America's horrific prison system

One overlooked item from the the release of the executive summary of the Senate Torture Report in 2014 was that the Justice Department’s Bureau of Prisons visited a CIA black site in Afghanistan in 2002 to conduct an "assessment".

Senate investigators found that the bureau officers visited a detention site codenamed Cobalt north of Kabul in November 2002. That site — also known as the Salt Pit — has become infamous for the brutal torture inflicted on detainees there, including rectal exams conducted with “excessive force.” According to Senate investigators, the CIA’s own employees described the facility as “a dungeon,” where detainees “cowered” as interrogators opened the door and “looked like a dog that had been kenneled.” ...
While BOP officers toured the facility, interrogators tortured detainee Gul Rahman to death. A CIA team dragged Rahman out of his cell, beat him, immersed him in cold water, and put him in an isolation cell, where he died of hypothermia overnight.
According to the Senate report, the Bureau of Prison officers remarked that “there is nothing like this in the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” but nonetheless concluded that the prison was “sanitary,” and “not inhumane.”

As horrific as that sounds - and it sounds absolutely Orwellian - you may be inclined to draw the wrong conclusion from this item. That is, you might think that the BOP officials weren't doing their jobs.
The reality is that the Salt Pit isn't different enough from America's prison system.
In recent years, both Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International has condemned our domestic prison system for violating human rights.

Rape

Rape is about men sexually assualting women. Men being sexually assaulted is a rare event, right?
Well, that's only true as long as you exclude one part of America: the prison system.

 In January, prodded in part by outrage over a series of articles in the New York Review of Books, the Justice Department finally released an estimate of the prevalence of sexual abuse in penitentiaries. The reliance on filed complaints appeared to understate the problem. For 2008, for example, the government had previously tallied 935 confirmed instances of sexual abuse. After asking around, and performing some calculations, the Justice Department came up with a new number: 216,000. That's 216,000 victims, not instances. These victims are often assaulted multiple times over the course of the year. The Justice Department now seems to be saying that prison rape accounted for the majority of all rapes committed in the US in 2008, likely making the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women.

  The numbers are somewhat vague because the overwhelming percentage of prison rape never gets officially reported.
   Nearly 1 in 10 prisoners are raped or sexually assualted. More than 90% of prisoners are male.

   In comparison, RAINN, which also goes beyond officially reported statistics, said that there were 213,000 victims of sexual assault in the US that year. Around 90% of them women and girls.
   There may be some overlap between the two reports, but probably not much. The two surveys also use different definitions of "sexual assault".
   So is "the United States the first country in the history of the world to count more rapes for men than for women"? That's not exactly clear, but it is certainly possible.

   Whenever I run across a stat that says "first in history of the world", especialy one as horrific as this, I have to think there is a deep moral sickness in that society, and that society is America. At the very least it means that we've been undercounting sexual assaults in this country by around 100%. Why? Because prisoners "don't count" as people.

Gulag

  Growing up in the 70's and 80's the Soviet Union was considered evil. Proof of that evil was their cruel, overflowing gulag system. After all, how could a country be considered free when it imprisoned so many of their citizens, right?
   The United States could never be like that.

 Robertson drew attention to one of the great scandals of American life. "Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today," writes the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik. "Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America--more than 6 million--than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."

 At the peak of Stalin's tyranny, the Soviet Union imprisoned around 800 per 100,000. We have nearly reached the absolute worst levels of Soviet gulag tyranny, and surpassed post-Stalin levels.

 According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people.

But we only imprison bad people, not like the Soviet Union, right.

  Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses.
   Federal law hands out 10 year sentences for possession of 2 ounces of crack. In Texas,  possessing 4 ounces of marijuana can get you 2 years in prison. 13 states have "three strikes" laws, and they don't have to be violent felonies. In fact, other laws automatically kick misdemeanors up to felonies.
   The crime rate in America has been falling for decades, yet our prison population keeps climbing. The violent crime rate in America is just 1/3rd of the rate in 1994. The murder rate is the lowest in a century, yet most Americans believe the crime rate is getting worse.

 So if the crime rate has no relationship to the prison population, and that is specifically targets non-violent offenders, then how can our prison system be in any way different from the Stalinist gulag system?

Torture

   OK. So we allow a culture of rape in our prisons. We lock people up for long periods of time for victimless crimes. We even allow private prisons to be so understaffed and insecure that they get called Gladiator School.

