Prison Industrial Complex

Mass Incarceration Vs Rural Appalachia

August 27, 2015 Panagioti Tsolkas, www.earthfirstjournal.org Petitions and Online Actions Environment, Jobs, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex

By Panagioti Tsolkas in the EarthFirst! Journal. Letcher County, KY - The United States Bureau of Prisons is trying to build a new, massive maximum-security prison in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Kentucky — and there’s a growing movement to stop it. The prison industry in the US has grown in leaps and bounds in the past 20 years— a new prison was built at an average rate of one every two weeks in the ’90s, almost entirely in rural communities. As of 2002, there were already more prisoners in this country than farmers. The industry seems like an unstoppable machine, plowing forward at breakneck speed on the path that made the world’s largest prison population.

Private Prison Firms Buy Access To Public Officials At Conferences

August 21, 2015 Mike Ludwig, www.truth-out.org Educate! Corruption, Mass Incarceration, Politics, Prison Industrial Complex

By Mike Ludwig in TruthOut - The prison industry in the United States has grown so large that there are no less than seven professional associations for people who work at prisons and jails. The industry conferences held by these associations provide a perfect venue for private corrections companies to influence government officials with little public oversight, according to a recent report by the watchdog group In The Public Interest (ITPI). The biggest names in the prison business spend millions of dollars sponsoring these conferences and wooing prison officials with free massages, awards ceremonies, luxury dinner cruises and plenty of corporate schwag. Over the past week, one of the most prominent associations, the American Correctional Association (ACA), held its summer conference in Indianapolis, where major sponsors included private prison companies Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), GEO Group and food services giant Aramark.

Illinois Spent 2.4 Million Incarcerating People In One Chicago Block

July 28, 2015 Alex Nitkin, www.dnainfo.com Educate! Capitalism, Chicago, Illinois, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex

By Alex Nitkin in DNAInfo - In just five years, the State of Illinois dedicated more than $2.4 million to the 4800 block of West Adams Street in Austin. But don't look for new developments or freshly paved roads on that stretch of street, because that's not where the money went. No, $2.4 million is the amount of money the state spent on incarcerating people for drug offenses from that block alone. Million Dollar Blocks looks at more than 300,000 criminal records, showing what developers called a "conservative estimate" of how much the Illinois Department of Corrections spent on people from each block and neighborhood. Cooper said he and his colleagues assumed the minimum sentence for each offense, when in reality the state likely spends much more. Developers at DataMade spent months putting together data based on offenders' home addresses, assuming that the state spends an average of $22,000 on each criminal every year.

What President Obama Didn’t Hear Or Smell At El Reno

July 21, 2015 Carl Takei, www.aclu.org Educate! Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Solitary Confinement, Torture

By Carl Takei in ACLU - From several years of touring prisons, I’ve learned they all have a distinctive and oddly similar smell: sweat, human misery, and grime — sometimes overlain, but never hidden, by the acrid odors of chlorine and other cleaning products. The sounds give you a sense of the different parts of the institution. Dorm-style general population units are a constant murmur of activity, with TV programs blending into the sound of people talking, playing cards, microwaving overpriced cups of noodles—anything to pass the idle hours, days, months, and years in custody that lay before them. I wish he had reached behind a solid steel door to shake the hand of someone in solitary confinement. Meanwhile, solitary confinement units are filled with the yells of those seeking help, the screams of those battling hallucinations, and the echoing metallic thuds of people banging their hands — or sometimes their heads — against the metal doors of their cells.

93 Orgs Urge EPA To Consider Prisoners In Environmental Justice

July 20, 2015 Human Rights Defense Center, www.nationinside.org Educate! Environmental Justice, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Prisons

By Human Rights Defense Center in Nation Inside - The Human Rights Defense Center (HRDC) submitted a public comment to the Environmental Protection Agency today that provides input on the agency’s EJ 2020 Action Agenda Framework, highlighting the lack of consideration for environmental justice among the millions of prisoners in the United States. The comment was co-signed by 93 social justice, environmental and prisoners’ rights organizations from across the country. “It’s encouraging to see the EPA attempting to increase the effectiveness of protecting vulnerable communities that have been overburdened by industrial pollution, but a significant component is missing when impacts on millions of prisoners and their families are ignored,” said Panagioti Tsolkas, coordinator of HRDC’s Prison Ecology Project.

