The Prison Industrial Complex
by Dave Hodges - thecommonsenseshow.com
Only
the most vile, degenerate and immoral person could feel good about the
practice of for profit institutionalized slavery which dominated the
southern economy for 300 years. What is even more unacceptable is that
people who knew better, presumably Christian people with a conscience
did little or nothing while evil was triumphing.
Today,
America is witnessing the rebirth of institutionalized slavery within
its borders and it is indeed a predominantly racist practice with
Latinos and Blacks comprising the bulk of the new slaves. And we are
also witnessing racist rates of incarceration within our juvenile
justice system. This outrageous practice should be decried by every
media outlet in the country, but this problem is all but ignored by the
mainstream media (MSM). Why? Because the MSM is making money off of this
unholy practice.
A Growing Customer Base
There are over two million inmates in American prisons, or one in 743 people. Communist
China, which has five times the population of the United States, has
500,000 less inmates. The United States has only 5% of the world’s
population, but has 25% of the world’s prison population.
In
1972, the U.S. had less than 300,000 inmates. By 1990, the
incarceration rate had skyrocketed to one million and by today, the rate
has more than doubled again. Again, I ask why? Because there is very
big monied interests behind the growth industry of privatized prisons.
According to Charles Campbell, author of The Intolerable Hulks (2001),
the privatization of the prisons movement has its origins in the
Revolutionary War period. England began to put undesirables and
prisoners in prison ships. The U.S. fully embraced the use of private
prisons during the Reconstruction Period (1865-1876) in the south,
following the Civil War. Plantation owners and business owners needed
“free” replacements to compensate for the loss of their previous slave
laborers. In 1868, convict leases
were awarded to private business interests in order to bolster their
labor workforce and the practice continued until the early 20th century.
Today, this practice has been taken over by private corporate interests who are increasingly taking over our prison system and this unholy practice is no less exploitative than the slave labor abuses of the past and as in all forms of slavery, it is being fueled by profit.
Prison for Profit
The Corrections Corporation of America is the largest private prison operator in the United States. The CCA procured its first private prison in, ironically, 1984.Did you know that in many states, privatized prisons are guaranteed 90% occupancy rates by the government?
According to the California Prison Focus “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters
incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate
stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer
sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,”
says a study by the Progressive Labor
Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi
Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”
The Impetus Behind the Prison Industrial Complex
According
to public analysis from the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC), the
largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated.
Vanguard is a major player in controlling several media giants.
Vanguard is the third largest holder in Viacom and AOL Time Warner.
Vanguard is also the third largest holder in the GEO Group.
The GEO group, second only in size to the CCA with regard to privatized
prisons as it controls over 100 correctional facilities in the US, UK,
Australia and South Africa. In addition to CCA’s unwarranted control
over the media, the number-one holder of both Viacom and Time Warner is a
company called Blackrock.
Blackrock is the second largest holder in CCA, and the sixth largest
holder in the GEO Group in this never-ending incestuous relationship.
The
conclusion is inescapable. The people who control privatized prisons in
the United States are also heavily vested in the media. This is why you
don’t hear about the Prison Industrial Complex in the media and the
installation of institutionalized slavery in our privatized prisons goes
largely unreported in the media.
Vanguard
Windsor II Investment Fund owns CCA. However, CCA is a minute part of
the Vanguard Windsor II Funds. Vanguard Windsor is also invested in
corporate giants like JP Morgan, IBM Pfizer and Conoco. This accounts
for the Wall Street backing of privatized prisons and the subsequent
lobbying for longer and stricter prison sentences which fuels this
growth industry.
This makes the privatized prison industry a Wall Street backed growth opportunity.
Increasingly, the victims of this corrupt prison system are the youth of America.
Need A Job? Go to Prison, They’re Hiring
The Prison Industrial Complex is an impressive growth industry which is fueled by its Wall Street investors and leads to greatly overcrowded and inhumane prisons.According to the Left Business Observer, the highly privatized federal prison industry produces “100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Thus, we see a partial marriage between private prisons and our government’s wars of occupation. Namely, prison slave labor is being used to produce the weapons and supplies of war.
America
has found and antidote to the loss of manufacturing through the various
free trade agreements (i.e. NAFTA, CAFTA). Unfortunately, prison slave
labor is the solution. The Left Business Observer
identifies private corporate interests benefiting from prison slave
labor which includes the manufacturing of “93% of all paints and
paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home
appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture.”
Go to School and End Up In Prison
There are almost 75,000 juveniles
in prison and the rates are skyrocketing because of a phenomenon that
is now being referred to as the school to prison pipeline in which
schools are increasingly refusing to deal with even minor discipline
issues and are placing juveniles in police custody.
In 2010, there
were 5,574 school-based arrests of juveniles in the Chicago Public
School. The juvenile arrests accounted for about one of every five
juvenile arrests in the entire city of Chicago for all of 2010. The
incarceration rates for Chicago’s juveniles are in line with most other
metropolitan areas in the country. There is also a general trend of
disproportionate rates of minority contact within the juvenile justice
system, Black youth accounted for 74% of school-based arrests, and 22.5%
of youth arrested were Latino. The enrollment
of Chicago schools in was 45% Black and 41% Latino. These high arrest
rates for so many of our minority youth, create potential slave laborers
for the Prison Industrial Complex. Once a child is adjudicated in the
justice system, society usually witnesses a straight line right to
prison. These precious children are having their futures robbed from
them before they can even get started. What are they being arrested for?
The number one reason is fighting on school grounds.
As
a child, I had fights on school grounds, but nobody tried to send me to
prison. The number two reason why children end up in the justice system
is for possessing small amounts of marijuana.
As
a former mental health counselor, I am all too familiar with the
devastation brought on by use of drugs. However, marijuana is not one of
these drugs. If legalizing marijuana runs against everything you
believe in, how about decriminalizing. In other words, we still make the
drug illegal but nobody goes to prison for simple possession.
The
federal authorities, controlled by the corporations will never allow
such a common sense, liberalized approach to drug enforcement. The feds
even arrest medical marijuana dispensers and users. Why? Because Wall
Street wants prisoners to fill its increasingly privatized and
for-profit prison system. This is the major reason why America has 25%
of the world’s prison population.
Our
minority youth, in the inner cities, are being conditioned by the
system that going to prison is part of the life experience. And with
extremely high recidivism rates, prison slave labor will never have any
shortage of participants.
The
Prison Industrial Complex and their lobbyists are responsible for zero
tolerance policies, mandatory sentencing and the three strikes life
sentencing that is so prominent in many of our states and unless we
identify these abuses and stop them, it is only going to get worse.
These events are culminating to establish was has been dubbed as the School to Prison Pipeline
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