Skip to content

Prison Industrial Complex

I Spent 14 Months In Jail Because I Couldn’t Pay Bail

June 20, 2017 Lavette Mayes and Matthew McLoughlin, www.truth-out.org ,
By Lavette Mayes and Matthew McLoughlin for Truthout - On any given day, more than 7,000 people are incarcerated at Chicago's Cook County Jail. Stretching over 11 city blocks, Cook County Jail is the largest single-site jail in the United States. Ninety-five percent of the people locked up in Cook County Jail have not been convicted of a crime. They are incarcerated pretrial -- and 62 percent of them are there only because they cannot afford to pay a monetary bond. In Cook County, bond court hearings last a mere 37 seconds on average. In that time, a judge makes bail decisions that reshape the entire course of people's cases, and often, their lives. For many people, the judge's decision includes setting a money bond they must pay before they can be released from jail. The amount of that bond -- and whether their family or friends can pay it -- then determines whether they await their trial in freedom or in a cage. Felony cases in Cook County commonly take more than a year to resolve, and some take several years. Right now, more than 4,000 people are being incarcerated in Cook County because they cannot pay bonds that were set using less than a minute's worth of information. After 24 hours of detention, people's risks of rearrest and failure to appear for court increase.

National Movement Demanding End Of Monetary Bail

December 29, 2016 Sarah Lazare, www.alternet.org ,
By Sarah Lazare for AlterNet - For the nearly 8,000 people locked up in Cook County jail, and the 2,400 on house arrest, the presumption of innocence until proven guilty effectively does not exist. Roughly 95 percent of those incarcerated have not faced trial or conviction of any kind, the vast majority of them ensnared simply because they are unable to afford bond. Those forced to languish in indefinite detention are disproportionately African American, and their pretrial punishments can permanently set their lives off-course, causing them to lose jobs, custody of their children, their housing, and even their lives.

Newsletter – Outing The Prison-Industrial Complex

October 16, 2016 Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese, www.PopularResistance.org , , , ,
By Margaret Flowers and Kevin Zeese for Popular Resistance. What do you call a system in which private entities partner with law enforcement to spy on peaceful protesters and arrest them, in which the poor and people of color are preyed upon to meet private prison quotas in order to provide slave labor, in which drug use is treated as a crime rather than the public health issue that it is, and in which police are heavily militarized and violate the law without being held accountable? Like the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex (PIC) has become a behemoth that feeds personal and corporate profits through human exploitation. Its tentacles reach into many parts of our society. It is necessary to understand how the many aspects of the PIC operate in order to confront it and stop it from swallowing up our families and communities.

Eliminate Profit From Punishment

August 16, 2016 Cedric Lawson, www.inequality.org , ,
By Cedric Lawson for Inequality - In July 2010, Marissa Alexander, a young Black woman from Florida, faced the fight of her life only nine days after giving birth to her youngest daughter. Her estranged husband, Rico Gray, attacked, strangled, and threatened to kill Marissa in her own home. To get rid of Rico, Marissa fired a warning shot into the ceiling. The single shot injured no one. And yet she was subsequently charged with several criminal charges and incarcerated for a victimless crime.

Executive Clemency Requested For 25 Deserving Women

July 26, 2016 Staff, www.change.org , ,
By Staff of The Clemency Report and CAN-DO Foundation - Note from Amy Ralston Povah, President - CAN-DO Foundation: “Thirteen of the original women on the Top 25 are NOW FREE - most due to clemency and a few for the two point reduction - this is progress. We've been told there will be "more women" on the next list coming out toward the end of July due to several of us who went to the White House complaining that there were only two women on the last list! We feel this short video helps explain why people end up with 10-LIFE for conspiracy even if they never sold drugs - and puts a face on it.”

Taking On America’s Prison Profiteers

July 19, 2016 Staff ,www.inequality.org , ,
By Staff of Inequality.org - No place in the world imprisons people at a higher per capita rate than the state of Louisiana. And that incarceration pays — for the profiteers who run the state’s private prisons. For the incarcerated, a totally different story. In 1998, the New York Times described one of Louisiana’s privately run facilities, the Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth, as possibly the worst such prison in the nation, a site “rife with brutality, cronyism, and neglect.”

Prison Sentencing As If Budgets Mattered

July 2, 2016 Staff, www.oregonpen.org ,
By Staff of Oregon Penn - In Oregon, where are we now spend more on prisons run by the Department of Corrections than on public four-year universities, what is right in front of our noses is that the way we decide how long criminals should spend in prison is not only bankrupting us in the present moment, it is sowing the seeds of economic inequality and social weakness for generations to come, because excessive spending on incarceration deprives us of public goods that promote prosperity.

As Prison Population Shrinks, Blacks Benefit More Than Whites

February 17, 2016 Keith Humphreys, www.washingtonpost.com
By Keith Humphreys for The Washington Post - After decades of growth, the U.S. imprisonment rate has been declining for the past six years. Hidden within this welcome overall trend is a sizable and surprising racial disparity: African-Americans are benefitting from the national de-incarceration trend but whites are serving time at increasingly higher rates. The pattern of results, evident in a series of reports from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, is most stark among women.