  Given all that, we still don't have systematic, institutionalized torture in our prisons, right? Wrong.

 In the early nineteenth century, the U.S. led the world in a new practice of imprisoning people in solitary cells, without access to any human contact or stimulation, as a method of rehabilitation. The results were disastrous, as prisoners quickly became severely mentally disturbed. The practice was all but abandoned. Over a century later, it has made an unfortunate comeback. Instead of torturing prisoners with solitary confinement in dark and dirty underground holes, prisoners are now subjected to solitary confinement in well-lit, sterile boxes. The psychological repercussions are similar.

 At any one day, around 80,000 prisoners are in solitary confinement. Often this condition last for years. The United States isn't the only country that uses solitary confinement. It just uses it the most.

 “The United States is an outlier in the world both in terms of the numbers, and an outlier in the amount of time people spend in [isolation],” said Craig Haney, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It is not uncommon for people to spend 10 or more years in conditions that are severe.”

Death Penalty

The United States is in very select company. This company includes only the most totalitarian and oppressive nations on Earth.
We are #5 on that list.

No one else in the Western Hemisphere, or in Europe, or even in most of Africa, still executes people. But we do.
When you are on a list for killing people that dictators in Africa are embarrassed to be on, you really need to rethink your values.

The system of capital punishment is flawed at every single level without exception.

  In 2013 a record 87 people exonerated of crimes which they had been convicted.

The number of U.S. criminals exonerated in 2013 climbed to a record high of 87, many of which were cleared due to DNA evidence or proof that the police forced a confession, according to a report released on Tuesday.

 8% of the exonerations occurred in death penalty cases, a total of 144 since the 70's. Three of them have happened so far in 2014 after the victims spent 3 decades in prison.
  A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that at least 4.1 percent of people on death row could be wrongly convicted. The authors were careful to note that this was "a conservative estimate".

  Between 1989 and 2013 there has been 1,300 exonerations, only 28% of them because of DNA evidence.

The death penalty is also applied in a racist way.

 The current death row population is 41.7 percent black, 43.1 percent white and 12.6 percent Latino, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Since 1976, 34 percent of all inmates executed were black (while 56 percent were white).
    But in cases where someone was executed after being convicted of a murder, the victims were far, far more likely to be white (77 percent) than black (15 percent). “The influence of race on the death penalty is pervasive and corrosive,” Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Center, wrote in 1998.

 The flaws in the capital punishment system extend to the methods of execution.
Botched executions in Arizona and Oklahoma this year have garnered some needed attention, but the fact is that botched executions are the rule, not the exception.
   Prof. Michael L. Radelet, provides a list of 46 botched executions since the early 80's. They include victims catching fire, where the technicians couldn't find a vein to insert the needle, where the executioner was drunk, and where the room was sprayed with blood and deadly fluids.
   And that is not a complete list.

Then there is the problem of the lethal drug shortage.
  Drug companies don't want to be involved in the execution business or they might get shut out of the markets of civilized countries. This has led to experimentation by people who aren't doctors (because doctors want no part of the execution business as well for ethical reasons).
  In other words we have unqualified amateurs in charge of killing people who might be innocent.

  The good news is that the world is moving away from capital punishment.
18 states have abolished the death penalty, six of them in just the last six years.

The trend with states abolishing the death penalty is matched by a global trend.
The number of nations that has abolished the death penalty has gone from 16 in 1977 to 97 in 2012 and another 36 nations hadn't executed anyone in at least 10 years.
 It's ironic that more and more states are rejecting the idea of killing its own citizens, while at the same time the Obama Administration is debating whether to assassinate one.
Much like the marijuana decriminalization/legalization debate, we are seeing a nationwide political change that is growing despite the fact that neither the media, nor Washington, has supported it.
Violent revenge killings may sell in politics and Hollywood movies, but executing people in an obviously flawed system that is reserved almost exclusively for the poor isn't nearly so sexy.

Slave Labor

Stephanie Wilson was walking out of a ritzy Saks store in New York a few years ago with a brand-new, overpriced handbag, when she noticed a handwritten note in the bottom of the bag.

 The note, signed by Tohnain Emmanuel Njong, said: "We are ill-treated and work like slaves for 13 hours every day producing these bags in bulk in the prison factory."
   A passport-sized photo of a man in an orange jacket was also enclosed.
"I read the letter and I just shook," Ms Wilson told DNAinfo.

