[OFFICIAL] - Prison Industrial Complex

Why did you leave corrections,?

 

what? He really needs to answer that?

Maybe I have watched too much lock up on MSNBC so I assume everyone would know why but he might have a better answer than I don't want to police murders, rapist, child molesters and people who might want to kill me.

I may have left out some folks who have the police on their enemies list in the prison system.


Also, a correction officer might not be a police officer but I'm sure they are on the list like the police for some of the prisoners.

 

Is there a more stressful job??

 

BM are the biggest threat to White Supremecy...

Not BW..if they were seen as a threat they'd be getting busted far more than WW.

Historically

WM have no reason to fear or mistrust BW.

BW were trusted to raise their babies while we were under open racial attack.

Do the Isrealis trust Palestinians with their babies??
Nope
Do Nazi's trust Jews with their kids??
Not hardly
Do Turks trust Armenians with their offspring??
Nope

For good reason.

WW are seen as more of threat than BW and the numbers back it up.

BW do not see WM as their enemy...and vica versa:smt039

 

It does not need its own thread, it belongs here because it goes along with what this thread is all about.

Also, if it had its own thread, it will get pushed back to page 10 in about 2 or 3 days because other threads would be created and distract people.

That's why I made one thread and consolidated it and update from time to time, forcing people hopefully to view the whole thread and all the info together in one place.

 

Justice Department says it will end use of private prisons

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...se-of-private-prisons/?utm_term=.94fe01418abc

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote.

While experts said the directive is significant, privately run federal prisons house only a fraction of the overall population of inmates. The vast majority of the incarcerated in America are housed in state prisons — rather than federal ones — and Yates’ memo does not apply to any of those, even the ones that are privately run. Nor does it apply to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Marshals Service detainees, who are technically in the federal system but not under the purview of the federal Bureau of Prisons.

The directive is instead limited to the 13 privately run facilities, housing a little more than 22,000 inmates, in the federal Bureau of Prisons system. The facilities were meant mainly to house inmates who are mostly low security, “criminal alien” men with 90 months or less time remaining on their sentences, according to a recent Department of Justice Inspector General report. Yates said the Justice Department would review the contracts for those facilities as they come up for renewal, as all will do in the next five years. She said they would then be reduced or allowed to expire, though none would be terminated prematurely.

Still, the memo could spark broader change in the prison system.

“This is a huge deal. It is historic and groundbreaking,” said David Fathi, director of the ACLU National Prison Project. “For the last 35 years, the use of private prisons in this country has crept ever upward, and this is a startling and major reversal of that trend, and one that we hope will be followed by others.”

The Justice Department’s inspector general last week released a critical report concluding that privately operated facilities incurred more safety and security incidents than those run by the federal Bureau of Prisons. The private facilities, for example, had higher rates of assaults — both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff — and had eight times as many contraband cellphones confiscated each year on average, according to the report.

Click Above Link For Full Story....

 

Mainstream Outlets Have Not Covered A Major Nationwide Prison Strike

http://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/1...covered-major-nationwide-prison-strike/213759

On September 9, inmates at prisons in at least 12 states began work stoppages and other protest actions to draw attention to unfair labor practices and living conditions in U.S. prisons. The actions have reportedly continued on a rolling basis in many prisons across the country for the last month, yet a Media Matters analysis found virtual media silence on the story.

According to inmate organizers at the Holman Prison in Alabama, who have been leading prison labor actions since 2012 as the Free Alabama Movement, inmates in prisons across the country launched strikes on September 9. The strikes, which were primarily work stoppages but also included hunger striking and other forms of peaceful protest, began on the anniversary of the deadly 1971 Attica prison uprising, which began as a means to call attention to prison conditions. The actions were primarily meant to protest extremely low-wage or forced labor in prisons, though inmate organizers in some facilities chose to focus their actions on living conditions and overcrowding instead of or in addition to labor practices.

Estimates from the organizers and allied groups suggest that more than 24,000 inmates in at least 12 states participated in strikes that day. Tracking mechanisms indicate that inmates in several prisons are still continuing acts of protest on a rolling basis, though activity is thought to be “apparently winding down.” These numbers -- if corroborated -- would make the September 9 actions the largest prison strike in U.S. history.

Though it is difficult to know for sure, actions in some facilities appear to be getting results. In Alabama, the epicenter of strike organizing, guards joined the effort, launching an informal labor strike to highlight prison overcrowding -- conditions that make prisons less safe for both inmates and guards. And the U.S. Department of Justice launched a “possibly unprecedented” statewide investigation into conditions in Alabama prisons last week.

Yet a search of Nexis transcripts from the major news networks -- ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC -- and National Public Radio for the last month has come up almost completely empty on coverage of the strikes, aside from a single 20-second mention during a run-through of headlines on NBC’s Today and a three-and-a-half-minute NPR Weekend Edition interview with the Marshall Project’s Beth Schwartzapfel.