Questions Surround Private Prisons After AZ Riot

July 20, 2015 Donald Cohen, www.capitalandmain.com Educate! Arizona, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Torture

By Donald Cohen in Capital and Main - By now, you have probably heard about the riot at the for-profit Kingman Prison in Arizona. Days of unrest at the prison, run by the privately-held Management Training Corporation, left 15 wounded and forced nearly 1,000 incarcerated people to be transferred to other facilities. The same facility also suffered from a major riot in 2010. Similarly, people detained at an MTC-run camp in Texas names Willacy rioted earlier this year, forcing that facility to close completely. The Kingman riots are focusing renewed attention on the Arizona legislature’s long, cozy relationship with the private prison industry.

Identifying Businesses That Profit From Prison Labor

May 19, 2015 Bob Sloan, www.dailykos.com Educate! Capitalism, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex

To demonstrate how difficult involvement in prison industries and the use of inmate labor is to identify, we'll begin with an investment firm involved in many of our 401(k) and retirement accounts. Fidelity Investments (Fidelity). This "financial investment" corporation is involved in holding the retirement and 401(k) accounts of millions of Americans. Many of the largest companies in our country offer Fidelity Investments as the sole source of retirement investing for their employees. Fidelity was previously identified as a funder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in an earlir Insourcing blog. ALEC is deeply invested in supporting Corrections Corporation of American (CCA) and Geo Group (Geo) - that are both corporate members of ALEC. ALEC has willingly accepted responsibility for enactment of laws authorizing and increasing the use of inmates in manufacturing of products as well as the housing of those inmates by private corporations such as CCA and Geo.

US Prisons So Bad They Hide Them From The World

March 14, 2015 RT, www.rt.com Educate! Human Rights, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex

The United Nations special rapporteur on torture lambasted the United States for continually obstructing his requests to visit prisons where 80,000 people sit in solitary confinement and to freely speak with inmates at Guantanamo Bay. Juan E. Méndez said Wednesday that he has attempted for more than two years to visit and check conditions at American prisons, including some of the nation’s most notorious maximum security facilities. He added that UN human rights officials have asked for access to Guantanamo prisoners since 2004. "On the federal level, I want to go to ADX in Florence, Colorado and to the Manhattan Correctional Center," Méndez said during a news briefing, Reuters reported. "Those are where people accused of terrorism are taken or where they serve their term."

Kathy Kelly’s View Of Prison From The Inside

March 11, 2015 Kathy Kelly, www.commondreams.org Resist! Criminal Justice, Law, Prison Industrial Complex

During my four stints in U.S. federal prisons, I've witnessed long-term inmates' unconquerably humane response when a newcomer arrives. An unscripted choreography occurs and the new prisoner finds that other women will help her through the trauma of adjustment to being locked up for many months or years. Halfway through a three-month sentence myself, I'm saddened to realize that I'll very likely adapt to an outside world for which these women, and prisoners throughout the U.S. prison system, are often completely invisible. U.S. state and federal prison populations have risen, since 1988, from 600,000 to an estimated 1,600,000 in 2012. This trend shows inhumane behavior on the part of lawmakers and myriads of employees who benefit from the so-called "criminal justice" system. But our entire society bears responsibility for what now can aptly be labeled a "prison-industrial complex."

‘We Must Love Each Other:’ Lessons In Struggle From Chicago

February 16, 2015 Prison Culture, www.usprisonculture.com Resist! Chicago, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, usa

The national protests catalyzed by the killing of Mike Brown in Ferguson last August continue even as many (including the mainstream media) have moved on. Some critics have suggested that the uprisings/rebellions are leaderless, lack concretedemands and/or are without clear strategy. Each of these critiques is easily refuted so I won’t concern myself with them here. In Chicago, many have used the energy and opening created by these ongoing protests to re-animate existing long-term anti-police violence campaigns. On Saturday afternoon, hundreds of people gathered at the Chicago Temple to show our love for police torture survivors on the day after Jon Burge was released from house arrest.

