Tulsi Gabbard Wants to Legalize Marijuana, Punish Big Pharma and End Private Prisons

Elias Marat
Activist Post

Tulsi Gabbard, Hawaii’s democratic congresswoman and one of many entrants in the crowded 2020 presidential race, is already turning heads thanks to her anti-interventionist foreign policy approach and progressive stance on a variety of issues, making her an outlier among establishment Democrats.

If her pre-campaign messaging and campaign launch speech are any indicator, the potential presidential contender has no intention of backing down – especially when it comes to her strong advocacy of medical marijuana and harsh criticisms of the criminal justice system and pharmaceutical industry.

Declaring her formal entrance into the Democratic Party presidential primaries, Gabbard issued a rousing call to end the for-profit prison industry, which has seen private corrections corporations rake in profits while shirking prisoners’ and immigrant detainees’ food, health care, and other essential services while exploiting incarcerated people as essentially slave labor.

“We must stand up against private prisons, who are profiting off the backs of those caught up in a broken criminal justice system,” Gabbard said.

Continuing, she added that “a system that puts people in prison for smoking marijuana while allowing corporations like Purdue Pharma, who are responsible for the opioid-related deaths of thousands of people, to walk away scot-free with their coffers full.”

Read more

University Study Shows How Prison Populations Skyrocket — Despite Record Low Crime

The Free Thought Project
Clare Bernish 

 

The justice system’s aversion to repeat offenders — not a rise in actual crime — feeds the prison-industrial complex, a new study has essentially found, as a record number of people receiving prison sentences have prior convictions.

Ohio State University sociologist Ryan King examined 33 years of data from the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines Commission — around 355,000 felony convictions — and found despite the sharp decline in the crime rate since the mid-1990s, judges are often faced with repeat-offenders, whom they tend to sentence more harshly.

“The issue is that the average offender who appears before a judge for sentencing today has a much more extensive criminal record than they did in the past,” noted King, a professor of sociology at OSU.

“It is much harder for judges not to give prison sentences to repeat offenders, so we have more convicted people going to prison.”

In comparing the more than three decades of data, King found the average offender in 1981 had just one prior felony, but in ten years, prior felonies doubled to two — and by 2013, the average offender had 2.5 previous felonies.

In fact, the rate at which prior offenders received prison sentences increased over time, as well, the study found. In 1981, 15 percent of prior offenders received a prison sentence, but that increased to 20 percent by 1995, and staggeringly had reached nearly 30 percent in 2013.

Fewer than 40 percent of offenders sentenced to prison had criminal records in 1981, but 60 percent did just two decades later.

“Criminal activity can decrease, but the criminal record only goes up,” said King. “Judges are dealing with more repeat offenders now.”

Read more

Freedom Rider: Who Prosecutes the Prosecutors?

Black Agenda Report

Margaret Kimberly

“Police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct are two heads of the same monster.”

Many Americans love to think that their country is the epitome of progress, democracy, and enlightenment. Millions of people will say that this is “the greatest country in the world.” These words are obviously born of ignorance and a belief in the superiority of the ultimate white settler state.

In fact, it can be argued that the United States has the worst human rights record of any of the “advanced” or “developed” nations of the world. It is the worst because of its blatant allegiance to white supremacy. Equal justice under the law is allegedly an American value, but those words are lies because of the never ending addiction to racism and violence. The worst, cruelest punishments are meted out to black people and the perpetrators have little fear of paying a price.

Aside from having a larger military budget than all other countries combined, the United States leads only in the number of people it keeps behind bars. There is a direct correlation between the enormous number of incarcerated, more than 2.4 million, and corruption on the part of the country’s prosecutors. No one knows how many of America’s prisoners are innocent but it is clear that a system built to put as many black people as possible in the confines of the criminal injustice system is not particularly concerned about whether all those in the gulag ought to be there.

“There is a direct correlation between the enormous number of incarcerated, more than 2.4 million, and corruption on the part of the country’s prosecutors.”