Traditional print media outlets did not appear to fare much better, according to a search of the same parameters; Media Matters found one article at The Wall Street Journal reporting on the initial days of the strikes.

Media Matters found no mentions of prison strikes across the major media outlets available in Nexis from September 8 -- the day before the strikes began -- through October 10. Most coverage seemed to come from new media outlets, like BuzzFeed and Vice News, or left-leaning, sometimes niche outlets like The Marshall Project, Mother Jones, Democracy Now!, and The Intercept. Readers who do not rely on these specific types of sources for their news, instead turning to evening broadcasts or major print outlets like The New York Times, may not know the strikes happened at all.

Media scholar and MIT professor Ethan Zuckerman explained why coverage of the strikes may be so difficult to find in a Medium post on September 10. Zuckerman, who studies “the distribution of attention in mainstream and new media” and how activists can leverage media coverage, wrote:

Click Above Link For Full Story

 

After Exploiting Prisoners for Years, MSNBC Still Won't Cover National Prison Strike

http://www.alternet.org/media/after...msnbc-still-wont-cover-national-prison-strike

The one-month anniversary of the nation’s largest prison strike in history passed Sunday with little fanfare. Since the event began, the strikes—taking place in 29 prisons in 12 states—have received a scattering of coverage, mostly from left-wing press. Though most big media names have ignored it, mainstream publications like the Wall Street Journal and CBS News have chimed in with reporting.

But the complete lack of coverage from MSNBC is the most glaring of all: MSNBC is the gatekeeping standard-bearer of progressive media in the U.S., setting the tone daily for what liberals should care about. More importantly, for 10 years the network has kept its ratings afloat on the weekends by exploiting prison labor in its reality TV show "Lockup."

The MSNBC weekend show, now in its 11th year, is a massive profit center for NBCUniversal and its parent corporation Comcast. “[It] rates spectacularly well,” Rachel Maddow told the New Republic in 2013. “They make so much money. It’s like having an ATM in the lobby that you don’t need a card for.”

One of the reasons "Lockup" is such a cash cow? What is, in effect, exploited prison labor. "Lockup" is a reality TV show in which the stars do not get paid, invariably keeping costs low and profits high. Asked in a 2014 Q&A if the prisoners were compensated, "Lockup" producer Susan Carney made it clear they weren’t. When asked why the prisoners participate, Carney speculated, “I believe it is because most people want to be heard and understood and many want their life story known. Also, a lot of inmates have told me they hope that by sharing their own difficult experiences they may help others in similar circumstances.”

"Lockup"’s profit model relies on, and has relied on for years, the most vulnerable exchanging their most sensational moments for a brief moment of being "heard” by the outside world. One possible reason MSNBC has shied away from reporting on the prison strikes is because it practices a slightly more PC version of what the scores of corporations that use prison labor do. Similarly, MSNBC producers must maintain positive relationships with prison officials and private prisons, which they rely on for access to their unpaid reality television labor.

“Prison and jail administrators are pimping out prisoners to production companies who make what they euphemistically call documentaries by filming the most deranged inmates they can find and putting them on the air to satisfy the prurient jaded, and schadenfreude-filled desires of a desensitized public,” wrote author and ex-convict Mansfield Frazier in his 2013 dressing down of the show. “We don’t allow TV cameras into mental institutions—not yet, anyway—so producers do the next best thing and capture the images of these walking wounded where they can: in jails and prisons, which by default have become our nation’s largest warehouses of the mentally ill.”

Obviously, there are barriers to reporting on what happens inside prisons, as the New Yorker's E. Tammy Kim noted last week. Yet there have been several stories on the strikes, in RT and the Nation and on NPR. So we know there’s something there to cover, and certainly if MSNBC really wanted to cover the issue it could do what Democracy Now! and others have done, and interview prison abolitionists and other activists.

Indeed, after a month of coverage trickling in, the biggest indicator of which publications won’t cover the strikes appears to be their closeness to the corridors of power. Thus far, first-tier media New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and MSNBC have not covered the strikes, the exception being the Wall Street Journal, giving credence to Noam Chomsky’s belief that business press is often more progressive because it is less ideological. What sets MSNBC’s lack of coverage apart, is that none of the other big names built a network partially on the backs of prisoners.

Click Above Link For Full Story....

 

Thanks for this thread

 

AG Sessions rescinds memorandum that directed the Bureau of Prisons to decline to renew private prison contracts.



https://news.vice.com/story/jeff-sessions-just-did-something-the-private-prison-industry-will-love

White House hints at crackdown on recreational marijuana


http://thehill.com/homenews/adminis...-hints-at-crackdown-on-recreational-marijuana

 

Private-prison giant, resurgent in Trump era, gathers at president’s resort

By Amy Brittain and Drew Harwell October 25, 2017

https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...3470754bbb9_story.html?utm_term=.e96ad7107b1d

In recent years, the private prison company GEO Group has held its annual leadership conference at venues near its Boca Raton headquarters. But this year, the company moved its gathering to a Miami-area golf resort owned by President Trump.

