Blogging is hard work, if it is to be done right. What is required for an intelligent blog is strong subject matter, well-thought, well-researched and well-presented. This takes time.
Unfortunately, I don't have that kind of time right now, and won't have that kind of time for the next several weeks with the possible exception of the end of this month and maybe Labor Day weekend. So unfortunately, posting will be a bit light while I finish a graduate school project. (Also, I gotta work and pay my bills!)
However, I can offer you some reposts of essays and interviews I have done over the last few years. If you haven't seen them before, I hope you enjoy them. Also, I've noticed a number of visits from people outside the U.S. To those of you from Russia, China, Kenya, Indonesia, Thailand, India, and Britain, a big "Thank You" for your readership.
And now for this week's re-post, I have selected, "An Inmate's View of Federal Prison." The subject matter, while grim, should be informative.
Showing posts with label prison-industrial complex. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prison-industrial complex. Show all posts
Saturday, August 8, 2015
Friday, July 3, 2015
What Are Police Made Of?
The ongoing unraveling of American society is like a play written by a criminally insane person. As such, it can provoke strong emotions in those who are forced to suffer through it. Yet one way of coping is to look at it as a play, and at yourself, the observer or unwilling participant, as an entertainment critic of sorts. Then it becomes possible to cultivate the detachment necessary for a calm, objective critique of the play, the various actors, and the roles they fill. Such a perspective can also guide you in exploring ways to escape the part that has been forced upon you.
This week's post will examine the role of the police in present-day American society, and will give you some idea of how likely you are to be cast as a bad guy by them, try as you might to fill another role. Such information might be of interest to readers, since as of today, July 3, 2015, police in the United States have killed 558 people this year, not to mention those who have been non-fatally maimed or injured by police, among whom is Walter William DeLeon, a middle-aged construction worker who was shot and critically injured by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department last month when he waved a towel at a patrol car in order to flag it down. This is, of course, in addition to the numerous well-publicized stories of police murders of unarmed citizens, especially citizens of color, in 2014 and earlier, and the ongoing police terrorizing of unarmed citizens in places like McKinney, Texas.
So what, exactly, are police made of these days? What kind of person is it who gravitates toward police work? What kind of job do policemen have? What sort of person does the typical police job produce? In his book, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, M. Scott Peck described the link between characteristics of individual humans and characteristics of groups formed by individual humans. He wrote, "For many years it has seemed to me that human groups tend to behave in much the same ways as human individuals - except at a level that is more primitive and immature than one might expect. Why this is so - why the behavior of groups is strikingly immature - why they are, from a psychological standpoint, less than the sum of their parts - is a question beyond my capacity to answer..." My post today will not attempt to answer that question definitively, but will hopefully illuminate some key elements of police as a group, and of what is known as "police culture" here in the U.S.
What kind of person is the typical police recruit? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask. In Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, authors Skolnick and Fyfe write, "However skeptically police may be viewed by outsiders, police often identify themselves as a moral force, protecting innocent and productive members of the public...The typical police recruit is white, physically fit and agile, of the lower-middle or working class, male, in his twenties, and with some college education..." However, what attracts potential recruits are often advertisements and videos which increasingly glamorize legal opportunities to use lethal violence rather than serving as a "moral force" in one's community. (See this also, where a former cop says, "...if anyone says they didn't get into law enforcement to drive a police car fast, with the lights and sirens, and come screeching into a parking lot sideways and jump out and tackle a guy, they're lying to you...")
When a person becomes a cadet, what kind of training do they receive? Again, the answer depends on whom you ask, but it seems clear that mediation and nonviolent conflict resolution isn't very high on the list of things taught. In fact, Dallas Police Chief David Brown publicly admitted that "Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest. They have a 'don't retreat' mentality. They feel like they're warriors and they can't back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is." By contrast, Dale Brown, who is not a policeman, has founded the very successful Threat Management Center in Detroit, whose specialty is "...tactical psychology, tactical law and tactical skills, to teach communities and corporations how to properly manage human threats and create non-violent outcomes..." (Emphasis added). The Threat Management Center has been in operation since 1995, and boasts an impressive string of accomplishments.