Police and prosecutors work hand in hand to keep the cogs coming into the machine. Police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct are two heads of the same monster and there is little legal recourse for the victims.

Read more
 

Five Stunning Facts About America’s Prison System You Haven’t Heard

seankerrigan.com

We’ve done several exposés on the prison system in America, including The Prison System Runs Amok, Expands at Frightening Pace (Sept 6, 2012) and Selling the American Dream is the Biggest Market of All (Sept. 30, 2013), but there’s still much more to be said about this topic. America’s massive prison system is creating a long list of unintended consequences, some of which will effect all of us in the coming years. To help explain just how bad things have gotten, we’ve compiled this list of the most stunning facts and statistics on the America’s prison system today.

1) Because of its prison system, the US is the only country in the world where more men are raped than women.

 

According to the 2011 report from Department of Justice, nearly one in 10 prisoners report having been raped or sexually assaulted by other inmates, staff or both. According to a revised report from the US Department of Justice, there were 216,000 victims of rape in US prisons in 2008. That is roughly 600 a day or 25 every hour.

Those numbers are of victims, not instances, which would be much higher since many victims were reportedly assaulted multiple times throughout the year. Excluding prison rapes, there about 200,000 rapes per year in America, and roughly 91 percent of those victims are women. If these numbers are accurate, this means that America is the only country in the world where more men are raped than women.

Even if the number of unreported rapes outside of prison were substantially larger than most experts believe, the fact that many victims in prison tend to be raped repeatedly would indicate that rape against men is at least comparable to rape against women.

Kendell Spruce was one such inmate, sentenced to six years for forging a check for which he hoped to purchase crack cocaine. In a National Prison Rape Elimination Commission testimony, Spruce said:

“I was raped by at least 27 different inmates over a nine month period. I don’t have to tell you that it was the worst nine months of my life… [I] was sent into protective custody. But I wasn’t safe there either. They put all kinds of people in protective custody, including sexual predators. I was put in a cell with a rapist who had full-blown AIDS. Within two days, he forced me to give him oral sex and anally raped me.”

Spruce was diagnosed with “full blown AIDS” in 2002 and died three years later.

2) There are more black slaves in America today than in 1850.

 

Read More

Hundreds of prisoners sentenced to death in the US are innocent, research suggests

The Independent 

More than 4 per cent of inmates sentenced to death on the United States’ notorious death row are probably innocent, research suggests. 

The findings, led by a University of Michigan Law School professor, offer a “conservative estimate” of the number of wrongfully convicted death row inmates over three decades.

Researchers reviewed the outcomes of the 7,482 death sentences issued from 1973 to 2004, and found that of that group, 117 inmates were exonerated.

They concluded that with enough time and resources, more than 200 other prisoners, at least 4.1 per cent, would have been proved innocent.

They reached that conclusion by using survival analysis, an advanced statistics tool used in medicine to judge the effectiveness of new treatments.

One of the main reasons why wrongly convicted defendants are not vindicated is because many win appeals reducing their death sentences to life in prison.

Researchers believe that once they have been granted a life sentence, proving their innocence is not as thoroughly pursued.

The results of the probe are likely to send shock waves through anti-death penalty campaign groups.
Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre, said the findings expose profound problems with the death penalty.

“This impressive study points to a serious flaw in our use of the death penalty,” he said. “The ‘problem of innocence’ is much worse than was thought."

The article was published yesterday in an American academic journal.

Man Facing Execution Pens Chilling Letter Full Of Truths You Can't Deny

Comment: Well worth watching.

---------------------------

"It's not about crime and punishment it's about crime and profit." - Ray Jasper

"A death row inmate scheduled to be put to death later this month compared prison sentences to slavery in a stinging indictment of the US judicial system.
Ray Jasper, a Texas inmate, submitted his letter to media blog Gawker. Jasper was convicted for participating in the 1998 robbery and murder of recording studio owner David Alejandro and sentenced to death as a teen.
Gawker initially reached out to all death row inmates with scheduled executions this year back in December 2013. In January it published a letter Jasper wrote in response, detailing his experience on death row."* The Young Turks hosts Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian break it down.
*Read more here from Daily Mail: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/artic...

