Prison Industrial Complex

Tucson Draws The Line On Prison Privatization

May 23, 2018 By Joe Watson, Truthout.org Create! Arizona, Prison Industrial Complex, Privatization

One more time, with emphasis: A city near the Mexican border in a state that's home to some of the country's harshest sentencing guidelines and the fourth-highest rate of incarceration in the US -- with privately-run prisons and immigrant detention centers from one corner of the state to the other -- is telling companies like GEO Group and CoreCivic that they're not welcome around here. "Profit should never be motivation for our justice system," said Tucson City Councilmember Regina Romero, who spearheaded passage of the resolution. Our little corner of Arizona has been so traumatized by mass incarceration -- with per capita jail admissions almost 50 percent higher than our neighbors in Phoenix -- that the Tucson City Council isn't the first municipal body in these parts to pass such a resolution.

Why Are For-Profit US Prisons Subjecting Detainees To Forced Labor?

May 20, 2018 Azadeh Shahshahani, The Guardian. Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Prison Industrial Complex, Workers

In 2017, officials at the Stewart immigration detention center in Georgia placed Shoaib Ahmed, a 24-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh, in solitary confinement for encouraging fellow workers to stop working. Ahmed, who was paid 50 cents per hour to work within the facility, was upset because his $20 paycheck was delayed. His punishment was solitary confinement for 10 days, where he was subject to deplorable conditions – a cell with no access to other workers, only an hour of out of cell time per day and showers only three times per week.

Jailbreak Of The Imagination: Seeing Prisons For What They Are And Demanding Transformation

May 7, 2018 By Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes, Truthout.org Create! Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Prisons

Our current historical moment demands a radical re-imagining of how we address various harms. The levers of power are currently in the hands of an administration that is openly hostile to the most marginalized in our society (Black people, Native people, the poor, LGBTQ people, immigrant communities and more). While we protect ourselves from their consistent and regular blows, we must also fight for a vision of the world we want to inhabit. For us, that's a world where people like Tiffany Rusher, who began a five-year sentence at Logan Correctional Center in Broadwell Township, Illinois, in 2013, are not tortured to death in the name of "safety." Our vision insists on the abolition of the prison industrial complex as a critical pillar of the creation of a new society.

Prisoners Organizing National Strike Against ‘Modern Day Slavery’

May 6, 2018 Michael Arria, In these Times. Organize! Human Rights, Prison Industrial Complex, Strike, Worker Rights

Prisoners across the country say they are gearing up for an end-of-summer nationwide strike against inhumane living conditions and unpaid labor—or, in their words, “modern-day slavery.” The strike was announced in an April 24 press release and shared by a number of advocacy groups. According to one of the outside organizers who was contacted by In These Times, the press released was developed and written by prisoners. The strike, which is primarily being organized by the prisoners, will start on August 21 and last until September 9.

Sharks, Wardrobes, And Crypto VS The Prison Industrial Complex

April 12, 2018 Eleanor Goldfield, Occupy.com Resistance Report Prison Industrial Complex

Stranger Than Fiction Headlines from the Front Lines. First up, are you on the WARdrobe watch list? And I do mean WAR drobe. And thanks to this new military program, sharks may soon be getting laser beams. Catholics fill baby bottles with their own blood and walk onto a nuclear arms base. Like Exxon, Shell knew too, and finally the resistance is spreading. Teacher strikes and tree-sits loudly call for a system that puts people and planet over profit. Finally, cryptocurrencies are often used to talk about personal economic gain. But what if we could use them as a tactic? Grayson Earle is a technologist and activist who doesn’t think very highly of capitalism - and he has no illusions about crypto’s potential for enriching the already rich. That being said, this decentralized, blockchained monetary system leaves the door open for new innovation.

Cook County Data Shows Reforms Haven’t Stopped The Jailing Of People For Being Poor

March 7, 2018 By Sharlyn Grace, Chicagoappleseed.org Educate! Poverty, Prison Industrial Complex, Repression

Last fall, the Coalition to End Money Bond organized more than 70 volunteers to monitor the implementation of General Order 18.8A in Cook County’s central bond court. The order aims to ensure that no one is incarcerated at Cook County Jail simply because they are unable to pay a monetary bond. Today, the Coalition to End Money Bond released its findings in the new report: Monitoring Cook County’s Central Bond Court: A Community Courtwatching Initiative. The information collected in the courtwatching report shows that some positive changes have occurred as a result of recent reforms but that the order has not met its goal.