What kind of person does a typical cadet become once he or she is hired to a police force? Here again, it depends on whom you ask. However, there is a large number of independent studies of various issues among police officers, issues which would be called crimes or serious dysfunction if they were observed among the general population. For instance, at least 25 percent of police officers are alcoholics. (See this and this also.) Of these, a substantial number drive while intoxicated and on duty. Between 25 and 40 percent of police officers are guilty of at least one incident of domestic violence (OIDV) against their spouses or children. (See this, this, this and this.) In many cases, the domestic violence is ongoing. Here is a link describing officer-perpetrated domestic violence from the point of view of the victims and their children. Please read it carefully and note how difficult it is for women abused by police husbands to do anything about their situation. Note also how right-wing politicians have recently made things more difficult for the victims. Lastly, illicit drug use other than alcohol is a growing problem among law enforcement officers - especially the use of performance-enhancing athletic drugs like steroids. (See this, this, this, and this.) No comprehensive, liar-proof studies have yet been undertaken to quantify steroid use among cops, but there is a flood of anecdotal evidence. And some authorities have proposed a link between the use of performance-enhancing drugs and aggression or unprovoked rage (AKA "'roid rage"). (Remember that the next time Officer Friendly pulls you over.) Note also the widespread accounts of sexual assaults commited by police. (See this, this and this.)
The police response to the exposure of such symptoms of dysfunction falls into one of two categories. First, there's the attempt to excuse such behavior by protesting that police work is inherently very dangerous, and that police are just reacting to the stress that naturally comes with the job. However, a look at actual statistics reveals a very different story. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund Preliminary 2014 Law Enforcement Officer Fatalities Report, there were 126 law enforcement fatalities in the United States in 2014. Of these, 62 fatalities were the direct result of "felonious incidents," while traffic accidents claimed 49 officers. 27 officers died of other causes, including 24 heart attack deaths. However, there are now more than 900,000 sworn police officers in the U.S. You do the math, but when I did, I found that a police officer has less than one chance in 10,000 of being killed by a criminal in the U.S. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not even list police work among the occupations with the highest fatal work injury rates in 2013. So we can't blame dysfunctional policing on the "inherently dangerous and stressful" nature of police work, because there really isn't much danger - especially if a police officer is not a hothead or loose cannon.
The second response to dysfunction is to try to cover it up, to sweep things under a fraternal rug of police secrecy. This is an inherent part of police culture. Many of the links I have cited, including especially the links to scholarly PDF's, document the ways in which secretive, fraternal police culture is a huge impediment to dealing with problems like substance abuse and domestic violence among the police. The very culture which is created to shield police from the repercussions of their actual mission prevent police from being held to account when they harm people outside of their actual mission. The very mindset created to enable police to carry out their actual mission in American society is so powerful that it can't be easily turned off or toned down by police once they are off duty.
What is the actual mission of American police? Again, I will cite M. Scott Peck and People of the Lie. In the chapter titled, "My Lai: An Examination of Group Evil," Peck describes the American soldiers who carried out the 1968 My Lai massacre as a self-selected group of "specialists". They were self-selected in that they were all in Vietnam during a time in which Americans who fought in the Vietnam war were all volunteers. My Lai happened in 1968, over a year and a half before President Nixon instituted the draft in order to supply fresh American combatants to Vietnam. They were specialized in their training and mission, which was to kill and destroy Vietnamese people who did not want America in Vietnam. They were under stress, being in a foreign country many of whose citizens were at best ambivalent toward American involvement, and finding themselves part of a larger military machine which was beginning to suffer serious failures as a result of failing to grasp the realities of the situation on the ground in Vietnam in 1968. Their specialization had been deliberately engineered by their superiors to make them cold-bloodedly destructive, to make them regress to childish reliance on the approval of those superiors, and to insulate them from seeing the larger picture of what they were doing to those human beings targeted as "the enemy" by their superiors.
In this, these soldiers were very much like the typical members of a police force, of whom Peck wrote, "One does not become a policeman by accident. It is only because particular kinds of people want to become policemen that they apply for the job in the first place. A young man of lower-middle-class origins who is both aggressive and conventional, for instance, would be quite likely to seek a position on the force..." Of such specialized groups as volunteer soldiers and police officers, Peck writes, "From these examples, we can discern three general principles...First, the specialized group inevitably develops a group character that is self-reinforcing. Second, specialized groups are...prone to narcissism...Finally, the society at large...employs specific types of people to perform its specialized roles..." One of those specialized roles is to attack those who are different from the idealized image of society at large which is promoted by the leaders of society. For those who differ from that idealized image pose an intolerable threat to that image by their mere existence. Peck says, "Evil ...[is] the use of political power to destroy others for the purpose of defending or preserving one's sick self." That is why police in McKinney, Texas threatened to use deadly force against a pool party of African-American pre-adolescent girls last month. That is why one newly graduated police cadet said that he would have shot the girls had he been present. But if you are reading this and you are not Black or Latino, do you think you're safe? Consider the 70-year old White woman who was slammed face-first into the ground by a Florida policeman. The police in America have turned into one of the outworkings of the damnation of this country.
