"Never Again" -Jewish slogan after the Nazi Holocaust
All throughout human history repressive governments have used incarceration as a means of social and political control.
The police state pograms of Mao, Stalin and Hitler rounded up, incarcerated and brutally murdered millions as a legacy to the desperate wickedness of the human heart of Man.
Today, the United States of America has joined that long list of dictatorial despotic regimes. The USA currently has the HIGHEST incarceration rate of any nation on Earth, locking up over 2 million of its citizens in an immense network of US prisons and jails across the country.
At least 6 million- roughly 2 percent of the US populace- are ensnared in the US criminal justice system by way of direct incarceration, detainment, probation, some form of supervision and/or parole. A disproportionate amount are women, the poor and people of color. One out of every 14 black men and women are now in jail or in prison. One in four are likely to be imprisoned at some point in their lifetime.
Patterned after the US military-industrial-complex, the US prison-industrial-complex consists of a marriage between corporate and government interests, that is, between business profit maximization and state social control.
The prison construction/incarceration boom in the USA is a relatively new phenomenon. During the past two decades, roughly 1,000 new jails and prisons have been built across the United States, contributing to an increased overall inmate population of between 50,000-100,000 annually. This enormous increase can be attributed primarily to the fact that 2/3rds of all citizens entering prison today are sentenced for non-violent offenses.
Underwriting the exploding growth of both public and private prison systems nationwide are a small number of high-powered Wall St financial houses such as Goldman Sachs and Merill Lynch; who together write between $2-3 billion dollars in prison construction bonds every year.
One recent report stated that there are over 500,000 full time employees working to prop-up, legitimize and institutionalize the US prison industrial complex, making it a central pillar of growth and stability in the current retrograde and floundering American economy.
Internationally, the phenomenon of prison expansion is a result of economic globalization and its attendent social misery and unrest. Homelessness, unemployment, exploitation of labor and resources, poverty, hunger etc.., all contribute to surges in incarceration rates in many nations throughout the world.
As globalization works to primarily benefit the international corporate and financial elite, police state repression and incarceration become the tools that are increasingly being used to control angry, frustrated, dissenting masses of people who reject and resist a system of global exploitation and destruction that clearly benefits only a very few on top.
George Bush's prison-industrial-complex will absolutely proliferate into similiar international state repression and incarceration measures worldwide. As Texas governor, Bush oversaw the execution of 152 prisoners and thus became the most killing governor in the history of the United States. Many inmates have testified to the existence of violence, rape, torture and extortion within the Texas prison system.
A recent CNN poll resulting in almost 50% of respondents justifying the use of torture, explains why there hasn't been much outrage over prisoner abuse, let alone opposition to a sprawling prison industrial complex, both in the USA and abroad...
Steve Jones
P.O. Box 1141
Boulder, Colorado
80306
USA
SOURCES:
1. Prison Activist Resource Center
P.O. Box 339, Berkeley, California 94704 USA
Website: http://www.prisonactivist.org
6. ***Book- Lockdown America, by Christian Parenti
Copyright, October 2000
The Prison Industrial Complex: Crisis and Control Article: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=852
7. Human Right Watch
Prison Project
350 Fifth Ave- 34th Floor
New York, New York 10118 USA
Website: http://www.hrw.org/prisons
8. Amnesty International
5 Penn Plaza- 14th Floor, New York, New York 10001 USA
Website: http://www.amnesty.org
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