 This was no urban legend. The prison slave who wrote that letter was real. Fortunately he is no longer in prison.

Alertnet reports that almost 1 million prisoners are doing simple unskilled labor including “making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.”
   Prison labor is now directly competing with labor in the private sector.

 “‘We pay employees $9 on average,’ [a company executive] said. ‘They get full medical insurance, 401(k) plans and paid vacation. Yet we’re competing against a federal program that doesn’t pay any of that.’
    [The private prison] is not required to pay its workers minimum wage and instead pays inmates 23 cents to $1.15 an hour. It doesn’t have health insurance costs. It also doesn’t shell out federal, state or local taxes.”

While the prisoners won't get whipped for refusing to work, like the days of slavery, they can be punished in other ways, such as being denied priviledges.

 All this is good news for The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). They've seen their revenue increase by 500% in the last two decades.
CCA saw $1.7 Billion in revenue in 2011. The Geo Group saw $1.6 Billion in revenue. Together they have spent about $20 million in lobbying, and another $5 million in political donations.

"Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors."
  - Charles Bukowski

 However, the real trick is how the contracts are written with the 48 states they are offering their business.

 what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling...
   In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts [out of 62] included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full.

The dirty little secret of today's global capitalist system is that it continues to rely on slave labor.

  Most people think of slavery as something in the distant past. In fact, there are more slaves today than at any time in human history.

 Kevin Bales, lead research on "The Global Slavery Index," published by the Walk Free Foundation, says despite anti-slavery laws in almost all the world's countries, 29.8 million people are trapped today in debt bondage, slave labor, sex trafficking, forced labor or domestic servitude.

No amount of facts can shake the faith in privatization in the Republican Party.
Like any religion, facts are neither required nor welcome.

  When the Arizona Corrections Department did a mandated study in 2010 that showed paying private prisons to house inmates was more expensive than housing them in state-run prisons once medical costs are factored in, the Republican-controlled legislature repealed the law that required the Corrections Department to release studies comparing per inmate costs.
   High ranking Brewer Administration officials previously worked as private prison lobbyists.

  Last year in Michigan, two Temple University professors published a paper showing the state could save 58% by privatizing prisons. The Republican Governor used it to push through partial privatization.
  It later turned out that the study was funded by the private corrections industry.

Private Prison Bankers

It may be a surprise to a lot of people, but inmates have to pay for basic services even in public prisons.

Eddie needs money to pay for basic needs like toothpaste, visits to the doctor and winter clothes. In some states families of inmates pay for toilet paper, electricity, even room and board, as governments increasingly shift the costs of imprisonment from taxpayers to the families of inmates...
  Jails often deduct intake fees, medical co-pays or the cost of basic toiletries first, leaving the account with a negative balance. This prevents inmates from buying “optional” supplies like stationery or sturdier shoes until they have paid down the debt...
   Capt. William Lawhorn of the St. Lucie County sheriff’s office said that inmates are charged a $25 initial booking fee, $3 a day for “subsistence” and medical co-pays, all of which can result in a negative balance.

 Inmates in northern Illinois are not issues winter clothes, so the need for money is not a choice.
   Since prisoners often make as little as 12 cents an hour, that means that the impoverished families must come up with the cash. The families can't simply give the money directly to the inmates, but instead must go through the prison system. It's been this way for a long time.

  What is new is that the prisons are privatizing that system, and one of the largest of those systems is called JPay.

 Sending a money order through JPay takes too long, so Taylor started using her debit card to get him funds instead. To send Eddie $50, Taylor must pay $6.95 to JPay. Depending on how much she can afford to send, the fee can be as high as 35 percent. In other states, JPay’s fees approach 45 percent.
   After the fee, the state takes out another 15 percent of her money for court fees and a mandatory savings account, which Eddie will receive upon his release in 2021, minus the interest, which goes to the Department of Corrections.

 If 35% fees sound suspiciously like a payday loan, there is a good reason: JPay is affiliated with Bank of America, just one of the Wall Street banks that fund the Payday loan industry.
   It may sound like all these fees are punishing the criminals, but they are really just ripping off the impoverished families of inmates. To make payments families sometimes forego paying for medical care and utility bills.

Other smaller companies compete with JPay and change as little as 3.5% per transaction. So why does prisons contract with JPay instead when it charges 10 times the fees?

