Entries Tagged 'Prison Industrial Complex' ↓

From Democracy Now!:

*****

Terrible on all fronts.

This is a piece from the Center for International Policy at the America’s Program.  It focuses primarily on listing the major players and spelling out strategies for ending private contracting in prisons:

“Elements of our criminal justice and immigration enforcement systems are spinning dangerously out of public control. Increasingly, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are outsourcing their imprisonment and detention responsibilities to hundreds of contractors and subcontractors—with scant oversight, little transparency, and often tragic consequences. As a result, human rights abuses, squandering of public revenues, and unscrupulous profiteering pervade and pervert the U.S. system of crime and punishment.

A shadow prison industry has spread to all parts of the federal detention and prison system. It is, with a few exceptions, in complete charge of all immigrant imprisonment and detention at both DOJ and DHS. Because the shadow industry has evolved without a plan or strategy, it has become a bizarre, labyrinthine complex of public and private players that is little understood and frighteningly out of control.”

*****

Down with the PIC!

This is from a really great article from over at MoJo:

“Surprisingly, even as their populations have swelled, America’s correctional facilities have become noticeably less violent. “The problem of riots and disturbances is not completely solved, but it is way below what it had been,” says Bert Useem, a Purdue sociologist who’s studied prison riots for three decades. The statistics bear this out: In 1972, the year after 29 prisoners and 10 guards were killed at Attica, there were more than 90 prison riots nationwide, yet by the mid-2000s, Useem writes, “prison riots had become rare.” And non-riot-related violence has waned too. Between 1995 and 2008, inmate violence in New York City jails dropped 95 percent.”

*****

The article is a first-person narrative about volunteering for a training exercises for prison guards.  It goes into some detail about strategies for responding to prison riots and about the business that surrounds prisons.