This week's post will examine the role of the police in present-day American society, and will give you some idea of how likely you are to be cast as a bad guy by them, try as you might to fill another role. Such information might be of interest to readers, since as of today, July 3, 2015, police in the United States have killed 558 people this year, not to mention those who have been non-fatally maimed or injured by police, among whom is Walter William DeLeon, a middle-aged construction worker who was shot and critically injured by officers of the Los Angeles Police Department last month when he waved a towel at a patrol car in order to flag it down. This is, of course, in addition to the numerous well-publicized stories of police murders of unarmed citizens, especially citizens of color, in 2014 and earlier, and the ongoing police terrorizing of unarmed citizens in places like McKinney, Texas.
So what, exactly, are police made of these days? What kind of person is it who gravitates toward police work? What kind of job do policemen have? What sort of person does the typical police job produce? In his book, People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, M. Scott Peck described the link between characteristics of individual humans and characteristics of groups formed by individual humans. He wrote, "For many years it has seemed to me that human groups tend to behave in much the same ways as human individuals - except at a level that is more primitive and immature than one might expect. Why this is so - why the behavior of groups is strikingly immature - why they are, from a psychological standpoint, less than the sum of their parts - is a question beyond my capacity to answer..." My post today will not attempt to answer that question definitively, but will hopefully illuminate some key elements of police as a group, and of what is known as "police culture" here in the U.S.
What kind of person is the typical police recruit? The answer to that question depends on whom you ask. In Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force, authors Skolnick and Fyfe write, "However skeptically police may be viewed by outsiders, police often identify themselves as a moral force, protecting innocent and productive members of the public...The typical police recruit is white, physically fit and agile, of the lower-middle or working class, male, in his twenties, and with some college education..." However, what attracts potential recruits are often advertisements and videos which increasingly glamorize legal opportunities to use lethal violence rather than serving as a "moral force" in one's community. (See this also, where a former cop says, "...if anyone says they didn't get into law enforcement to drive a police car fast, with the lights and sirens, and come screeching into a parking lot sideways and jump out and tackle a guy, they're lying to you...")
When a person becomes a cadet, what kind of training do they receive? Again, the answer depends on whom you ask, but it seems clear that mediation and nonviolent conflict resolution isn't very high on the list of things taught. In fact, Dallas Police Chief David Brown publicly admitted that "Sometimes it seems like our young officers want to get into an athletic event with people they want to arrest. They have a 'don't retreat' mentality. They feel like they're warriors and they can't back down when someone is running from them, no matter how minor the underlying crime is." By contrast, Dale Brown, who is not a policeman, has founded the very successful Threat Management Center in Detroit, whose specialty is "...tactical psychology, tactical law and tactical skills, to teach communities and corporations how to properly manage human threats and create non-violent outcomes..." (Emphasis added). The Threat Management Center has been in operation since 1995, and boasts an impressive string of accomplishments.
What kind of person does a typical cadet become once he or she is hired to a police force? Here again, it depends on whom you ask. However, there is a large number of independent studies of various issues among police officers, issues which would be called crimes or serious dysfunction if they were observed among the general population. For instance, at least 25 percent of police officers are alcoholics. (See this and this also.) Of these, a substantial number drive while intoxicated and on duty. Between 25 and 40 percent of police officers are guilty of at least one incident of domestic violence (OIDV) against their spouses or children. (See this, this, this and this.) In many cases, the domestic violence is ongoing. Here is a link describing officer-perpetrated domestic violence from the point of view of the victims and their children. Please read it carefully and note how difficult it is for women abused by police husbands to do anything about their situation. Note also how right-wing politicians have recently made things more difficult for the victims. Lastly, illicit drug use other than alcohol is a growing problem among law enforcement officers - especially the use of performance-enhancing athletic drugs like steroids. (See this, this, this, and this.) No comprehensive, liar-proof studies have yet been undertaken to quantify steroid use among cops, but there is a flood of anecdotal evidence. And some authorities have proposed a link between the use of performance-enhancing drugs and aggression or unprovoked rage (AKA "'roid rage"). (Remember that the next time Officer Friendly pulls you over.) Note also the widespread accounts of sexual assaults commited by police. (See this, this and this.)