And for every payment it accepts in these states — prisoners typically receive about one per month — the company sends between 50 cents and $2.50 back to the prison operator.

 As for Bank of America, they got a 14-year, no-bid contract with the Treasury Department worth $76 million.
  In 2008 JP Morgan Chase got a non-competitive bid contract for their captive market.

The Wal-Mart Model

  One element of the prison system that people forget about is the halfway house. They are largely run by local nonprofit organizations. Normally you wouldn't think of a private prison, a business that exists to maximize the number of humans behind bars, being involved in rehabilitating prisoners.
  Well, it's a Brand New America.

 About a year after acquiring a smaller firm that operates halfway houses and other community corrections facilities, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) CEO Damon Hininger announced a few weeks ago that "[r]eentry programs and reducing recidivism are 100 percent aligned with our business model."

Wait, what?

High recidivism rates mean more people behind bars, and CCA depends on more and more incarceration to make its billions. Since when do they actually want people to do well after they get out, instead of being sucked back into the system?

 Halfway houses provide things like drug-treatment services, psychological help, educational services, and support. Guess what will get cut in the name of profits?
   Private prison corporations freely admit that their objective is more inmates.

 For example, in a 2010 Annual Report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company, stated: "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by . . . leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices . . . ."

Tales from the Police State

Stories like this should fall into the "absurd exception" category, if they didn't happen so often.

 Karen Holloway just spent six hours in a jail cell for failing to maintain her yard in accordance with the standards set by the city.
    The saga began last summer, when Holloway was sent a citation for her overgrown grass and shrubbery. Holloway, who works a full-time job and has two children living at home, a husband in school, and one family vehicle, admits the yard needed some attention but that it just wasn't feasible to do the work...
    Holloway feels this was all just too much, saying, "It's not right. Why would you put me in jail with child molesters and people who've done real crimes, because I haven't maintained my yard."

 This isn't the first case in South Carolina like this. Linda Ruggles couldn't pay $500 for loose shingles and spent six days in jail.

Here are some random examples:

Man arrested for "passive aggressively" stabbing a watermelon

New Jersey threatens to take 13-year old from father for “Non-Conforming Behavior”

  It's the schools where things have gotten completely out of hand. The Wall Street Journal had an excellent article about this.

     A generation ago, schoolchildren caught fighting in the corridors, sassing a teacher or skipping class might have ended up in detention. Today, there’s a good chance they will end up in police custody.

    In Texas, a student got a misdemeanor ticket for wearing too much perfume. In Wisconsin, a teen was charged with theft after sharing the chicken nuggets from a classmate’s meal—the classmate was on lunch assistance and sharing it meant the teen had violated the law, authorities said. In Florida, a student conducted a science experiment before the authorization of her teacher; when it went awry she received a felony weapons charge.

    Over the past 20 years, prompted by changing police tactics and a zero-tolerance attitude toward small crimes, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. Nearly one out of every three American adults are on file in the FBI’s master criminal database.

1 in 3! For a nation that has the nerve to call itself the "Land of the Free" that is batsh*t insanity!

 At school, talking back or disrupting class can be called disorderly conduct, and a fight can lead to assault and battery charges, said Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, a national civil-rights group examining discipline procedures around the country.
   “We’re not talking about criminal behavior,” said Texas State Sen. John Whitmire, the Democratic chair of the senate’s Criminal Justice Committee, who helped pass a new law last year that limits how police officers can ticket students. “I’m talking about school disciplinary issues, throwing an eraser, chewing gum, too much perfume, unbelievable violations” that were resulting in misdemeanor charges.

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Pricknick's picture

Then you can tell me about humanity.
If you're lucky, you'll get two weeks of training about how those who are incarcerated shall be treated as human. About how they have rights. About how they are allowed due process.
Then, you'll go into the general population where what you've been told only applies to those who are on outside looking in.
They call them "deplorables". They tell them how they're going to hell unless they conform. They give sub-standard treatment because "They're all innocent".
It was at a prison, that I made up my mind to retire as a registered nurse .
If you can't help, without repercussions, it's better to walk away.
I cried.
And I walked.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

Meteor Man's picture

In an informed and impassioned account, Ruth Wilson Gilmore examines this issue through statewide, rural, and urban perspectives to explain how the expansion developed from surpluses of finance capital, labor, land, and state capacity. Detailing crises that hit California’s economy with particular ferocity, she argues that defeats of radical struggles, weakening of labor, and shifting patterns of capital investment have been key conditions for prison growth.