We Don’t Need Mass Incarceration To Keep People Safe

January 19, 2018 By German Lopez, Vox.com Educate! Crime, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex

If mass incarceration were an effective way to fight crime, then one would expect to see a strong correlation between higher rates of incarceration and reduced crime. States have been running a live experiment of sorts on this over the past several years, reforming their criminal justice systems to, in short, punish people less punitively and incarcerate them for shorter periods of time for low-level offenses. Supporters of mass incarceration, such as the Trump administration and particularly Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have warned that these changes would lead to more crime. But over the past few years, we’ve actually seen the opposite. Take this chart from Adam Gelb at Pew Charitable Trusts, which advocates for criminal justice reform, that shows crime has continued to fall even as states have reduced their prison populations...

Prisoners Suffer Gross Human Rights Violations. Now They’re Standing & Speaking Up.

January 18, 2018 Eleanor Goldfield, Artkillingapathy.com Educate! Human Rights, Prison Industrial Complex, Prisoner rights, Prisons

The message goes on to detail the three main demands via examples such as price gouging prisoners on products like a case of soup that costs $17 in the Canteen as opposed to the roughly $4 it costs on the outside. As the writer points out, “This is highway robbery without a gun.” With regards to parole, Florida eliminated parole for non-capital felonies back in 1984 meaning that the death penalty can’t be used in those cases. Instead, those serving life in prison have no hope for parole and those with near-life sentences have very little hope. Rehabilitation is a foregone conclusion. This also means that the “gain time” system for prison labor is essentially meaningless to these prisoners. Florida prisons offer what’s known as “gain time” for prison labor. Prisoners work in exchange for time struck off their sentence. The problem here is three-fold.

A New School To Prison Pipeline That Might Surprise You

December 6, 2017 Staff, educationalchemy.com Educate! Labor, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Prison Labor

By Staff of Educational Alchemy - Maryland Correctional Enterprises (MCE) is the state’s own prison labor company. A semi-autonomous subdivision of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services (DPSCS), MCE commands a workforce of thousands of prisoners, paid just a few dollars per day. MCE workers make far less than minimum wage, earning between $1.50 and $5.10 for an entire day’s work. Most of us are familiar by now with the concept of a school-to-prison pipeline, but here it is, a prison-for-school pipeline, or better yet, prison-for-profit (all hail 21st century slavery alive and well) in the name of “education reform.” It might be a “great day” for Ed St John and U of M, but I doubt its a great day for the forced laborers who did the work. The new center will “transform teaching and learning” but it will not transform systemic oppression or racism. In fact, it benefits from the fruits of oppressive labor. This is not the only time that U of M, or other institutions of higher learning have used prison labor. That is a deep seated problem in itself that warrants our attention. As one news article states, “”Maryland is just a symptom … of how the prison industrial complex affects African-Americans and poor people of color nationwide.”

America’s Secretive Private Prison Industry To Become Much Less Secret

November 6, 2017 Brad Poling, occupy.com Educate! Capitalism, Prison Industrial Complex, Private Prisons

By Brad Poling for Occupy - Seventy-five miles southwest of San Antonio, Texas, in the expanse of desert between the U.S./Mexico border and nestled between oil boomtowns of yesteryear, is Dilley, the epicenter of a new battle over immigrants' rights. The remote town of 4,000 people has enjoyed a hot local economy thanks to its most controversial feature: its private prison. Dilley houses the nation’s largest family detention center, a 50-acre complex that holds 2,400 detainees every night. The center has become a symbol of the resurgent private prison industry and a reminder of why the Justice Department abandoned these facilities in the first place. The private prison industry, which briefly went into free fall after President Obama's Justice Department announced the government would end its use of private prisons in August 2016, has found new allies in President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions – and is making fast dividends on the new deal. Giants like GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) have received billions in taxpayer dollars for renewed government contracts, and have leveraged their private status to closely guard the details of each deal.

Stop Using Inmates As Slaves

October 23, 2017 Annie McGrew and Angela Hanks, www.talkpoverty.org Resist! Prison Industrial Complex, Prison Labor, Slavery

By Annie McGrew and Angela Hanks for Talk Poverty - Last week, a Louisiana sheriff gave a press conference railing against a new prisoner release program because it cost him free labor from “some good [inmates] that we use every day to wash cars, to change oil in the cars, to cook in the kitchen.” Two days later, news broke that up to 40 percent of the firefighters battling California’s outbreak of forest fires are prison inmates working for $2 an hour. Practices like these are disturbingly common: Military gear, ground meat, Starbucks holiday products, and McDonald’s uniforms have all been made (or are still made) with low-wage prison labor. Inmates are exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act, which requires that workers are paid at least the federal minimum wage. That makes it completely legal for states to exploit inmates for free or cheap labor. More than half of the 1.5 million people in state and federal prisons work while incarcerated, and the vast majority only make a few cents per hour. Most inmates work in their own prison facilities, in jobs such as maintenance or food service. These jobs pay an average of just 86 cents an hour, and are primarily designed to keep the prison running at a low cost. Others may be employed in so-called “correctional industries,” where inmates work for the Department of Corrections to produce goods that are sold to government entities and nonprofit organizations.

