SuN
.:~**~.~**~.~**~:.
Private prisons are designed to make money; a high turn over of inmates is the ideal, with drug,traffic and relatively petty crime convictions set the pace, with rape and murder convictions being very costly and attracting relatively short sentences.
Minorities are targeted because generally they are easier to trap, charge and convict, creating a golden goose.
Prisons have become incubators of disease where abuse and neglect of human rights is standard, a result of opportunistic exploitation.
Justice has been pimped by the privatization of prisons.
PRIVATE PRISONS A PRISON OFFICER'S PERSPECTIVE
"Why were the private prisons of last century closed down or transferred to public ownership and control? And let us make no mistake¾ the 19th century private prison was a failure. A commentator writing for the US National Institute of Justice summed up the experience as a history of inmate abuse in which private contractors often ignored their obligations under meticulously drafted contracts (DiIulio 1988).
The 20th century is not so civilised that this cannot happen again. Rather, the 19th century experience sounds a warning about the very real problems of controlling and monitoring the behaviour of private contractors. It should be noted, however, that these comments relate only to the situation where the day-to-day administration and operation of a prison is contracted out. The use of private contractors to build and maintain facilities is of little professional concern.
One needs to think carefully about the motivation behind the current enthusiasm for private prisons. Is it motivated by a real concern for better service and for providing alternatives to the conventional forms of incarceration? Or, is it simply an expression of failure, a desperate attempt to produce additional places, more cheaply, in which to confine the community's failures, misfits, rejects and victims of economic
recession? If it is the latter, then can we really be sure that the difficult task of vetting, monitoring and if necessary terminating, private contracts will be carried out properly.
Monitoring functions will require, amongst other things, skilled and motivated
people with adequate funding from the government. This is unlikely to be forthcoming if private prisons are established simply out of a desire to put an intractable problem out of sight and out of mind."
Truth about Private Prisons
"For-profit prison companies like CCA have always presented themselves as both cheaper and better than the traditional publicly owned prisons, staffed by state employees. However, from the mayhem and murders at the prison in Youngstown, Ohio, which eventually led to the company paying $1.6 million to prisoners to settle a lawsuit, to a series of wrongful death civil suits, and numerous disturbances and escapes, the authors document in detail a staggering range of failures of prison management.
-failure to provide adequate medical care to prisoners;
-failure to control violence in its prisons;
-substandard conditions that have resulted in prisoner protests and uprisings;
-criminal activity on the part of some CCA employees, including the sale of
-illegal drugs to prisoners; and
-escapes, which in the case of at least two facilities include inadvertent releases of prisoners who were supposed to remain in custody."
Prison labour
A US worker who once made $8 an hour loses his job when the company relocates to Thailand, where workers are paid only $2 a day. Unemployed and alienated from a society indifferent to his needs, he becomes involved in the drug economy or some other outlawed means of survival. He is arrested, put in prison and put to work. His new salary: 22 cents an hour.
For private business, prison labour is like a pot of gold: no strikes, no union, no unemployment insurance or workers compensation to pay, no language or shipping problem, as in a foreign country.
New leviathan prisons are being built with thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds and even lingerie for Victoria's Secret.
Prisoners can be forced to work for pennies because they have no rights. Even the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery, excludes prisoners from its protection.
More and more, prisons are charging inmates for basic necessities, from medical care to toilet paper to use of the law library. Many states are now charging room and board. Berks County Prison in Pennsylvania is charging inmates $10 per day to be there. California has similar legislation pending.
So, while government cannot (yet) require inmates to work at private industry jobs for less than the minimum wage, they are forced to by necessity.
Some prison enterprises are state run. Inmates working at UNICOR (the federal prison industry corporation) make recycled furniture and work 40 hours a week for about $40 per month.
Oregon Prison Industries produces a line of "prison blues" jeans. An ad in its catalogue shows a handsome prison inmate saying, "I say we should make bell-bottoms. They say I've been in here too long."
Prison industries often compete directly with private industry. Small furniture manufacturers around the country complain that they are being driven out of business by UNICOR, which pays 23 cents an hour and has the inside track on government contracts.
US Technologies sold its electronics plant in Austin, Texas, leaving its 150 workers unemployed. Six weeks later, the electronics plant reopened in a nearby prison.
The war on drugs
The "war on drugs" launched by President Reagan in the mid-'80s has been fought on interlocking international and domestic fronts.
At the international level, the war on drugs has been both a cynical cover-up of US government involvement in the drug trade, as well as justification for US military intervention and control in the Third World.
Over the last 50 years, the primary avowed goal of US foreign policy has been "to fight communism" (and protect corporate interests). To this end, the US government has, with regularity, formed strategic alliances with drug dealers throughout the world.