The results—a vast and expensive prison system, a huge number of incarcerated young people of color, and the increase in punitive justice such as the “three strikes” law—pose profound and troubling questions for the future of California, the United States, and the world.

Golden Gulag provides a rich context for this complex dilemma, and at the same time challenges many cherished assumptions about who benefits and who suffers from the state’s commitment to prison expansion.

This book was published in 2007:

http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn=9780520242012

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

Meteor Man's picture

Those cages are an abomination. They train people that they're not human, that they're animals," said Terry Kupers, a psychiatrist in Berkeley who served as an expert witness on treatment of mentally ill prisoners in the case that forced California prisons to provide psychiatric care.

"It's bizarre, it has a Hannibal Lecter quality to it," said H. Steven Moffic, likening California's procedures to the measures used to contain an incarcerated serial killer in "The Silence of the Lambs."

http://articles.latimes.com/2010/dec/28/local/la-me-prison-20101228

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

Meteor Man's picture

The Lynwood Vikings were a white supremacist gang in Los Angeles, based at the Lynwood station of the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, whose members were deputy sheriffs in the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department (LASD).[1] Its members have included Paul Tanaka, deputy Sheriff and LASD second-in-command to Lee Baca.[1] After lawsuits repeatedly surfaced concerning the group's activities, the Vikings were described by federal judge Terry Hatter as a "neo-Nazi" gang engaged in racially motivated hostility.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynwood_Vikings

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"They'll say we're disturbing the peace, but there is no peace. What really bothers them is that we are disturbing the war." Howard Zinn

reflectionsv37's picture

Without doubt, the best I've ever read about our third world prison system. We, as a people, should be ashamed. Sadly, many in our country believe our prisoners are working out in gyms, watching television and shooting pool. Yet even as these issues have gained some attention, nothing has changed, nor is it likely to in the near future. It truly disgusts me!

When I read things like this, I can't help but think of one of the battle cries from our government leaders, "They hate us for our freedoms!" It's little wonder the rest of the world wants little to do with the American form of democracy.

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“Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.”
George W. Bush

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and one time after two inmates stomped the snot out of me I was sent to solitary confinement for 72 hours because I wouldn't say who beat me when the guards came, they guessed right but I wouldn't confirm it.
I hadn't been raped but this was just a stage on the way to it and I gotta say when I got shoved into the isolation cell which had no bunk no toilet (just a hole in the floor that could only be flushed by a guard outside the cell if/when they ever appeared) I really did feel some relief because there was no-one that could attack me there.
No joke it really was 'bread and water' and I could tell if it was morning or evening by what got shoved thru the slot in the door, if I got 2 cups of water and three slices of bread it was morning, four slices of bread and 3 cups of water meant it was evening, but I felt safe in there.
The law read that every 72 hours a person must be given a full meal and allowed to shower (fortunately alone) but when my 72 hours was up I was just removed and placed in a different 'tank' on a different floor and after only a week there I heard the story that I was alright I'd gone 'to the hole' and not snitched. You see, the trustees delivering meals to all the tanks are the jail's information pipeline so had I snitched it wouldn't matter where they moved me or what happened to the guys that attacked me, I would have a very good reason to fear my life was in danger.
Everyone knows that and even with certain wings in the jail that were 'protective units' for those that report people for assaulting them, in those places you weren't really much safer because at any time you could be moved ,usually with assurances that you new location would have no knowledge of your snitching. Maybe not when you got there but the pipeline would tell about any new inmates to a tank if there were a snitch.
So yeah reports of rape are like cockroaches, seeing (hearing of) a few of them means there are many many more.
One last thing, one guy my age in a cell down the way absolutely lost it, he started just sitting up in his bunk and howling like a dog at night until after a few nights of that someone beat shit out of him and then I never hear a sound from again, even in the day room around everyone else,he wouldn't speak.
That wasn't the last jail I was in as a teenager but what learned certainly helped me survive the others, a whole lot of others didn't .

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tapu dali's picture

I suppose 'rehabilitation' is not in their Dictionary.

Rather, 'prison is not meant to be pleasant'

Unlike in Norway:
http://content.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1989083,00.html

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There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.

It is a different situation, but the same story.
The strong prey upon the weak.
The authorities manage the violence for their own purposes.

