#prison privatization

[occupyv]

[cascadiavape]

The Drug War and Prison Privatization on Project Censored

The Drug War and Prison Privatization on Project Censored

On the latest Project Censored radio show, host Mickey Huff interviews Nolan Higdon, creator of the  Project Censored investigative report “Justice for Sale”. They discuss the connection between the Drug War and the Prison-Industrial complex and related topics. The show concludes with inspiring highlights from a recent speech by former Black Panther Charlotte O’Neal, aka “Mama C.”

https://s3-us-…

View On WordPress

[fuckyeahcitizenradio]

Visit Original Link

Allison shares The Saddest Thing Ever, surprise! Bill O'reilly is a big ol' liar (and recently threatened a reporter), a scientist and famed climate change skeptic took $1.2 million from the fossil-fuel industry, thousands of inmates seize control of a privatized Texas prison and demand better medical care, police union head says Tamir Rice was "menacing" because he was tall, hundreds of prisons charge for "jail video visits", Nicholas Kristof admits to being wrong on unions, and Walmart says it plans to raise wages.

Remember to order #NEWSFAIL: all about our shitty media and how alternative media will save us all and give us a nice review on Amazon!

Citizen Radio is a member-supported show. Visit http://wearecitizenradio.com to sign up and support media that won't lead you to war, and keep CR Productions growing!

[evilpenguintrainer]

[newenglanderzine]

Prison Privatization: Modern Day Slavery

 by Tyler Collins

    The United States of America, a country wherein countless sacrifices have been made, and too many wars fought to uphold the ideal of freedom has created for itself a paradox. In our country, we have prison systems to deprive people of the freedom to live the life they want. This action, and complex system built over two centuries, is a punitive measure to help others who are at possible risk of being harmed from somebody who breaks the law. These “criminals”, as we call them, are capable of harming other people. In our society, and many others throughout the world, the prison system was created as a way to not only take these people who pose a risk off the streets of the public, but also to facilitate a change in the criminal’s behavioral personality; so that when, and if they are released from jail, they will not re-offend. However, something has gone terribly wrong along the way. America, a capitalist nation, has mixed the politics of free market economics with the privatization of prisons. People who transform into criminals (very often first time offenders of the law) are given lifetime sentences. It’s not for taboos such as murder -- something that does deserve a lifetime of consequences -- it is for crimes such as drug use or distribution, felony misdemeanors, or even money laundering. For the layman’s mind, people are being put in jail for life to turn a profit for those at the very top of our economic force. The Corrections Corporation of America, the single most successful private prison company in the world, is at the helm of this institutionalized miscarriage of justice. Families are torn apart, and people’s lives are destroyed forever because of one mistake; simply to meet a status quo and make millions off of the suffering of others.

    Ask anybody about the harsh realities of prison, and they will paint for you a picture of an unspeakable hell. It’s not just prisoners who tell of a patterned corruption in prisons (their suffering and bias is the most obvious). It is also those who are meant to uphold the law and enforce it that share horror stories. In an opinion editorial released this year in The New York Times, Nicholas D. Kristof shared an anecdote chronicling this reality. “Judges and prison officials are rebelling at the injustice of our justice system. . . Judge James R. Spencer, a federal district judge said when sentencing a former F.B.I. informant to life without parole for selling crack cocaine to support his own addiction: “A life sentence for what you have done in this case is ridiculous; it is a travesty.” This is just one example of somebody suffering the repercussions of the mass incarceration that makes America’s prisons so notorious. So why, then, if so many people with so much power in the law that disagree with this system, must this virulent issue persist? Federal legislation makes combating this tragic human rights issue nearly impossible.

This goes deeper than legislation, however. The Corrections Corporation of America gets help from government contracts. Private prisons build relationships with right-wing politicians. A devastating example of this symbiotic dynamic between the government and the privatization of prisons was revealed in a piece done in the Times by Paul Krugman, documenting Chris Christie’s (R-New Jersey) “close, personal ties” to Community Education Centers, which is a halfway house system for criminals. Halfway houses are an offshoot of private prisons, carrying over the same ethics, style of imprisonment and punishment, and attempt to reform. Despite claims from Christie that the Community Education Centers is a morally sound, and safely conducted system, prisoners are still abused and raped by other inmates, the halfway houses are severely understaffed due to budget confines, and those who do work there are disillusioned and do nothing to ease the pain of people spending their life there (those of which are there for non-violent crimes). Krugman continues in his Times piece, “You shouldn’t imagine that what was discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining the government across much of our nation.” This is undeniably true. Reports of abuse, unfair life sentences carried out by reluctant judges, and the continued growth of private prisons as a business are ubiquitous in nature.