The police response to the exposure of such symptoms of dysfunction falls into one of two categories. First, there's the attempt to excuse such behavior by protesting that police work is inherently very dangerous, and that police are just reacting to the stress that naturally comes with the job. However, a look at actual statistics reveals a very different story. According to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund Preliminary 2014 Law Enforcement Officer Fatalities Report, there were 126 law enforcement fatalities in the United States in 2014. Of these, 62 fatalities were the direct result of "felonious incidents," while traffic accidents claimed 49 officers. 27 officers died of other causes, including 24 heart attack deaths. However, there are now more than 900,000 sworn police officers in the U.S. You do the math, but when I did, I found that a police officer has less than one chance in 10,000 of being killed by a criminal in the U.S. Indeed, the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not even list police work among the occupations with the highest fatal work injury rates in 2013. So we can't blame dysfunctional policing on the "inherently dangerous and stressful" nature of police work, because there really isn't much danger - especially if a police officer is not a hothead or loose cannon.
The second response to dysfunction is to try to cover it up, to sweep things under a fraternal rug of police secrecy. This is an inherent part of police culture. Many of the links I have cited, including especially the links to scholarly PDF's, document the ways in which secretive, fraternal police culture is a huge impediment to dealing with problems like substance abuse and domestic violence among the police. The very culture which is created to shield police from the repercussions of their actual mission prevent police from being held to account when they harm people outside of their actual mission. The very mindset created to enable police to carry out their actual mission in American society is so powerful that it can't be easily turned off or toned down by police once they are off duty.
What is the actual mission of American police? Again, I will cite M. Scott Peck and People of the Lie. In the chapter titled, "My Lai: An Examination of Group Evil," Peck describes the American soldiers who carried out the 1968 My Lai massacre as a self-selected group of "specialists". They were self-selected in that they were all in Vietnam during a time in which Americans who fought in the Vietnam war were all volunteers. My Lai happened in 1968, over a year and a half before President Nixon instituted the draft in order to supply fresh American combatants to Vietnam. They were specialized in their training and mission, which was to kill and destroy Vietnamese people who did not want America in Vietnam. They were under stress, being in a foreign country many of whose citizens were at best ambivalent toward American involvement, and finding themselves part of a larger military machine which was beginning to suffer serious failures as a result of failing to grasp the realities of the situation on the ground in Vietnam in 1968. Their specialization had been deliberately engineered by their superiors to make them cold-bloodedly destructive, to make them regress to childish reliance on the approval of those superiors, and to insulate them from seeing the larger picture of what they were doing to those human beings targeted as "the enemy" by their superiors.
In this, these soldiers were very much like the typical members of a police force, of whom Peck wrote, "One does not become a policeman by accident. It is only because particular kinds of people want to become policemen that they apply for the job in the first place. A young man of lower-middle-class origins who is both aggressive and conventional, for instance, would be quite likely to seek a position on the force..." Of such specialized groups as volunteer soldiers and police officers, Peck writes, "From these examples, we can discern three general principles...First, the specialized group inevitably develops a group character that is self-reinforcing. Second, specialized groups are...prone to narcissism...Finally, the society at large...employs specific types of people to perform its specialized roles..." One of those specialized roles is to attack those who are different from the idealized image of society at large which is promoted by the leaders of society. For those who differ from that idealized image pose an intolerable threat to that image by their mere existence. Peck says, "Evil ...[is] the use of political power to destroy others for the purpose of defending or preserving one's sick self." That is why police in McKinney, Texas threatened to use deadly force against a pool party of African-American pre-adolescent girls last month. That is why one newly graduated police cadet said that he would have shot the girls had he been present. But if you are reading this and you are not Black or Latino, do you think you're safe? Consider the 70-year old White woman who was slammed face-first into the ground by a Florida policeman. The police in America have turned into one of the outworkings of the damnation of this country.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
The Sheep Dogs Of Dissent
I was driving home from work this evening (only a week left to go before I won't have to do that again!), and found myself stuck in a long, slow freeway traffic jam. I wanted to find out why the freeway was so slow, so I turned on the radio, hoping to hear some traffic news from KPOJ.