Sex in men's prisons: 'The US system cultivates rape. If you treat people like animals, they behave like it'

Human Rights Watch estimated in 2010 that 140,000 US inmates have been raped. Shaun Attwood has written three books on life inside and his latest, Prison Time, details the sex – consensual or otherwise – the prostitution, the pimping and the equal, loving relationships behind bars

 

The Independent

The crook of another man's elbow is on my Adam's apple, pressing down, choking me. After just a couple of seconds, I panic and gasp.

Shaun Attwood, who spent more than five years in some of America's toughest prisons, including Arizona's infamous Maricopa Jail, is showing me how men in prison are raped.

"Generally they put the victim to sleep with a choke hold – locking the windpipe like this," he says, rendering me unable to reply. "Within about 10 seconds you're unconscious."

Attacks don't always begin like this. Sometimes, "they'll lure them with drugs and get them really high – 90 per cent of prisoners shoot-up drugs". Sometimes they'll trick the victim into a debt and then make them repay it with sex. Other times it can start with a beating or stabbing.

Human Rights Watch estimated in 2010 – three years after Attwood left jail – that 140,000 US inmates have been raped. Other studies have helped fill in the quantitative picture: 21 per cent of prisoners in the Midwest reported being forced into some form of sexual activity, according to Prison Journal. Young inmates are five times more likely to be sexually assaulted, says Just Detention International, an organisation devoted to ending prison rape.

Similar statistics aren't available in the UK but in the year 2011 – there were 103 male and female prisoner-on-prisoner sexual assaults.

The statistics, then, we know. The jokes, of course, we know, too: "Don't drop the soap!" is repeated so often by so many as to become Britain and America's prison-rape refrain – a chorus of discomfort to muzzle the horror.

But the 3D picture of prison rape in America, the how and why and what happens next, is scarcely uttered because those who survive the system almost invariably have no voice. Attwood, however, a tall, skinny, somewhat geeky 43-year-old from Widnes, doesn't just have a voice, but has written three books on life inside. And his latest, Prison Time, details the sex – consensual or otherwise – the prostitution, the pimping and the equal, loving relationships behind bars.

The details of which cast fresh light not only on the culture, politics and dynamics in America's penitentiary system, but on the nature of male sexuality itself. Heterosexual? Bi? Gay? Labels erode, irrelevant, in the absence of women and societal constraints.

We begin by discussing rape because it is everywhere in prison and everywhere in his book, an ever-present threat.

Read more

 
 

Private prisons hold 18% of America’s federal prisoners

Center for investigative Reporting

Private prisons hold 18% of America’s federal prisoners, but aren’t subject to open records laws.
A new report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington calls for increased transparency in the public’s access to information on private prisons.

Half of U.S. prison sex crimes involve staff toward inmates: fed study

Reuters


Nearly 9,000 incidents of sexual victimization against inmates in U.S. prisons and jails were reported in 2011, with roughly half of them involving corrections staff, according to a report by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The number of incidents showed a "significant increase" over about 8,400 incidents reported in 2010 and 7,855 reported in 2009, it said. The year 2011 was the most recent cited in the bureau study, published on Thursday.

The number has been rising in each of the last five years, said the study, which defined sexual victimization as including non-consensual acts, abusive touching, threats, indecent exposure and harassment.

Of the 8,763 such incidents reported in 2011, 10 percent were substantiated, the bureau said. The study looked at incidents reported by correctional administrators.

About half of all the allegations involved staff directed toward inmates, it said, and half involved inmates with other inmates.

Another study released in May by the bureau showed some 80,000 victim allegations among inmates, said Allan Beck, a BJS statistician and an author of the report.

"Of course we find much higher rates of sexual victimization through inmates' self-reports than what comes through in the official records," he said.

But the nature of the incidents has similarities, he said.

"It's a matter of scale," Beck said.

Any sexual contact between inmates and staff is illegal, the bureau noted.