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tapu dali's picture

the Criminal Code is national, not local.

In Canada, for example, there are two classes: "indictable offenses"~felonies and "summary conviction"~misdemeanors.

Indictable offenses are treated under the uniform criminal code of Canada, and are reserved for offenses requiring 2 years or or more in prison or penitentiary.

Summary offenses are treated in provincial court and carry a maximum penalty of two years less a day.

There are few "local" lockups, those are for e.g. traffic violations and the usual sentence is of the $300 or 30 days variety.

The idea that some hick county could send a person to jail for years with no Federal or provincial oversight is just not done.

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There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.

a torture system.

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tapu dali's picture

that mandates a fixed conviction rate is surely unconstitutional.

Please refer to my my post on Norway's prison system, infra.

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There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.

tapu dali's picture

throw the whole country into jail?

Nobody's innocent, after all.

Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.

[Cardinal Richelieu, disputed].

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There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.

Did repost this to Twitter and FB. Thanks gj.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Lookout's picture

Alabama is one of the worst.
http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2014/06/averting_its_eyes_alabama_lets....
Alabama's prison problems, here are three key facts that explain the situation:

We're in the worst shape in the United States. No state jams more prisoners into less space. We are at about double capacity. It can't stay that way. Federal courts forced California to free 30,000 inmates three years ago. The threat looms over Alabama.

It hasn't always been this way. Alabama's prison population climbed 840 percent since 1977, faster than most. Meanwhile, the state's population rose 23 percent.

The United States by far leads the world in locking up the greatest percentage of its own people. Alabama — third after Louisiana and Mississippi — helps lead the nation that leads the globe.

The result? Tutwiler Prison for Women. Inside Alabama's only prison for women, rampant sexual abuse is conspicuous as a national shame, yet it's only a smaller aspect of the larger crisis of an overcrowded, understaffed, violent penal system.

The national strike didn't make the corporate news. Don't tell the people...
Prisoners from across the United States have just released this call to action for a nationally coordinated prisoner workstoppage against prison slavery to take place on September 9th, 2016.
https://prisonwatchnetwork.org/2016/04/04/announcement-of-nationally-coo...
30 min story
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RjCqn_F9ck]

Free Alabama movement
https://freealabamamovement.wordpress.com/tag/kinetic-justice-amun/

Those who stand up are punished harshly. The leader of free Alabama, Kinetic justice, has been transferred to a new prison, and put into solitary with no water.
http://www.theroot.com/articles/news/2016/11/alabama-department-of-corre...
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/02/us/alabama-inmate-strike-kinetic-justice/i...

Thanks for addressing this national shame gjohn!

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“Until justice rolls down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

gulfgal98's picture

This is one of the most comprehensive essays or articles I have ever read concerning the national shame that is our prison system here in the United States. Thank you for all the work you put into this excellent essay.

If nothing else, our system of incarceration and the lack of real criminal justice speaks loudly as to how barbaric we are as a society and how close our nation is to third world status.

edited for typo

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Although the opening article was new. It inspired me to put these altogether.

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Citizen Of Earth's picture

Corrections Corporations of America, which has renamed itself CoreCivic, and GEO Group had suffered some of their biggest declines over the last several months.

But on Wednesday, both stocks recouped some of those losses. CoreCivic gained 43 percent, while GEO climbed more than 21 percent.
http://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/09/prison-stocks-are-flying-on-trump-victory...

Investors expect them to Benefit Bigly by Trumps promise to detain/deport millions of immmigrants. And from the free slave labor while they are sitting in jail awaiting deportation. Hey, what's the rush. Keep em for slaves for a while. /snark

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

tapu dali's picture

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There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.

blazinAZ's picture

I move more and more toward advocating for a complete abolition of our "justice" system, the military, prisons, and all policing. I don't have the answers for how we as a society deal with the most aggressive and violent among us, but clearly what we're doing is not working.

I also feel that any system of government or economics -- capitalism -- that can only survive if there is slave labor of some kind (chattel slavery, indentured servitude, prison slave labor) is fundamentally flawed and corrupt. The empire must fall.

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There is no justice in America, but it is the fight for justice that sustains you.
--Amiri Baraka

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tapu dali's picture

many other countries in the world where "prison is not meant to be pleasant", their inmates would no doubt give anything to be in a relatively safe and comfortable American lockup.

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There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know.