It wasn't quite the time for news, traffic and weather; like most news/talk stations nowadays, they only give you a smidgeon of news, and that only happens once every half hour. What I got instead was a bit of impassioned commentary from Randi Rhodes regarding the privatization of prisons in the United States. She also played an audio clip of the mother of a young teen sentenced to a juvenile camp by a Pennsylvania judge who was convicted this past February of accepting kickbacks from a private prison corporation operating in the state. Evidently the young teen killed himself as a result of his imprisonment, and so at the sentencing of the former judge, the young man's mother delivered a furious rant when she found out that the judge would remain free until his sentencing.
I found that I couldn't stand to listen to more than three minutes of this, and I shut the radio off and delivered a little soliloquy of my own. I was mad, all right – but for reasons which might not have occurred to Randi Rhodes.
It's not that I'm pleased by the commercialization and corruption of the American criminal justice system. Indeed, I've known about it for a few years now, as I wrote in posts such as “Money and Filthy Hands,” and “The Replacement of Petroleum Slaves,” to name a few. The American criminal justice system is a disgraceful evil whose purpose is increasingly to serve as yet another way of funneling the wealth and labor of poor people into the hands of the rich. Part of what made Randi Rhodes' show so hard to listen to is that it is painful to hear of the miscarriages of justice that are still going on in this country.
Now the fact that rich people profit from locking up youth without cause is nothing new. It was only recently elevated to national attention because of the increasing lockups of non-minority youth. But the minority community (in particular, the Black and Latino communities) have always had to deal with this. (See Color Of Justice and Justice for Some, for instance.) It seems, however, that problems of injustice don't really start to exist until they begin to be experienced by mainstream, apple-pie America. And that I find irritating.
But here's a yet more irritating thing. I admit that I didn't finish listening to Randi Rhodes, but I think I can guess how her commentary was structured: first, to inflame passion and anger among certain listeners with so-called “progressive” political views, then to make impassioned appeals to “work to try to change the system!” Why “work to change the system”? “Because we're all in this together, and we're under the system, so we gotta change it to make the system work better and more fairly!”
The truth is that the “system” under which all but the richest Americans live and operate can no longer be changed by ordinary people of small means. It is evil, predatory, sociopathic and unfair precisely because its masters are evil, predatory, sociopathic and unfair. Its masters are also very powerful. To me, it really seems that there's nothing we can do about this short of disengaging ourselves from the system.
This disengagement may seem like a small act, but it is the one thing we can do to weaken the system. Don't like American public education? Disengage from it. Don't like American for-profit health care? Learn to take care of yourself. Don't like the way most of us get our food? Create alternative means of feeding yourself. But don't tell the world what you're up to. Disengagement may well be the most effective act of sabotage any individual can commit.
You won't find that sort of solution discussed on KPOJ, “Portland's only progressive talk station!” If the KPOJ talking heads seriously discussed how people can disengage themselves from the predatory and corrupt systems under which they now live, Clear Channel would instantly pull the plug. Instead, we get impassioned talk designed to inflame us to go out and vote, or to support one political candidate over another, or "be ethical consumers," or in any of a number of other ways to continue to lend our support to a corrupt and failing system. And every fifteen minutes, there is a station break into which five or six commercials are jammed, telling us to go out and consume even more. Those talking heads who are good at what they do are able to keep their audiences hooked so that they soak up everything, including the commercials.
Meanwhile, the masters of commercialized, faux-progressive mass media in this country do their best to shift their audience base ever so slightly to the right, day by day. How many KPOJ talking heads supported NATO intervention in Libya? Why did Rachel Maddow ask a couple of years ago what the United States should be doing to make the governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan “behave”? It seems sometimes that the main job of the faux-progressives is to turn genuine outrage into ineffectual channels that pose no threat to their real masters.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
An Inmate's View Of Federal Prison
As I have written before, we live and function in an official economy which is run by a very small group of very rich people. Their goal is the continued growth of their profits; yet because of emerging constraints on the earth's natural resources, the rich can no longer grow their profits by unlimited industrial expansion. Increasingly, the only way for the rich to maintain or grow their profits is by robbing the poor.
