Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men.
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26 January 2012
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17:03
The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.
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15:23
The Caging of America
In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
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27 September 2011
In prison, every time we complained about our conditions, the guards would remind us of comparable conditions at Guantanamo Bay; they’d remind us of CIA prisons in other parts of the world; and conditions that Iranians and others experience in prisons in the U.S.
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12 June 2011
Friday marks the 40th anniversary of one of the biggest, most expensive, most destructive social policy experiments in American history: The war on drugs.
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3 June 2011
The rest of the book is an analysis and account of the US penal system and how it stands up in comparison to flogging. It doesn’t do well.
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29 October 2010
When it comes to creating demand for a previously unnecessary service and making a profit by any means necessary, you can’t beat the private sector.
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28 October 2010
Seriously? AZ immigration law was crafted by private prison entrepreneurs.
This story blew my mind. How was it that we went so long without learning about this? And, rhetorically: why did it take NPR to do it, and not one of our corporate-sponsored media outlets? It’s no wonder Jim Demint wants to defund them.
I encourage you to read/listen to this story. But here’s the jist:
Step 1: Private prison corporations propose a prison for women and children who are in the country illegally. They are 100% confident they can fill the prison, and laud “the amount of money that [they] would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate.”
Step 2: ALEC, a secret pay-to-play legislative group that lets corporate executives who pay enough money help draft legislation, drafts what will become Arizona SB 1070. Executives from the Corrections Corporation of America, representing the private prison industry, have a heavy hand in drafting the law, and even give it its Owellian name: the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.”
Step 3: The law is introduced in the state senate, with an unusually high number of sponsors (36). Most of them are involved in ALEC, and those who are receive campaign contributions from the Corrections Corporation of America.
Step 4: Profit. Oh yeah, and racism, classism and unprecedented freedom-crushing.
This is absolutely crushing my spirit this morning. Families will be torn apart, people will be imprisoned for what amounts to petty crime, and people who have brown skin or less than a substantial amount of capital at their disposal will fall victim to what is essentially a business model. That business model just happens to include the (completely legal and largely ignored) manipulation of our legal system. To borrow a bumper sticker phrase I usually cringe at: if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.
More ALEC stuff to come.