Let’s End Torture In U.S. Prisons

February 4, 2016 John Kiriakou, www.otherwords.org , , ,
By John Kiriakou for Other Worlds - A prisoner is kept in a small cell — usually 6 feet by 10 — alone, for 23 hours a day. For one hour a day, he or she may be taken into a small cage outside, with the opportunity to walk in circles before being taken back in. Even the outdoor cage can usually be opened and closed remotely. The idea is to keep the prisoner from having any human interaction. Those who’ve been through it call it a “living death.” The United Nations calls it torture. The practice is widespread in the United States. And until recently, it was applied even to juveniles in the federal prison.

Private Companies Making Killing In Justice System

January 26, 2016 Brandon Weber, www.progressive.org , ,
By Brandon Weber for The Progressive - Private corporations make money at almost every step of our justice and prison systems, from processing fines to monitoring ankle bracelets and drug testing. And they make a lot of it. The group In the Public Interest(ITPI), has just compiled a list. Sweetheart contracts with state and federal governments, and with the private companies who now own 20 percent of federal prisons across the United States, have opened up a whole new areas of taxpayer-funded profit-making.

Report: Ohio’s Youth Prison Reform Is National Model

November 4, 2015 Staff, www.nbc4i.com ,
By Staff of NBC4i - A quarter-century after Ohio’s juvenile prison system was on the brink of crisis, it has become a model for others, according to a report released Monday. The state dramatically decreased the number of young people behind bars and saved taxpayers millions of dollars through the use of alternative programs, the Juvenile Justice Coalition said in the report. “Ohio’s de-incarceration programs are less expensive and more effective than prisons when youth are matched to the right programs,” the group’s executive director, Erin Davies, told Northeast Ohio Media Group.

6,000 Prisoners Make Their Way Home

October 31, 2015 Amber Hall, www.thetakeaway.org
By Amber Hall of The Takeaway - Over the next three days, 6,000 will be released from federal prisons. The decision to release the prisoners came last April from the U.S. Sentencing Commission, a judicial agency which voted to reduce sentences for drug-related crimes. For many, it's been years since they've freely walked outside prison gates—the average inmate in this release will have served nine years. What's next for them? Re-entry, the process by which former inmates acclimate back into society. Some will have families waiting for them, others will go to treatment centers, and many others will be on their own.

‘A Pipeline Straight To Jail’

October 13, 2015 Chris Hedges, www.truthdig.com
By Chris Hedges for Truth Dig - The defeat of the Harvard University debate team by a team from the Eastern New York Correctional Facility in the Catskills elucidates a truth known intimately by those of us who teach in prisons: that the failure of the American educational system to offer opportunities to the poor and the government’s abandonment of families and children living in blighted communities condemn millions of boys and girls, often of color, to a life of suffering, misery and early death. The income inequality, the trillions of dollars we divert to the war industry, the flight of manufacturing jobs overseas and the refusal to invest in our infrastructure wrecks life after innocent life.

Justice Department Freeing 6,000 Prisoners, Largest One-Time Release

October 7, 2015 Sari Horwitz, www.washingtonpost.com
By Sari Horwitz for The Washington Post, The Justice Department is set to release about 6,000 inmates early from prison — the largest one-time release of federal prisoners — in an effort to reduce overcrowding and provide relief to drug offenders who received harsh sentences over the past three decades, according to U.S. officials. The inmates from federal prisons nationwide will be set free by the department’s Bureau of Prisons between Oct. 30 and Nov. 2. About two-thirds of them will go to halfway houses and home confinement before being put on supervised release. About one-third are foreign citizens who will be quickly deported, officials said. The early release follows action by the U.S. Sentencing Commission — an independent agency that sets sentencing policies for federal crimes — that reduced the potential punishment for future drug offenders last year and then made that change retroactive.

Public Prisons Profiteering Is Staggering

October 5, 2015 James Kilgore, www.truth-out.org ,
James Kilgore for Truthout - In addition to the private prison corporations, a wide range of companies, organizations, individuals, and even towns profit economically or politically from prisons. They all have "skin in the game" - and have a definite interest in opposing attempts to reduce or end mass incarceration. These prison profiteers recognize that incarcerating people is an economic as well as a political operation. Keeping a person in prison is costly, whether in New York, where in 2010 it cost on average $60,076 a year to lock up one person, or in West Virginia, where the price tag was $26,498. The question is: where does that money come from and where does it go?
«12345»

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here

Urgent End Of Year Fundraising Campaign

Online donations are back! 

Keep independent media alive. 

Due to the attacks on our fiscal sponsor, we were unable to raise funds online for nearly two years.  As the bills pile up, your help is needed now to cover the monthly costs of operating Popular Resistance.

Donate Here
Sign Up To Our Daily Digest

Independent media outlets are being suppressed and dropped by corporations like Google, Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our daily email digest before it’s too late so you don’t miss the latest movement news.