More than three-quarters of staff perpetrators resigned or were fired, and nearly half were arrested, prosecuted or convicted, the study found.

The findings were based on annual surveys of adult prisons and jails throughout the nation, it said. The data for 2011 was collected from facilities holding 1.97 million inmates.

The surveys have been conducted yearly since 2004 in compliance with the federal Prison Rape Elimination Act.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst; editing by Gunna Dickson)

Iraqi women endure Abu Ghraib legacy

Asia Times

 "When they first put the electricity on me, I gasped; my body went rigid and the bag came off my head," Israa Salah, a detained Iraqi woman told Human Rights Watch (HRW) in heart-rending testimony released last week.

Israa, not her real name, was arrested by US and Iraqi forces in 2010, according to HRW's "No One is Safe" - a 105-page report released on February 6. The HRW report says Israa was tortured to the point of confessing to terrorist charges she didn't commit, and that she is just one of thousands of Iraqi women being detained illegally and abused.

HRW writes that Israa was handcuffed, pushed down on her knees, and kicked in the face until her jaw broke. When she refused to sign a confession, electric wires were attached to her handcuffs.

Welcome to "liberated" Iraq, a budding "democracy" that American officials rarely cease celebrating.
 There is no denying that the brutal policies of the Iraqi government under Nouri al-Maliki are a continuation of the same policies of the US military administration, which ruled over Iraq from 2003 until the departure of US troops in December 2011.

It is as if the torturers have read from the same handbook. In fact, they did.

The torture and degrading treatment of Iraqi prisoners - men and women - in Abu Ghraib prison was not an isolated incident carried out by a few "bad apples".

Since the revelations of prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib prison surfaced in 2004, many other stories of US torture emerged not only throughout Iraq but in Afghanistan as well. The crimes were not only committed by the Americans, but the British as well, followed by the Iraqis, who were chosen to continue with the mission of "democratization".

"No One is Safe" presented harrowing evidence of the abuse of women by Iraq's criminal justice system. The phenomenon of kidnapping, torturing, raping and executing women is so widespread that it seems shocking even by the standards of the country's poor human-rights record.

If such abuse had been exposed elsewhere, the global outrage would have been profound. Some in the liberal Western media, supposedly compelled by women's rights would have called for some measure of humanitarian intervention, war even. But in the context of today's Iraq, the HRW report is unlikely to receive much coverage.

A buzzword that has emerged since the publication of the report is that the abuse confirms the "weaknesses" of the judicial system. The challenge then becomes the matter of strengthening a weak system, perhaps through channeling more money, constructing larger facilities, and providing better monitoring and training, likely carried out by US staff.

Absent are the voices of the same women's groups, intellectuals and feminists who seem to be constantly distressed by traditional marriage practices in Yemen, for example, or the covering up of women's faces in Afghanistan. There is little, if any, uproar and outrage, when brown women suffer at the hands of Western men and women, or their cronies, as is the situation in Iraq.

If the HRW report emerged in complete isolation from the harrowing political situation created by the US invasion of Iraq, one could grudgingly excuse the relative silence. But it isn't the case. The Abu Ghraib culture continues to be the very tactic by which Iraqis have been governed since March 2003.

Years after the investigation of the Abu Ghraib abuses, Major General Antonio Taguba, who conducted an inquiry in them, revealed that there were more than 2,000 unpublished photos documenting further abuse. "One picture shows an American soldier apparently raping a female prisoner while another is said to show a male translator raping a male detainee", reported the Daily Telegraph newspaper in May 2009.

Major General Taguba had then supported Obama's decision not to publish the photos, not out of any moralistic reasoning, but simply because "the consequence would be to imperil our troops, the only protectors of our foreign policy, when we most need them, and British troops who are trying to build security in Afghanistan". Of course, the British, the builders of security in Afghanistan, wrote their own history of infamy through an abuse campaign that never ceased since they set foot in Afghanistan.

Considering the charged political atmosphere in Iraq, the latest reported abuses have their own unique context. Most of the abused women were Sunni, and their freedom has been a major rallying cry for rebelling Sunni provinces in central and western Iraq.

