And you thought all the "good American Jobs" were destined to go overseas ...
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There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.
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The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”
According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of 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. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more [...]
Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call “highly skilled positions.” At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.
Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. [...]
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The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?
by Vicky Pelaez, Global Research, March 31, 2014
US Incarceration Timeline -- wikipedia.org
Talk about having a "captive market" to drive down your "business costs." U.S. Corporations are tripping all over themselves to get a slice of this "no labor-bargaining" market.
You've heard of MIC ... well say Helloooo! to PIC.
What is the Prison Industrial Complex?
by Rachel Herzing, Critical Resistance; publiceye.org
"Prison Industrial Complex" (PIC) is a term we use to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry that use surveillance, policing, and imprisonment as solutions to what are, in actuality, economic, social, and political "problems."
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POLICING
The choices police make about which people to target, what to target them for, and when to arrest and book them, play a major role in who ultimately gets locked up. As we have seen, those choices are also made within the larger picture of a system of policing that is set up to target poor people, people of color, immigrants, and people who do not conform to socially acceptable behavior on the street or in their homes (i.e. police frequently target women, queer people, people of color, and young people simply based on their appearance or behavior). While, ostensibly, the police are on the street to stop or solve "crime," their mere presence is a means of enforcing social control. Furthermore, policing routinely incorporates violence to maintain its systemic power as well as the individual power of police officers.
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COURTS
Because the court system is just one stop in the entire system that puts people in cages, it reflects the problems that begin in other parts of the system. As people of color and poor people are targeted for surveillance and police repression, more of those same people end up in the courts. The entire prison industrial complex is shaped by structural inequalities, so it follows that the courts target people of color and poor people just like every other part of the prison industrial complex. Of course, the impact of racism, classism, and enforcement of social norms also weighs heavily in determining how people are treated by and in the system. Two examples are demonstrative here. First, Black people are arrested for drug offenses at higher rates than White people despite the fact that Black people constitute about 13% of the national population and about 13% of the drug users. Further, while Blacks represent only about 13% of the drug users nationally, Black people represent 38% of those arrested for drug offenses, and of that number 55% of those convicted of drug offenses, and 74% of those sent to prison.17
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Lastly, the rich have crucial advantages when it comes to the court system. Those who can afford to hire their own attorneys are less likely to be imprisoned. They can afford bail, which allows them to leave jail and conduct their own investigations and better prepare for trial. They can afford better attorneys, better expert witnesses, better private detectives, and more "respectable" alibis. Those who cannot afford bail and come straight to court from jail are more likely to be imprisoned. Additionally, poor people are not only found guilty more often than people who are not poor, they are also recommended for suspended sentences and probation less frequently than people with more money.
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No wonder so many
people say, our so-called Justice System is "rigged."
Red state governors (probably some blue states too), appeal to the ideas of "fighting crime," "shrinking government," and promoting "private enterprise" -- every time they push through yet another 'Private Prison Project', somewhere within their jurisdiction boundaries.
Here are just a few "economic reasons" why their Rah-rah, apple-pie arguments are wrong:
Texas and the Prison-Industrial-Complex
by Erik Kain, Contributor, forbes.com -- Sep 1, 2011
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Here’s the problem with faux privatization: If all you do is take taxpayer money and give it to a private corporation to do a mandated public service like prison work, you’re not actually shrinking government. That’s just a ruse. All you’re actually doing is giving a monopoly rent to a private contractor who then goes about the same business the state would have provided. This is often referred to as “cronyism”.
Some services the state provides can actually be privatized. Imagine if the state provided snow shoveling services for all sidewalks. You could reasonably privatize this by deciding that the state would no longer provide the service and people would need to either shovel their own sidewalk or pay somebody else to do it. That’s real privatization. The government is out of the equation altogether.
This simply doesn’t work with prisons, for obvious reasons. No matter what, the state is responsible for locking people up. Thus any ‘privatization’ that occurs is simply the transfer of the provision of a government service (in this case, incarceration) to a private contractor. The contractor still operates with the full force of the law. In other words, it’s still government, just government-for-hire or for-profit government.
Profiting off of crime should make us uncomfortable, I think, especially when it involves pocketing taxpayer money.
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-- The median wage in state and federal prisons is 20 and 31 cents an hour, respectively.
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About half of the 1.6 million Americans serving time in prison have full-time jobs like Hazen did. They aren’t counted in standard labor surveys, but prisoners make up a sizable workforce: with 870,000 working inmates, roughly the same number of workers as in the states of Vermont and Rhode Island combined.
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Because inmate workers are not considered “employees” under the law, they have none of the protections that word implies. No disability or worker’s compensation in the event of an injury. No Social Security withholdings, sick time, or overtime pay. In three states—Texas, Georgia, and Arkansas—they work for free.
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Study after study has found what common sense would suggest: Prisoners who gain professional skills while locked up, and those who earn a decent wage for their work, are far less likely to end up back behind bars. But if prisons in America, with the world’s highest incarceration rate, had to pay minimum wage—let alone the prevailing wage—they couldn’t keep operating. [...]
“If our criminal-justice system had to pay a fair wage for labor that inmates provide, it would collapse,” says Alex Friedmann, managing editor of Prison Legal News, an independent magazine that promotes inmates’ rights. “We could not afford to run our justice system without exploiting inmates.”
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Modern-Day Slavery in America's Prison Workforce
Why can't we embrace the idea that prisoners have labor rights?
by Beth Schwartzapfel, prospect.org
It used to be "our nation," people (of, by and for The People) ... Can't we find a way to do better than this?
Out of sight, must no longer mean "out of mind."
We've got to stop, with the once quaint notion of ... "Lock em up and throw away the key."
Prison Labor is still Human Labor. As such, they still should be allowed basic Human Rights.
The "privatizing" of this captive, and basically free-labor force for the sake greedy Corporations -- under the false meme guise of "Fighting Crime" -- has one day soon -- Got to GO!
"Failing to signal a Lane Change" is not 'a Crime' -- that needs to be fought.