Prison Industrial Complex

Private Prisons Getting Rich By Abusing Immigrants

June 11, 2014 Hamilton Nolan, www.gawker.com Educate! Immigration, Prison Industrial Complex, Private Prisons

What sort of criminal is the target of most federal prosecutions? Mobsters? Bank robbers? No: illegal immigrants. And where do they go? To private prisons, for whom America's immigration system is a giant profit center. A new report from the ACLU takes a deep look at Criminal Alien Requirement [CAR] prisons—privately run federal prisons designed to house people convicted of breaking immigrations laws. You might be shocked to learn how big of a business this has become. From the report: Nationwide, more than half of all federal criminal prosecutions initiated in fiscal year 2013 were for unlawfully crossing the border into the United States—an act that has traditionally been treated as a civil offense resulting in deportation, rather than as a criminal act resulting in incarceration in a federal prison. This is dramatically changing who enters the federal prison system. The tipping point came in 2009, when more people entered federal prison for immigration offenses than for violent, weapons, and property offenses combined—and the number has continued to rise each year since. Thanks to very deliberate choices on the part of our legal system, more immigration violations now end with prison, rather than with deportation.

Immigration Reform Is Anti-Immigrant & Anti-Indigenous

June 5, 2014 Franco Habre and Mari Garza, www.facebook.com Educate! Congress, Immigrant Rights, Immigration, Indigenous Rights, Prison Industrial Complex

Comprehensive Immigration Reform is inherently anti-immigrant. It is presented as a "path to citizenship” and as a temporary solution to halting the incarceration/deportation of some migrants, but it is actually an attack in disguise. The reform package known as Senate Bill S.744 is a blatant plot to further immobilize, mold, and reduce the lives of migrants. Comprehensive Immigration Reform, otherwise known as “CIR”, is not about restoring the dignity and human rights of migrants. It is, however, an opportunity to reinforce white supremacy, the rule of law; racist/imperial borders; free trade and exploitable labor from the global south, and will further invisibilize the existence of Indigenous/First Nations peoples living in and around the so-called US/Mexico border, which at the time of its creation, bisected the homelands of four Indigenous tribes. The title of Senate Bill S.744 is, “The Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act”. The title makes it easy to infer the priority of the bill--border security. The policing/surveillance of the 1,933-mile colonial boundary called the US/Mexico border has grown exponentially in the last decade. Communities along this border have experienced the unrelenting infestation of increasingly abusive Border Patrol agents, aerial drones, in-land weaponized checkpoints during daily routines in their own neighborhoods, and increased freight traffic. In addition, despite the increased border security, people still die in the deserts of the border region, those migrating north from Mexico and Central America to flee economic and/or political injustice. This bill will continue to limit the freedom of movement for Indigenous peoples as the bill contains provisions for increased militarization of their homelands, and will thus continue shifting border crossers through the perilous deserts of Lipan Apache, Kickapoo, Tohono O'odham, and Yaqui homelands.

A Month of Resistance To Stop Mass Incarceration

May 14, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Acronym TV, Carl Dix, Dennis Trainor Jr, Juanita Young, Mass Incarceration, Prison Industrial Complex, Prison system

In this clip form Acronym TV’s full show on the call for a month of resistance To Mass Incarceration, Carl Dix and Juanita Young call on people to recognize the injustice of the system of Mass Incarceration and join the resistance to put an end to it. Watch the full episode here. Learn more about the Call For A Month Of Resistance To Mass Incarceration, Police Terror, Repression And The Criminalization Of A Generation here.

The Rise Of The American Corporate Security State

May 14, 2014 Jesselyn Radack, Berrett-Koehler, www.truth-out.org Educate! Corporatism, Criminal Justice and Prisons, Prison Industrial Complex

Daniel Ellsberg writes of The American Corporate Security State: "Edwards is an extraordinary writer who brilliantly captures the essence of what whistleblowers such as Snowden have sacrificed their careers and jeopardized their personal liberties to convey." Get the book by contributing to Truthout here. Foreword In the pages that follow, Bea Edwards shows the post-9/11 merger of corporate wealth and government power in the United States - beneath a thinning veneer of democracy. The book in your hands explains the way in which this private/public collaboration gives policy-making over to profit-seeking corporate interests, which then become a direct threat to our civil rights and our way of life. Peace and financial stability are the first casualties. Increasingly, well-connected corporate directors, with their privileged access to military resources and the national treasury, placed the country on a permanent war footing even as they dismantled government regulation of their businesses. They made a series of decisions and actions that the public never considered, debated, or approved, even indirectly.

This Mother’s Day, Remember Those Separated By Incarceration

May 12, 2014 Ayannis Banks Harris, www.truth-out.org Resist! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Prison Industrial Complex, Women's Rights

The majority of women in prison are domestic violence survivors. Most women in prison are also mothers. This Mother's Day, Monica Simpson of SisterSong discusses the case of Marissa Alexander in the context of reproductive justice and the criminalization of survivors and mothers of color. As Mother's Day sentiments begin flooding our social media timelines, with each poster opining that theirs is the greatest mother, we tend to forget how painful this day can be for some: mothers and children who have been separated for various heart-wrenching reasons, including incarceration. Oftentimes, these are mothers who found themselves in relationships where domestic violence proliferated, and - with few options - were forced to make decisions and sacrifices in the face of circumstances many will never know. According to the Correctional Association of New York, the overwhelming majority of women in prison are domestic violence survivors. It is no wonder these mothers frequently go unconsidered, since their collective voice is rarely amplified. Their situations rarely meet the mainstream public eye unless they are brought into another conversation, usually for the purpose of comparison, and often in negligible ways.

Why the Capitalist Elite Love Mass Incarceration

May 9, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Acronym TV, ATV 004, Carl Dix, Cornel West, Dennis Trainor Jr, Genocide, Juanita Young, Mass Incarceration, Month of Resistance, police brutality, police murder, police terror, Prison, Prison Industrial Complex, Race, US genocide

In this clip from Acronym TV’s full program, to discuss a planned month of Resistance To Mass Incarceration, Carl Dix breaks the war on drugs and the war on crime as proxy wars for the war on black, Latino, and oppressed people. This war, according to Dix, has been going on for decades amongst a backdrop of are the globalization of industry. With production moved from the United States to many other parts of the world where they can find workers that they can exploit much more viciously in much worse conditions and pay them much less than they could here generating more profit for the people who run this country, that leave generations of young people with no legitimate ways to survive and raise families, and Incarceration becomes the program for dealing with that.

With Mass Incarceration, U.S. is Guilty of a Slow Motion Genocide

May 8, 2014 Dennis Trainor Jr, www.PopularResistance.org Resistance Report Acronym TV, ATV 004, Carl Dix, Cornel West, Dennis Trainor Jr, Genocide, Juanita Young, Mass Incarceration, Month of Resistance, police brutality, police murder, police terror, Prison, Prison Industrial Complex, Race, US genocide

If this were happening anywhere else in the world, Americans would be justifiably horrified: 1 out of every 100 adults are living behind bars in the United States, with 1 in 31 in some sort of correctional control, including prison, jail, parole, and probation. The United States, with 5% of the world’s population, has 25% of the worlds prison population. Private prisons are operating around the country at the local and state level, and a majority of them include “occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full.”

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