    Personally, what makes this entire ordeal with the CCA and other private prisons so dubious for me, is that they do not wait for people to commit crimes to predict how many cells they will have to fill. The root of predicting this criminality starts by turning an eye towards childhood. Neil Gaiman, an English author popularly known for his children’s books, wrote an interesting, and eye-opening article in The Guardian. He underscores the importance of literature and education by prefacing, “Once in New York, I listened to a talk about the building of private prisons -- a huge growth industry in the U.S. The prison industry needs to plan its future growth -- how many cells are they going to need? How many prisoners are there going to be 15 years from now? And they found they could predict the answers very easily, using a pretty simple algorithm, based on asking what percentage of 10 and 11-year olds couldn’t read.” What a startling revelation. At a time where high school students are dropping out at such a high rate never seen before, education funding decreasing or being slashed altogether throughout the country, and America falling behind in education comparative to places like Japan, it is difficult to deny the correlation that exists between falling education rates and rising crime rates. Are we inadvertently putting our children in the crosshairs of the private prison industry? With America incarcerating people at five times the rate as the rest of the world (to put that in even more context, that is more people imprisoned than citizens in countries such as North Korea, Saudi Arabia, China, and even Russia), and with so many students dropping out and doing poorly on the Programme for International Student Assessment test (PISA), it’s a sad reality that puts the evils of the CCA in perspective. Moreover, poverty in the U.S. continues to grow at an alarming rate ever since the recession that started in 2008.

Due to this problem that the rich have created by subsidizing the utmost 1% of gains in the country, job opportunities for the “99%” disappear. Consequently, people become desperate and turn to selling and abusing drugs or getting involved in other criminal operations to support themselves and their families (who are either oblivious to this activity or have no power to stop it). When they eventually get caught, as they always do, they spend the rest of their lives going straight into the system that created those circumstances to begin with. Furthermore, with no access to money before turning to drugs, they were not able to get access to higher education -- reaffirming the correlation between low education levels and the likelihood of committing crimes. In a nation where everybody loves to talk about freedom, and how hard we had to fight to obtain it, we have done a superb, brilliant job at creating a for-profit modern day slavery nightmare.

    There are people that truly do deserve to be in jail. People kill other people. That is a phenomenon that has permeated the world since humanity rose to the top of the social food chain. CEOs swindle millions from investors and create a tidal wave of consequences -- just look at Bernard Madoff’s actions, or The Great Depression, or the recession of 2008, for example. Thank god we have the SEC to monitor criminals that pioneer Wall Street (the ones directly responsible for the financial meltdown in 2008). The crux of this narrative, though, is that we must not look at criminality as something that always has, and always will exist. We have to look at the roots of those behaviors. What causes them? Why do they happen so often, and why is the glorious United States of America the leading nation in all of this devastation? The most important question, however, is what can be done to fix this broken system? The answer, within the context of history, proves to be quite simple. Those who work in the government and pass legislation that deems certain behaviors criminal, are working right alongside institutions such as the Corrections Corporation of America and Community Education to make an enormous profit. Nicholas D. Kristof, a regular columnist for The New York Times, wrote this criticism quite eloquently in his op-ed: “I write often about human rights abuses abroad. But when we take young, non-violent offenders -- some of them never arrested before -- and sentence them to die in prison, it’s time for Americans who care about injustice to gaze in the mirror.” At a time where society has dipped down to such a terrible nadir of politics and social experiments, it’s important to keep in mind that legislative measures can be reversed, corrupt government workers and radical politicians can be thrown out via new elections, and the innumerable amount of lives impacted by the actions of others can still be saved. The gravity of these circumstances are unfathomable to me, and what our country has done in the name of “justice” and money is unconscionable. If the people who passed laws spent some time on the other side of the jail bars, maybe they would think so as well.

[miscellanyblue]

Alpert: Public Deserves a Say in Private Prison Debate

Writing in the Concord Monitor, longtime activist Arnie Alpert warns that "a momentous decision is being considered behind closed doors in the Department of Administrative Services" that has "profound implications for public safety, the state budget, job quality and the constitutional obligation to support the rehabilitation of offenders."

Administrative Services and Department of Corrections staff are reviewing piles of documents from four corporations interested in taking over the state's prison system and running it for profit. If a contract with one of the private firms emerges in late summer or early fall, only then will policy-makers and citizens get to know the details....

"The private prison experiment in other states has gone poorly," writes Alpert. He quotes Elaine Rizzo and Margaret Hayes who reviewed the record of prison privatization in terms of the impact on cost, public safety, and correctional policy.

"Of greatest concern is the indisputable fact that private prisons exist to make a profit. It is in their economic interests to reduce costs by maintaining full facilities, reducing staff wages and benefits, reducing institutional expenses associated with safety and sanitation, and reducing critical care services and programming. These cost-saving measures come at the expense of institutional and public safety, and hold the potential for negative publicity and more costly lawsuits."

"The public deserves a full and open airing of the privatization issue," insists Alpert, "not a rush job slipped through the Executive Council while the eyes of voters and lawmakers are focused on other matters."

[scorchingwildfire]

"the UK; where the highly criticized detention of children, the policy of indeterminate detention and the accompanying depression, self-harm, and suicides of detained migrants are practically ignored, leaving various charities to deal with the problem." 

"Another interesting piece of information to note here, is that some detention centers are run by private security companies that get a fee per inmate per day. Thus making it a profitable business to keep more people in, for longer."

"At least the interior people had tried to liven the place up by sticking numerous posters on the walls. My favorite one read, “Peace: Partnership: Respect” and then "WELCOME" in a zillion different languages." 

"Fingerprints and photos, a pat down, through the metal detector, and then escorted through the huge, electric prison doors by another pair of officers, into a courtyard surrounded by high walls and decorated with yet more barbed wire just to make triple-sure no one gets out."

"The thing is most of these people left their homes for a very good reason, and leaving them in a perpetual state of not knowing whether they will or will not be sent back is pretty screwed up."

[theaquabrat]