In Arab culture, dishonor through occupation and the robbing of one's land comes second to dishonoring women. The humiliation that millions of Iraqi Sunni feel cannot be explained by words, and militancy is an unsurprising response to the government's unrelenting policies of dehumanization, discrimination and violence.

While post-US invasion Iraq was not a haven for democracy and human rights, the "new Iraq" has a culture of impunity that holds nothing sacred. In fact, dishonoring entire societies has been a tactic in al-Maliki's dirty war. Many women were "rounded up for alleged terrorist activities by male family members", reported the Associated Press, citing the HRW report.

"Iraqi security forces and officials act as if brutally abusing women will make the country safer," said Joe Stork, deputy MENA director at HRW. It was the same logic that determined that through 'shock and awe' Iraqis could be forced into submission.

Neither theory proved accurate. The war and rebellion in Iraq will continue as long as those holding the key to that massive Iraqi prison understand that human rights must be respected as a precondition to a lasting peace.

Ramzy Baroud is an internationally-syndicated columnist, a media consultant and the editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His latest book is My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza's Untold Story (Pluto Press, London).

(Copyright 2014 Ramzy Baroud)

The horrible truth: Half of all prison rape is committed by guards

The Daily Caller

New data suggests that inmates have just as much to fear from their guards as they do from each other: Nearly half of all sexual assaults in U.S. jails and prisons is committed by corrections officers and staff.
That statistic actually represents an uptick in reported cases of sexual assault. Accusations of rape against prison guards and staff rose 18 percent between 2006 and 2011–the most recent year for which data is available–according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

“An inmate is just as threatened by staff as … by other inmates — this wasn’t the prevalent thought just a few years ago,” said Jamie Fellner, a former member of the National Rape Elimination Commission, in a statement to The Washington Times.

According to the statistics, in cases where the accusation was found credible, 77.1 percent of the victims–and 80 percent of the perpetrators–were male. More than a third of the victims were 24-years-old or younger.

Some accusations are made by prisoners against guards whom they simply do not like, making the adjudication of such matters inherently difficult.

Still, the increase in accusations is something of an indictment of the Prison Rape Elimination Act, which has not succeeded in curbing sexual assault in prisons since it was signed into law by President Bush ten years ago.

Some experts think rape between guards and prisoners is actually occurring at an even higher frequency than the number of accusations suggest.

Read more

Prison Inc. The Private Industry

Online Paralegal

The corruption of Britain: UK’s key institutions infiltrated by criminals

Comment: Well, there's a surprise....

----------------------- 

The Independent

The entire criminal justice system was infiltrated by organised crime gangs, according to a secret Scotland Yard report leaked to The Independent. 

In 2003 Operation Tiberius found that men suspected of being Britain’s most notorious criminals had compromised multiple agencies, including HM Revenue & Customs, the Crown Prosecution Service, the City of London Police and the Prison Service, as well as pillars of the criminal justice system including juries and the legal profession.

The strategic intelligence scoping exercise – “ratified by the most senior management” at the Met – uncovered jurors being bought off or threatened to return not-guilty verdicts; corrupt individuals working for HMRC, both in the UK and overseas; and “get out of jail free cards” being bought for £50,000.

The report states that the infiltration made it almost impossible for police and prosecutors to successfully pursue the organised gangs that police suspected controlled much of the criminal underworld.

The author of Tiberius, which was compiled from intelligence sources including covert police informants, live telephone intercepts, briefings from the security services and thousands of historical files, came to the desperate conclusion: “Quite how much more damage could be done is difficult to imagine.”

The fresh revelations come a day after The Independent revealed that Tiberius had concluded the Metropolitan Police suffered “endemic police corruption” at the time, and that some of Britain’s most dangerous organised crime syndicates were able to infiltrate New Scotland Yard “at will”.

In its conclusions, the report stated: “The true assessment of the damage caused by these corrupt networks is impossible to make at this stage, until further proactive scoping has been undertaken.