One way of robbing the poor is by depriving them of their liberty and turning them into extremely cheap slave labor. I discussed this in an earlier post, The Replacement of Petroleum Slaves, which described how the state and Federal prison systems of the United States were being turned into a pool of slave labor with the potential to replace cheap foreign labor for industry in the event of a breakdown of globalism. In this present post, I will expand a bit on that theme, based on some confirming information I received relatively recently.
Several weeks ago I was introduced to a person who had been incarcerated in a Federal prison in the American Southwest around decade ago. I had heard something of his background before we met, and I also had an extensive body of knowledge regarding the prison-industrial complex in various American state prison systems. I wanted to see if my conclusions also applied to the Federal system, so we did an interview.
He told me that there is most definitely a “prison industry” at the Federal level, named UNICOR, also known as Federal Prison Industries. UNICOR is a “wholly owned government corporation created in 1934,” shortly after the creation of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. (Source: Federal Prison Industries, Inc. - Wikipedia) UNICOR produces goods and services from the labor of inmates of the United States Federal Bureau of Prisons. According to Federal law, UNICOR is ostensibly restricted to selling its products and services to Federal government agencies, and cannot sell to the commercial market. (More on that later.)
UNICOR produces many products, including clothing, textiles, electronics, and office furniture. My former inmate acquaintance mentioned that UNICOR's labor rates were cheaper than Chinese labor, and said that back when he was in prison, an inmate earned between 11 cents and 26 cents an hour. He also informed me that UNICOR is publicly traded – thus capable of being influenced by the profit motive.
This profit motive, and the opportunity to use the Federal prison system as an instrument of private profit, has had a predictable effect: Federal prisons try as hard as possible to find excuses to keep inmates imprisoned for as long as possible, since all able-bodied inmates who are not security risks are required to work in prison, either for UNICOR or to support prison operations. Also, according to this former inmate, many people sent to Federal prison are framed, including a highly disproportionate number of minorities. Those who are framed are easy for the other inmates to spot, because in conversation it soon becomes obvious that these people do not know how to commit a crime. Native Americans accused of crimes are predominantly judged under Federal law which is much harsher than state laws, and leads to much harsher sentences.
According to my interviewee, prisoners working for UNICOR are not provided with many of the worker safeguards common in private industry. He told me of times where he and other inmates had to dispose of or recycle old electric power transformers containing PCB's, without any protective clothing or safety measures. (By the way, this statement about inadequate worker safety is corroborated by other sources, such as “UNICOR Continues To Use Prisoners To Recycle Electronics,” The Real Cost Of Prisons Weblog, 20 April 2009; and “Prisoners and Workers Poisoned By Prison Recycling at UNICOR Are Suing,” The Real Cost Of Prisons Weblog, 11 August 2009.)
As for prison culture, my interviewee told me that gangs are largely in control at the various prison units, except for the maximum security units. However, the prison guards regularly try to instigate trouble between prison gangs. We discussed the impact of prison culture on the broader American culture. At this point, the interviewee was joined by his spouse, who talked about how with many people from minority neighborhoods being singled out for lockup, the culture and families in these neighborhoods were being ruined. Children in these neighborhoods were now being conditioned to grow up as criminals, due to corrupt and excessive application of police “enforcement” in the places where these children live.
This led to a discussion of ways in which minority culture could be repaired in the United States. My interviewee had two immediate suggestions: first, get rid of mandatory sentencing laws for non-violent crimes; and second, stop the American “war on drugs” as it is now being waged. The interviewee's spouse had suggestions for how concerned and caring volunteers could go into minority neighborhoods to provide exposure to opportunities for learning that would not otherwise be available.
For me, this interview was yet another confirmation of the deliberate breaking of poor neighborhoods and minority communities by the dominant holders of power and wealth in the U.S. It was also a confirmation of the corroding, corrupting nature and effect of growth capitalism. Truly, “the love of money is root of all the evils.” (1 Timothy 6:10) In research that I did following this interview, I found more information on UNICOR's status as a publicly traded company, as well as the efforts of state prison systems to imitate UNICOR. Here are some links:
““Private Prison Industry” Experiences Boom,” Leslie Berenstein, Copley News Service, 11 May 2008. This describes the public trading of UNICOR stock, among other things.
“Dr Boyce: How Companies Make Money off Prisoners,” BLACKVOICES, 28 July 2009.
“SLAVERY ON THE NEW PLANTATION - Hugo Pinell,” Kiilu Nyasha, December 2006.