Support The Dallas 6

February 1, 2015 Support the Dallas 6, www.scidallas6.blogspot.com Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Prison Industrial Complex

At SCI Dallas (Pennsylvania), after a series of abuses at the hands of corrections officials, some prisoners housed in the solitary confinement unit decided they had enough and decided to stage a protest in response to the inhumane conditions and mistreatment of prisoners by covering their windows. Each prisoner involved in the protest is now collectively referred to as the Dallas 6. Pack the court at their next hearing on February 17. This trial pertains to an April 29, 2010 peaceful protest against illegal and inhumane and tortuous conditions created by the Department of Corrections’ prison guards in the “hole” at the State Correctional Institution at Dallas PA (SCI Dallas), including food starvation, mail destruction, beatings, medical neglect, use of a “torture chair” and deaths of various prisoners. After guards tortured fellow prisoner Isaac Sanchez in a “torture chair” overnight and threatened several Dallas 6 members with death, prisoners Andre Jacobs, Carrington Keys, Duane Peter, Derrick Stanley, and others decided that they didn’t want to suffer anymore. Covering their cell door windows with bedding, the prisoners demanded that the abuse stop, and requested access to their counselors, state police, the District Attorney and the Public Defenders’ Office.

Who Are The Prison Profiteers?

October 12, 2014 Rick Riley, www.atlantablackstar.com Educate! Labor Rights, Prison Industrial Complex

Prison labor in the United States is referred to as insourcing. Under the Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC), employers receive a tax credit of $2,400 for every work-release inmate they employ as a reward for hiring “risky target groups.” The workers are not only cheap labor, but they are considered easier to control. They also tend to be African-American males. Companies are free to avoid providing benefits like health insurance or sick days. They also don’t need to worry about unions, demands for vacation time, raises or family issues. Here are some of the biggest corporations to use such practices, but there are hundreds more...

We’re All Criminals And Outlaws

August 11, 2014 John W. Whitehead, www.activistpost.com Educate! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Police, Prison Industrial Complex

“Never in the civilised world have so many been locked up for so little.”—“Rough Justice in America,” The Economist Why are we seeing such an uptick in Americans being arrested for such absurd “violations” as letting their kids play at a park unsupervised, collecting rainwater and snow runoff on their own property, growing vegetables in their yard, and holding Bible studies in their living room? Mind you, we’re not talking tickets or fines or even warnings being issued to these so-called “lawbreakers.” We’re talking felony charges, handcuffs, police cars, mug shots, pat downs, jail cells and criminal records. Consider what happened to Nicole Gainey, the Florida mom who was arrested and charged with child neglect for allowing her 7-year-old son to visit a neighborhood playground located a half mile from their house. For the so-called “crime” of allowing her son to play at the park unsupervised, Gainey was interrogated, arrested and handcuffed in front of her son, and transported to the local jail where she was physically searched, fingerprinted, photographed and held for seven hours and then forced to pay almost $4000 in bond in order to return to her family.

Formerly Incarcerated People Lead Justice Movement

July 18, 2014 Chris Moore-Backman, www.truth-out.org Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Movement, Prison Industrial Complex

A half-century since the apex of the Civil Rights Movement, the quest for racial and economic justice continues unabated in the United States. Arguably the most powerful expression of that struggle today is the growing movement to end the racialized system of mass incarceration. At the forefront of leadership in the struggle to dismantle the US prison-industrial complex and to alleviate its negative consequences, stands the Formerly Incarcerated and Convicted People's Movement (FICPM). The FICPM is a nationwide coalition of formerly incarcerated men and women who are holding forth a radical vision for justice and transformation and who are putting that vision to work in towns and cities across the nation. This 29-minute radio documentary highlights the voices of nine members of the FICPM steering committee, men and women who have experienced the workings of the US criminal justice system from the inside out and who have dedicated themselves to the work of building a new and better future, not only for presently and formerly incarcerated people, but for the entire nation.

Shocking Photos From Inside Private Prison

June 14, 2014 George Lavender, www.inthesetimes.com Educate! Human Rights, Prison Industrial Complex, Private Prisons

A privately-run prison in Mississippi holding “seriously mentally ill” prisoners stands accused of being dirty, dangerous and corrupt. East Mississippi Correctional Facility, operated by Management and Training Corporation (MTC), is the subject of a lawsuit brought on behalf of several prisoners at the facility. After widespread criticism of conditions inside the same prison the previous operator, the GEO group, discontinued its contract with the state in 2012. At the time, the GEO group said that the prison was “"financially underperforming." A lawsuit first filed a year ago by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center alleged that “grossly inhumane conditions have cost many prisoners their health, and their limbs, their eyesight and even their lives.” Photos taken as part of a tour of the prison, showed “charred door frames, broken light fixtures and toilets, exposed electrical wires, and what advocates said were infected wounds on prisoners’ arms and legs,” according to the New York Times.

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