The event last week, during which executives and wardens gathered for four days of meetings, dinner receptions and golf outings at the luxurious 800-acre Trump National Doral, followed an intense effort by GEO Group to align itself with the president and his administration.

During last year’s election, a company subsidiary gave $225,000 to a pro-Trump super PAC. GEO gave an additional $250,000 to the president’s inaugural committee. It also hired as outside lobbyists a major Trump fundraiser and two former aides to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of the president’s most prominent campaign backers.

GEO Group, meanwhile, has had newfound success in Trump’s Washington.

The company secured the administration’s first contract for an immigration detention center, a deal worth tens of millions a year. And its stock price has tripled since hitting a low last year when the Obama administration sought to phase out the use of private prisons — a decision that Sessions reversed.

GEO Group’s achievements over the past year show how a company that has long relied heavily on doing business with the government — and whose business model was under threat — is thriving in the Trump era.


Even as the president has targeted lobbyists and Washington special interests with his vow to “drain the swamp,” GEO Group has regained its footing while escalating its spending on traditional tactics such as lobbying and campaign donations. The Doral event represents a potential avenue of influence that is unique to Trump: the chance for a corporation to engage in a private business transaction with the president.

“It is the opposite of draining the swamp,” said Carl Takei, a senior staff lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project.

GEO Group did not answer questions from The Washington Post about its stepped-up political activity, nor would the company say when it booked the Doral conference or how much it paid the president’s resort.

The Post was able to identify only one other event that GEO had at Doral in recent years: a shareholder meeting in 2007, about five years before Trump purchased the property.

“Over the years, we have held company and employee meetings at a variety of venues around the country, and as a Florida-based company, we have held meetings throughout the state, including at Doral,” GEO Group said in a statement.


The company also sought to play down its influence in shaping the administration’s agenda. “We do not take a position on, or advocate for or against, criminal justice, sentencing, immigration enforcement or detention policies,” the statement said. “Our political and lobbying activities focus on promoting the benefits of public-private partnerships.”

A White House official said the administration had no knowledge of the Doral event. The Trump Organization did not respond to requests for comment.

[Trump’s divisive presidency reshapes a key part of his private business]

GEO Group, which owns or manages about 140 prisons, immigration-detention centers and other facilities nationwide and derives nearly half of its revenue from federal contracts, entered the Trump era with a great deal at stake. In the past 10 years, the federal government has paid GEO Group and its subsidiaries more than $4 billion, according to federal contracting records.

The company suffered a setback when, in the summer of 2016, then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates ordered the Justice Department to phase out its use of private prisons. Yates’s move came after a Justice Department inspector general’s report called the facilities less secure than those run by the government.


The Federal Bureau of Prisons slashed thousands of beds from potential prison deals that were up for a federal award.

In a statement to The Post, GEO criticized the inspector general’s findings and said the data shows that “privately run facilities are at least as equally safe, secure, and humane as publicly run facilities.”

Alex Friedmann, who is an associate director with the Human Rights Defense Center, a prisoner advocacy group, and an activist shareholder in GEO Group, said the company has worked to amass political influence because public contracts are its lifeblood.

“They have to lobby and curry political favor because that’s what their business model is based on,” he said.

In the 2016 election cycle, GEO stepped up its contributions, with its employee-financed political action committee giving federal candidates, PACs and parties about $732,000 — more than four times as much as in the previous presidential cycle, according to federal filings. Of the amount contributed directly to congressional candidates in the last cycle, 87 percent went to Republicans, according to a breakdown by the Center for Responsive Politics.

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not sure if this has already been discussed somewhere else, but it looks like Kamala has good policy positions when it comes to reforming our broken justice system.

https://www.newsweek.com/kamala-harris-plan-changing-prison-sentences-backed-republicans-1967828

"With her background in criminal justice, Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, set goals on ending mandatory minimum sentences as vice president in order to get incarceration rates down. Harris has also pushed to legalize marijuana and abolish the death penalty and solitary confinement. The former California attorney general also called to use clemency powers to limit the number of people in federal prison."

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing...-president-kamala-harris-on-clemency-actions/

"President Biden and I will continue to work to address historic inequities and racial disparities in federal drug policy and sentencing, to make sure that our justice system truly lives up to its name."

I know there's an uphill battle when it comes to actually getting this stuff done, but it gives me hope that it's on her radar and if we can get congressional majorities we may see some real progress when it comes to racial disparity in sentencing and incarceration.