‘The Justice System In Its Current Form Destroys Families’

September 30, 2017 Staff, www.blog.generationopportunity.org Educate! Criminal Justice System, Families, Prison Industrial Complex

By Staff of Generation Opportunity - A year ago, Weldon Angelos was released from prison after serving nearly 13 years of a 55-year sentence. Today, he’s leading the movement for criminal justice reform in the United States. Weldon’s story about facing over-criminalization and injustice is well-known. He was arrested for selling marijuana while in possession of a firearm and received an extraordinarily long punishment for a first-time, non-violent offender. Since his release, Weldon has worked tirelessly to reconnect with his family – his sister, his nephew, and his fiancée and two sons – while fighting to fix our broken criminal justice system. “I’m incredibly grateful to be out, but I’m going to continue to push for reforming mandatory minimum sentencing because it destroys so many families,” Weldon declared in an interview last year. “I witnessed that first-hand in prison. There are other people like me, even more deserving than me, that should be out.” Generation Opportunity caught up with Weldon during a recent trip to Washington, D.C., where he shared his story with lawmakers and urged them to make criminal justice reform a top priority. Weldon took a few minutes to talk to Gen Opp about adjusting to life after prison and what he considers the most important elements of criminal justice reform.

BLM Partners With Organizations To Halt Jail Expansion

September 29, 2017 Kirsten West Savali, www.theroot.com Organize! Black Lives Matter (BLM), Prison Industrial Complex, Racism

By Kirsten West Savali for The Root - Patrisse Khan-Cullors, Black Lives Matter co-founder, veteran organizer, artist and freedom fighter, has partnered with more than 30 organizations to launch JusticeLA, a human rights and abolitionist coalition organized around the collective goal of halting a proposed $2 billion jail-expansion plan in Los Angeles County. The coalition’s first action took place Tuesday morning with a powerful demonstration in front of the Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration ahead of the weekly Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meeting. Though the board’s Sept. 26 agenda included finalizing the county’s 2017-2018 budget, supervisors first approved, in 2015, the expansion plan, which outlines the construction of two new jails, the Los Angeles Times reports. According to the coalition, the amount will be more in the ballpark of $3.5 billion once construction is completed and any additional expenses accounted for—$3.5 billion, which coalition members say should be reclaimed, reimagined and reinvested in the oppressed and occupied communities for whom the jails are being created.

Private Prison In New Mexico Demands More Prisoners

August 8, 2017 Steven Rosenfeld, www.alternet.org Educate! Mass Incarceration, New Mexico, Prison Industrial Complex, Private Prisons

By Steven Rosenfeld for AlterNet - The nation’s second-largest private prison corporation is holding New Mexico politicians hostage by threatening to close unless the state or federal authorities find 300 more prisoners to be warehoused there, according to local news reports. “The company that has operated a private prison in Estancia for nearly three decades has announced it will close the Torrance County Detention Facility and lay off more than 200 employees unless it can find 300 state or federal inmates to fill empty beds within the next 60 days,” the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper reported last week. The paper said that county officials issued a statement citing the threatened closure and emphasized that every virtually every politician in the region, from county officials to state officials to congressmen, were scurrying to save jobs—as opposed to shutting a privatized prison by an operator that has been sued many times for sexual harassment, sexual assault, deaths, use of force, physical assaults, medical care, injuries and civil rights violations. “This is a big issue for us,” Torrance County manager Belinda Garland told the Santa Fe newspaper.

Defendants Can’t Be Jailed Just Because They Can’t Afford Bail

July 26, 2017 Staff, www.reuters.com Resist! Chicago, Courts, Prison Industrial Complex, Reform

By Staff of Reuters - CHICAGO (Reuters) - Defendants who are not considered dangerous will no longer have to stay in jail if they cannot afford to pay bail while awaiting trial in the Illinois county that includes Chicago, a circuit court judge ordered on Monday. Before an initial bail hearing, information will be provided by the defendant in Cook County regarding his or her ability - within 48 hours - to pay bail, the order said. If the defendant cannot pay, he or she will not be held before trial. “Defendants should not be sitting in jail awaiting trial simply because they lack the financial resources to secure their release,” Timothy Evans, chief judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, which includes Chicago, said in a statement. “If they are not deemed a danger to any person or the public, my order states that they will receive a bail they can afford,” the judge said. The order goes into effect on Sept. 18 for felony cases and on Jan. 1, 2018, for misdemeanor cases in the circuit court. Defendants who are deemed dangerous, however, will be held in jail without bond, according to the court’s statement. Judges can also release defendants on individual recognizance or electronic monitoring, which do not require the defendant to pay money to be released, it said.

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