“UNICOR VI (GSB: DCDave's Column),” a page of footnotes accompanying a longer article on UNICOR. Note 6 is troubling, as it hints that UNICOR may be selling its goods to private parties in addition to the Federal Government, in violation of Federal law.
“Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex: Class warfare from above,” Michael Parenti, Covert Action Quarterly, 29 August 2001. This article gives a slightly different view of the possible motives behind the recent expansion of the prison-industrial complex.
“Workin' for the Man,” Nora Callahan, The November Coalition
One last note. We live in a time of severe economic distress, with falling tax revenues at the State and Federal levels, and states that are unable to balance their budgets. Yet you can just bet that next year, in states where the private prison industry or the prison-industrial complex has gained a foothold, there will be lobbyists pushing for an expansion of harsh mandatory sentencing laws for non-violent crimes – even though there's no longer any money to enforce such laws. I think of the mess these people have already made in California, or of the mess that people like Bill Sizemore and Kevin Mannix would like to make in Oregon.
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
California Prison Reform Opportunity
Some readers of this blog may have followed my posts on private prison abuse and the prison-industrial complex. The posts are these: Money and Filthy Hands, Our Least Resilient Neighborhoods, Tarnish On The Golden State, Homeboy Culture And The Solari Index, and The Replacement of Petroleum Slaves. For those unfamiliar with this subject, these posts drew on a number of sources who documented how the prison lobby and the private prison “industry” have pushed for harsh sentencing of nonviolent offenders in order to boost the incomes of prison guards and private prison corporations. This lobbying, and “targeted enforcement” by police, have resulted in a disproportionate number of minorities who are locked up in prison.
There is an upcoming opportunity to remedy this situation. On 5 August 2009, the California Rehabilitation Oversight Board will hold a hearing on expanding the Honor Program now operating at California State Prison, Los Angeles County (CSP-LAC). The Honor Program has yielded impressive results in reducing prisoner violence and boosting prisoner rehabilitation, as well as saving taxpayers at least several hundred thousand dollars. A program that heals offenders and sets them straight is a boon to society, even if it means a loss of revenue for private prison corporations and prison guard pensions. Such interests will of course oppose programs that help people escape the prison system. Prison industry lobbyists seem to have a friend in Governor Schwarzenegger, who vetoed a 2007 bill that would have mandated expansion of the Honor Program, and whose proposed 2009 budget would increase California's use of private prisons (Sources: http://www.youthradio.org/news/schwarzenegger-talks-private-prisons-and-budget-cuts; and http://reason.org/blog/show/solving-the-ca-budget-governat)
However, not all Californians (or ex-Californians like me) are so evil that they want to profit from breaking the lives of others. Therefore, supporters of the Honor Program will be out in force at the meeting on the 5th of August. Their goal is to expand the Honor Program to all California prisons.
I was invited to go, but I don't know if I'll be able to make it. If any readers are available on that date, feel free to attend and help make a positive difference. Here is a link to the Honor Program website: http://www.prisonhonorprogram.org/. I have also included the invitation e-mail below:
Dear Honor Program Supporter:
We are closer than ever to achieving official support of the Honor Program by the CDCR. In recent months, we have been very successful in gaining the attention of CDCR Secretary Matthew Cate and Inspector General David Shaw, who have indicated their interest in the program. There are very positive signs that the CDCR plans to take action in the near future to fully support and implement the program.
However, we need your help to ensure this actually happens! Especially at this time of fiscal crisis, when so much attention is being given to California's state budget (to the exclusion of other important matters), we must remind Secretary Cate of the importance of the Honor Program.
Please plan to attend the upcoming C-ROB (California Rehabilitation Oversight Board) meeting in Sacramento on Wednesday, August 5, 2009. Secretary Cate attends these meetings, which are a perfect opportunity to advocate directly with the decision maker.
We want to see as many Honor Program supporters as possible attend the August 5 meeting to provide public testimony and encourage Secretary Cate to follow through on his plans to support the program. (If you are not comfortable with public speaking, your physical presence alone will send a message to Secretary Cate of the degree of public support for the program.) Please reply to this e-mail if you would like to attend the meeting and have questions or need more information.
For more information on the C-ROB meeting, go to http://www.oig.ca.gov/pages/c-rob.php.
Thank you very much for your support.
Sincerely,
THE FRIENDS AND FAMILIES FOR THE HONOR PROGRAM
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