together. Mr. Alex Jones seems to put it all together quite well at http://www.prisonplanet.com . He and others have seen this for what it is and what it is intended to become. I am going to do what I am able to do in my own capacity to counter it. Thankyou, Common Dreams

6. walkingbear February 15th, 2007 7:40 am

   When a prison is used to house anti establishment thinkers and doers..people who are against a system of diversity of cultures within a country..then we have to worry.

   The biggest growing Indian Reservation in the US is the State Prison System.

   How do you separate the killers and murderes from the oppressed minorities who are imprisoned because the system cannot intigrate their differences?

   A government that uses the FBI, the CIA and military hardware against her own people…. Witness Oglala in the 70s….then we are living in a military dictator state and prisons will be used to keep the “status quo”..even if the status quo stinks like a the rotting carcasses left out in the snows at Wounded Knee.
   Isn’t it about time Leonard Peltier, and all the other spirited campaigners against the oppressed peoples, be they ..Red, Yellow, Black and White are set free.

   Look here if you think that anything done by the US legal/prison system is anything but not corrupt.
   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fj_nvrF6WiY
   Ho
   WalkingBear

7. Antidote February 15th, 2007 8:38 am

   We have split the world into culture/ environment (nutrure) and biology (nature). The former is usually interpreted as education, opportunity, strenghth of the family, social support, etc. The latter usually interpreted as genetics. But there are bio-enviornmental influences: our food, water, and air along with the toxins in our environment.

   I’ve worked in prison. These guys are dealing with more than a lack of education and opportunity. They are also suffering with all kinds of illnesses; and if the body is ill, so is the mind.

   Have a look here:

   http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0502-27.htm

   It’s not just that so many of us have access to nothing but McJobs. McCulture leads to McBrain.

   For more on this, search on Bernard Gesch (Oxford) and Stephen Schoenthaler (CSU).

8. johnathon February 15th, 2007 4:04 pm

   From Canada…..Perhaps the lawlessness and corruption in your federal government is infecting the general population?

9. pkokinos February 16th, 2007 3:56 pm

   The prisons are as frightening as the Katrina debacle, and the whole system has, indeed, created the gulag experience for Americans, but on a much more subtle level–beginning when they are children and training them to become the drones in a Byzantine hive of institutionalized racism, power politics, and blind tradition. The issues are certainly economic, but they are also deeply educational, in the sense that children of color and children of ethnicities that have been traditionally repressed learn how hopeless they are from the moment they reach the schoolroom door.

   The “McCulture” we are suffering from now, including the McPresident who is representing us on the world stage, can be laid directly at the feet of our “public education” system, which is becoming as much an oxymoron as the old “military intelligence.” This is not because of the people involved, in either system, most of whom are deeply dedicated to their work and often create miracles of educational or military progress despite working against bloated, inefficient, dysfunctional bureaucracies. This is, however, because of a desperate need for what this study suggests, cultural change at its very deepest level. We have let that hopeful dream of America get away from us, and, for the past 30 years in particular, have allowed ourselves to be ground down into brainless mush. The systems that may have worked in simpler times have not changed to meet the intellectual and economic realities of this future that is upon us–and the most horrifying example of a dying system can be seen in the casual atrocities of our public schools. (Before anyone screams foul, I have been a high school English teacher and a school and district administrator on both sides of the country for 25 years, so please believe me when I say we are SO not serving all of our children now.)

   I want a revolution in public education that blows apart the old “factory school” models and stops allowing our least-supported students to be shoved off the conveyor belt into the trash bin when they don’t meet specs. The cultural change that we need starts right there, at the schoolroom door, where we can create small, personalized family-concept and team-concept schools that show all of our children their value as individuals and as citizens and helps all of them think, learn, and discover their own talents, no matter what their background or family situation! Want to make a difference in the drug-poverty-crime culture? This is where we begin.

   Flattening the hierarchy and reinventing the operational structure of schools on a more human (and humane) model are ideas that have been toyed with for decades, but never on a large enough scale to matter. We are held back by lack of focus and lack of resolve, as well as by the financial, structural, and philosophical restraints that traditionally have bound the American public to outdated ways of thinking about the purpose of our schools. It’s a huge problem, but ultimately one that can be solved, and with the money we are already spending; the trick, of course, will be the transition–and building consensus.

   To vent my own frustration with the schools and to attempt to create some awareness of the need for revolutionary change, I have written a novel called ANGEL PARK that tells a story about the depth of transformation we need to create in order to put America back on a more hopeful track. If anyone who reads this post would like to read the book, please email me at americanstory@sbcglobal.net with a mailing address and I will ship you a free copy. A piece of fiction about public education is apparently a rare thing, but I chose to do that instead of adding to the body of 475,000 non-fiction works on education in the hope that I might be able to connect emotionally with people who are concerned about the way the country is going. If you don’t want to contact me, please go to iuniverse.com/bookstore and read the opening under Publisher’s Choice. Let the revolution begin.
   Patricia Kokinos
   Ventura, CA

10. spfldpianist June 12th, 2007 9:48 am

    NOT JUST THE UNEDUCATED! I spent 3 years in Federal Prison on a mail fraud case. Even though I have a business degree and a J.D. degree and a great resume, there is no way that I could find traditional employment. The Scarlet Letter will effect me for life. After I paid the court imposed price - now I must face poverty or come up with another “scheme”. Employers AND the government are free to discriminate against ex-offenders in every facet of life. Employment, credit, public housing, education, insurance. It is time to give ex-offenders a chance to go straight! You can help politically, financially, and socially. Recidivism accounts for almost 300,000 “new” entrants to prison each year! This is because society will not allow these people a chance. The costs are astonishing. Take action now! Contact your law makers, give generously to programs for reform, and give us a chance to prove ourselves. Contact me…
    Mark Vincent
    Executive Director
    2nd Chances Prison Partnership
    spfldpianist@aol.com

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