At the conclusion of World War II, the OSS (precursor of the CIA) allied itself with heroin traders on the docks of Marseilles in an effort to wrest power away from communist dock workers.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA aided the heroin-producing Hmong tribesmen in the Golden Triangle area. In return for their cooperation with the US government's war against the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and other national liberation forces, the CIA flew local heroin out of south-east Asia into the US. It's no accident that heroin addiction in the US rose exponentially in the 1960s.
Nor is it an accident that cocaine began to proliferate in the US during the 1980s. Central America is the strategic midpoint for air travel between Colombia and the US. The Contra war against Sandinista Nicaragua, as well as the war against the national liberation forces in El Salvador, was largely about control of this critical area.
When Congress cut off financial support for the Contras, Oliver North and Bill Casey found other ways to fund the Contra resupply operations at Reagan and Bush's behest, in part through drug dealing. Planes loaded with arms for the Contras took off from the southern US, off-loaded their weapons on private landing strips in Honduras, then loaded up with cocaine for the return trip.
US military presence in Latin America has not stopped drug traffic, but it has influenced aspects of the drug trade, and is a powerful force of social control in the region.
US military intervention — whether in propping up dictators or squashing peasant uprisings — now operates under cover of the righteous "war against drugs and narco-terrorism", while the real narco-terrorists and narco-dictators operate with US protection.
In Mexico, for example, US military aid supposedly earmarked for the drug war is being used to arm Mexican troops in the southern part of the country. The drug trade (production, transfer and distribution points), however, is all in the north. The drug war money is being used primarily to fight the Zapatista rebels in the southern state of Chiapas.
In the Colombian jungles of Cartagena de Chaira, coca has become the only viable commercial crop. In 1996, 30,000 farmers blocked roads and airstrips to prevent crop spraying from aircraft.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, one of the oldest guerrilla organizations in Latin America, held 60 government soldiers hostage for nine months, demanding that the military leave the jungle, that social services be increased and that alternative crops be made available to farmers.
Given the notorious involvement of Colombia's highest officials with the powerful drug cartels, it is not surprising that most US drug war military aid actually goes to fighting the guerrillas.
One result of the international war on drugs has been the internationalization of the US prison population.
For the most part, it's the low level "mules" carrying drugs into the US who are captured and incarcerated in ever-increasing numbers. At least 25% of inmates in the federal prison system today will be subject to deportation when their sentences are completed.
Minorities are targeted because generally they are easier to trap, charge and convict, creating a golden goose.
Prisons have become incubators of disease where abuse and neglect of human rights is standard, a result of opportunistic exploitation.
Justice has been pimped by the privatization of prisons.
PRIVATE PRISONS A PRISON OFFICER'S PERSPECTIVE
"Why were the private prisons of last century closed down or transferred to public ownership and control? And let us make no mistake¾ the 19th century private prison was a failure. A commentator writing for the US National Institute of Justice summed up the experience as a history of inmate abuse in which private contractors often ignored their obligations under meticulously drafted contracts (DiIulio 1988).
The 20th century is not so civilised that this cannot happen again. Rather, the 19th century experience sounds a warning about the very real problems of controlling and monitoring the behaviour of private contractors. It should be noted, however, that these comments relate only to the situation where the day-to-day administration and operation of a prison is contracted out. The use of private contractors to build and maintain facilities is of little professional concern.
One needs to think carefully about the motivation behind the current enthusiasm for private prisons. Is it motivated by a real concern for better service and for providing alternatives to the conventional forms of incarceration? Or, is it simply an expression of failure, a desperate attempt to produce additional places, more cheaply, in which to confine the community's failures, misfits, rejects and victims of economic
recession? If it is the latter, then can we really be sure that the difficult task of vetting, monitoring and if necessary terminating, private contracts will be carried out properly.
Monitoring functions will require, amongst other things, skilled and motivated
people with adequate funding from the government. This is unlikely to be forthcoming if private prisons are established simply out of a desire to put an intractable problem out of sight and out of mind."
Truth about Private Prisons
"For-profit prison companies like CCA have always presented themselves as both cheaper and better than the traditional publicly owned prisons, staffed by state employees. However, from the mayhem and murders at the prison in Youngstown, Ohio, which eventually led to the company paying $1.6 million to prisoners to settle a lawsuit, to a series of wrongful death civil suits, and numerous disturbances and escapes, the authors document in detail a staggering range of failures of prison management.
-failure to provide adequate medical care to prisoners;
-failure to control violence in its prisons;
-substandard conditions that have resulted in prisoner protests and uprisings;
-criminal activity on the part of some CCA employees, including the sale of
-illegal drugs to prisoners; and
-escapes, which in the case of at least two facilities include inadvertent releases of prisoners who were supposed to remain in custody."