“However a statement by an experienced SIO [senior investigating officer] currently attached to SO 1(3) gives some indication of the depth of the problem in east and north-east London: ‘I feel that at the current time I cannot carry out an ethical murder investigation without the fear of it being compromised.’

“The ramifications of this statement are serious and disturbing and provide a snapshot of the current threat to the criminal justice system. Additionally the fact that none of these syndicates have been seriously disrupted over the last five years provides an insight into the effectiveness of their networks.”

In one case identified by Tiberius, a leading criminal was acquitted of importing cannabis after he allegedly “bought” members of the jury hearing his case. A named police officer “was involved in some way or another”, according to the report.

Tiberius also revealed the Met was concerned at the time with a national newspaper story on the ability of the Adams family to escape the law by penetrating the criminal justice system.

In 1998, police appeared to have finally made a breakthrough when Tommy Adams was jailed for more than seven years for importing cannabis.

However, the article cited by Tiberius stated that the “only reason the Adams family had allowed the prosecution to succeed and had not resorted to bribery or intimidation to thwart it, was because the other brothers wanted to teach Tommy a lesson for getting involved in crimes they had not authorised”.

The article concluded: “Witnesses terrified into silence, dodgy jurors, bent lawyers, bent policemen and bent CPS clerks – all are part of the same cancer eating away at justice. A cure for the malady will not be easy to come by. Perhaps we should begin by acknowledging that the patient is sick.”

Tiberius disclosed that the Met interviewed the journalist who wrote the story after the murder of Solly Nahome, a Jewish money launderer credited as the “brains” behind the Adams’ criminal empire. The reporter stated one of her journalistic sources on the family was a corrupt police officer but did not disclose who it was.

Another case of corruption beyond the Met, identified by Tiberius, included intelligence of alleged foul play within HMRC, which is supposed to lead the UK’s fight against white-collar crime such as money laundering.

In 2000, according to Tiberius, a key police informant was secretly helping Scotland Yard with an investigation into the importation of £10m of heroin by a Turkish gang in north London.

The deal went wrong, the informant was tortured in a cellar and “an attempt was made to sever his fingers with a pair of garden shears”. His associate was also attacked and had “three fingers chopped off with a machete”.

The henchman Tiberius alleged had committed the assaults was the son of a named Met detective, who repeatedly tried to impede police inquiries into the case, according to Tiberius. He also had a corrupt relationship with a named detective sergeant then based in Marylebone police station who is suspected to have “organised cheque frauds”. Research conducted by The Independent suggests that none of the three men has ever been prosecuted.

The Turkish drug dealer was later convicted and told police he was an HMRC informant. He said he knew of “corrupt contacts within the police” and had a Cyprus-based customs officer as a handler who “took money off him”.

Alastair Morgan, whose brother Daniel was murdered in 1987 before he could expose links between Met officers and organised crime, told The Independent: “Despite all the protestations by police that things have changed since the ‘bad old days’, this doesn’t surprise me in the slightest.

“The police have no desire to tackle this. It would be too damaging to have it all aired in open court. The Met is a highly political organisation.”

Scotland Yard said: “[We] will not tolerate any behaviour by our officers and staff which could damage the trust placed in police by the public. We are determined to pursue corruption in all its forms and with all possible vigour. All such allegations and intelligence are taken extremely seriously.”

The U.S. Prison Population - By The Numbers

Activist Post

It has been well documented that despite the platitudes suggesting that the United States is the beacon of freedom, it is actually the location with the most filled cages of human beings. The capital of this Gulag is currently Louisiana, where the incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran's, seven times China's and 10 times Germany's. (Source)

America holds 25% of the world's prison population and only 5% of its overall population. The number of prisoners held in private prisons has risen dramatically over the past 10 years from 2,000 housed in 5 private prisons, to more than 60,000 housed in 100. It is a number expected to rise to 360,000 prisoners over the next decade. (Source) Moreover, as the economy declines, there has even been a revival of debtors prisons, formally abolished in the early 1800s. Even more troubling is the heightened criminalization of children for behavior which previously was considered merely a nuisance, not something worthy of handcuffs and the Big House.