Prison labour
A US worker who once made $8 an hour loses his job when the company relocates to Thailand, where workers are paid only $2 a day. Unemployed and alienated from a society indifferent to his needs, he becomes involved in the drug economy or some other outlawed means of survival. He is arrested, put in prison and put to work. His new salary: 22 cents an hour.
For private business, prison labour is like a pot of gold: no strikes, no union, no unemployment insurance or workers compensation to pay, no language or shipping problem, as in a foreign country.
New leviathan prisons are being built with thousands of eerie acres of factories inside the walls. Prisoners do data entry for Chevron, make telephone reservations for TWA, raise hogs, shovel manure and make circuit boards, limousines, waterbeds and even lingerie for Victoria's Secret.
Prisoners can be forced to work for pennies because they have no rights. Even the 14th amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery, excludes prisoners from its protection.
More and more, prisons are charging inmates for basic necessities, from medical care to toilet paper to use of the law library. Many states are now charging room and board. Berks County Prison in Pennsylvania is charging inmates $10 per day to be there. California has similar legislation pending.
So, while government cannot (yet) require inmates to work at private industry jobs for less than the minimum wage, they are forced to by necessity.
Some prison enterprises are state run. Inmates working at UNICOR (the federal prison industry corporation) make recycled furniture and work 40 hours a week for about $40 per month.
Oregon Prison Industries produces a line of "prison blues" jeans. An ad in its catalogue shows a handsome prison inmate saying, "I say we should make bell-bottoms. They say I've been in here too long."
Prison industries often compete directly with private industry. Small furniture manufacturers around the country complain that they are being driven out of business by UNICOR, which pays 23 cents an hour and has the inside track on government contracts.
US Technologies sold its electronics plant in Austin, Texas, leaving its 150 workers unemployed. Six weeks later, the electronics plant reopened in a nearby prison.
The war on drugs
The "war on drugs" launched by President Reagan in the mid-'80s has been fought on interlocking international and domestic fronts.
At the international level, the war on drugs has been both a cynical cover-up of US government involvement in the drug trade, as well as justification for US military intervention and control in the Third World.
Over the last 50 years, the primary avowed goal of US foreign policy has been "to fight communism" (and protect corporate interests). To this end, the US government has, with regularity, formed strategic alliances with drug dealers throughout the world.
At the conclusion of World War II, the OSS (precursor of the CIA) allied itself with heroin traders on the docks of Marseilles in an effort to wrest power away from communist dock workers.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA aided the heroin-producing Hmong tribesmen in the Golden Triangle area. In return for their cooperation with the US government's war against the Vietnamese National Liberation Front and other national liberation forces, the CIA flew local heroin out of south-east Asia into the US. It's no accident that heroin addiction in the US rose exponentially in the 1960s.
Nor is it an accident that cocaine began to proliferate in the US during the 1980s. Central America is the strategic midpoint for air travel between Colombia and the US. The Contra war against Sandinista Nicaragua, as well as the war against the national liberation forces in El Salvador, was largely about control of this critical area.
When Congress cut off financial support for the Contras, Oliver North and Bill Casey found other ways to fund the Contra resupply operations at Reagan and Bush's behest, in part through drug dealing. Planes loaded with arms for the Contras took off from the southern US, off-loaded their weapons on private landing strips in Honduras, then loaded up with cocaine for the return trip.
US military presence in Latin America has not stopped drug traffic, but it has influenced aspects of the drug trade, and is a powerful force of social control in the region.
US military intervention — whether in propping up dictators or squashing peasant uprisings — now operates under cover of the righteous "war against drugs and narco-terrorism", while the real narco-terrorists and narco-dictators operate with US protection.
In Mexico, for example, US military aid supposedly earmarked for the drug war is being used to arm Mexican troops in the southern part of the country. The drug trade (production, transfer and distribution points), however, is all in the north. The drug war money is being used primarily to fight the Zapatista rebels in the southern state of Chiapas.
In the Colombian jungles of Cartagena de Chaira, coca has become the only viable commercial crop. In 1996, 30,000 farmers blocked roads and airstrips to prevent crop spraying from aircraft.
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, one of the oldest guerrilla organizations in Latin America, held 60 government soldiers hostage for nine months, demanding that the military leave the jungle, that social services be increased and that alternative crops be made available to farmers.
Given the notorious involvement of Colombia's highest officials with the powerful drug cartels, it is not surprising that most US drug war military aid actually goes to fighting the guerrillas.
One result of the international war on drugs has been the internationalization of the US prison population.
For the most part, it's the low level "mules" carrying drugs into the US who are captured and incarcerated in ever-increasing numbers. At least 25% of inmates in the federal prison system today will be subject to deportation when their sentences are completed.