The U.S. prison business has become the essence of predatory corporatism: it privatizes profits and socializes losses. This combination has led to a situation where correctional facilities have very little incentive to correct behavior, but every incentive to ensure that new bodies arrive as fast as possible and keep them in a state of indentured servitude. The Infographic below dissects the world's largest prison population, offering a stark condemnation of the "Land of the Free."

One statistic to note is that actual violent crime and property crimes have been declining, but the prison population continues to explode. So where are all of these new "criminals" coming from?

Boston University Online Masters in Criminal Justice

The numbers are the numbers, but I personally would take issue that the #1 solution would be treatment programs as intimated above -- many of these inmates never should have arrived in the first place. The first solution would be to eliminate the for-profit nature of the growing prison Gulag.

There is certainly a place for treatment programs of all types that aim to reduce the rate of recidivism, especially for violent criminals. But until this predatory system that trades bodies for dollars is abolished, it will only mean further enrichment from solutions within the very same system that created the problem in the first place.

A nation that still purports to be the Land of the Free simply cannot continue to say that with a straight face when it has literally invested in slavery. A predatory system -- even if some believe it only preys on other predators -- can only lead to a ruined social landscape like that of Louisiana. If left unchecked, this predator is guaranteed to consume any part of the American landscape that buys into placing a monetary value on an expanding prison slave system.

 

Locking up profits

 
One reason that the number of incarcerated people in the US remains high is 

that politicians are afraid to appear 'soft' on crime or illegal immigration [GALLO/GETTY]

Al Jazeera

With 1 in 100 American adults behind bars, falling crime rates and a cash-strapped economy, the United States would seem ripe for the kinds of national reforms that might keep people out of prison. Recent polls have shown that even our law-and-order-minded citizenry would rather see penalties eased for certain criminals than pay more money to keep them locked up.

A smattering of states, blue and red alike, have taken tentative steps to reduce their prison populations. Yet overall, the incarceration rate remains flat even as crime levels decrease and budget deficits grow. And on the federal level, the numbers of prisoners just keep growing; Congress, meanwhile, can't even manage to pass a bill to study criminal justice reforms, much less make them.

What is it that's keeping some 2.3 million people in prisons and jails across the United States, and thousands more in immigrant detention centres? In large part, it's the timidity of politicians from both parties, who still fear appearing soft on crime or on illegal immigration.

Since the 1980s, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike, they have lengthened sentences and rolled back parole opportunities, leading to a 700 per cent increase in the US prison population. In the last 15 years, they have also overseen a five-fold increase in the numbers of undocumented immigrants jailed in detention centres.

Several new reports argue that the greed and influence of private prison companies, as well as the perfidy of politicians, plays a role in keeping prisons and detention centres teeming. According to Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration, a report released this month by the American Civil Liberties Union, "Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6 per cent of state prisoners, 16 per cent of federal prisoners".

These companies have a vested interest in putting more people in prison and keeping them there longer - and they have the lobbying dollars to make it happen. By funding state and national campaigns, lobbying legislators and participating in influential conservative political organisations, they appear to have succeeded in shaping policies that enhance their bottom line, at the expense of a sane and affordable criminal justice system.

A second report, put out by the Detention Watch Network, asserts that private prison companies have been especially successful in influencing immigration policies and practices. Some 400,000 immigrants pass through the nation's immigrant detention centres each year, at a cost to the taxpayers of $1.7bn. Nearly half of these immigrants are housed in 30 detention centres run by private companies under contract with the federal government; they are paid an average of $122 per day per resident.

Read more

11 Stunning Facts About America's Prisons

Business Insider

The U.S. has a greater percentage of its population locked up than any other country in the world.Despite budget cuts and tax shortfalls housing inmates costs the country almost $600 billion a year. Despite the rising incarceration rates over the last decade, crime is actually down. High inmate populations are blamed on mandatory sentencing and over-zealous drug laws. [...]