Showing posts with label debtor prison. Show all posts
Showing posts with label debtor prison. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Friday, October 29, 2010
Private prison industry helped draft AZ immigration law
A private corrections company helped write and lobbied hard for a draconian bill that'll help fill their cells
Alex Pareene
Salon
When it comes to creating demand for a previously unnecessary service and making a profit by any means necessary, you can't beat the private sector. So no one should be surprised that the private prison industry is in part responsible for the Arizona immigration law that requires state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law (read: lock up anyone suspected of being Hispanic until and unless they can prove their citizenship). NPR investigated the prison industry's role in drafting and passing SB 1070. It's pretty depressing.
Corporations and interest groups like R.J. Reynolds, ExxonMobil, the NRA, and the Corrections Corporation of America host a regular conference for state legislators in DC. At last December's conference, the Corrections Corporation of America and Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce drafted the bill that eventually became the Arizona law.
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RELATED ARTICLE:
Our Future in Chains: The For-Profits Debtors' Prison System
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Salon
When it comes to creating demand for a previously unnecessary service and making a profit by any means necessary, you can't beat the private sector. So no one should be surprised that the private prison industry is in part responsible for the Arizona immigration law that requires state law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration law (read: lock up anyone suspected of being Hispanic until and unless they can prove their citizenship). NPR investigated the prison industry's role in drafting and passing SB 1070. It's pretty depressing.
Corporations and interest groups like R.J. Reynolds, ExxonMobil, the NRA, and the Corrections Corporation of America host a regular conference for state legislators in DC. At last December's conference, the Corrections Corporation of America and Arizona state Senator Russell Pearce drafted the bill that eventually became the Arizona law.
Read Full Article
RELATED ARTICLE:
Our Future in Chains: The For-Profits Debtors' Prison System
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Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Incarceration's Impact on Society is Shameful
McCatchy News
You won't need a calculator, but get ready to decipher a bunch of numbers — data that ought to make Americans feel both sadness and shame.
For those of us who've kept up with our criminal justice system the past three decades, these numbers I'm about to share are neither surprising nor shocking, but they do paint a startling picture of the impact our high incarceration rate is having on individuals, families and our society as a whole.
In a report issued last week by the Pew Charitable Trusts, researchers document the scale of incarceration in the United States and its direct effect on the earning power of former inmates and their children.
Collateral Costs: Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility, a collaborative effort between Pew's Economic Mobility Project and its Public Safety Performance Project, also breaks down the impact imprisonment has on those of different races. Again, while that news isn't amazing unto itself, it should sound an alarm that will awaken us from our deep sleep of complacency.
The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, with 2.3 million Americans behind bars, a 300 percent increase since 1980, the report states. This country has more inmates than the top 35 European countries combined.
While the costs of housing prisoners -- $50 billion annually for state correctional costs alone -- should be enough to cause us to rethink our way of doing things, the overall societal and human costs should be even more convincing.
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RELATED ARTICLE:
Our Fututre in Chains: The For-Profit Debtors' Prison System
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Sunday, October 10, 2010
Our Future In Chains: The For-Profit Debtors' Prison System
Debtors' prisons have a sordid history that was thought to be best left behind in Medieval Europe and in Charles Dickens' fictionalized accounts of the 19th-century hellholes of Victorian England. America was not to be outdone, debtors’ prisons were widespread in the United States as well, and stories of the conditions in New York's debtors’ prisons could make one question if repayment of debts was really the purpose; violent criminals were much better clothed and fed. In fact, history shows that terror and slavery have always had a close relationship with debt, and it follows a path from the Romans right through to 17th century England, and into America from English common law. However, America chose to abolish her debtors’ prisons a full 36 years before England; first in New York in 1831, and by 1833 the rest of the America had followed.(1)
Now, debtors' prisons seem to be making a comeback in America. A recent article in the Star Tribune in Minnesota titled, "In jail for being in debt," exposes the growing number of citizens going to jail at the behest of banks and a welcoming judicial system. They write:
It's not a crime to owe money, and debtors' prisons were abolished in the United States in the 19th century. But people are routinely being thrown in jail for failing to pay debts. In Minnesota, which has some of the most creditor-friendly laws in the country, the use of arrest warrants against debtors has jumped 60 percent over the past four years, with 845 cases in 2009, a Star Tribune analysis of state court data has found.
In our modern era of debt servitude, a PR Push has been designed to reintroduce a serious discussion of debtors' prisons as a sound solution. What goes beyond alarming is that the full-fledged return of debtors’ prisons might be seen as both appropriately terrifying, as well as a profitable investment opportunity and politically sound decision to be made by state governments struggling with their own looming bankruptcies, and a Federal government struggling politically with the concept of a jobless recovery that is not materializing.
A de facto debtors' prison has already been largely accepted in the case of "deadbeat" parents when a failure to pay child support puts them in civil contempt of court. It is this civil contempt charge that is now beginning to take on an expanded definition to include those who owe for much smaller infractions. When a court order to pay a debt is issued and ignored, it then qualifies as a civil contempt of court. At that point, the judge becomes a literal dictator with the ability to imprison a person indefinitely for the violation. The Constitution explicitly prohibits incarceration for failure to pay debts, but it is the violation of a court order that gives judges free rein to impose draconian punishments. In this way, an end-run around the Constitution can become frighteningly commonplace.(2)
America already has a record-high ratio of people in prison, with no signs of the trend reversing as private corporations like Wackenhut Corporation, referred to as a "Free Market in Human Misery," have long been enlisted to turn government directives into shareholder profit. One might even deign to call it blatant fascism in its purest form, as government legislation leads offenders directly into private company coffers. The prison-industrial complex has already capitalized on government actions like The War on Drugs. A prime example is how The California Correctional Peace Officers Association helped fuel the prison-building boom as a cozy relationship was established on Capitol Hill through influence peddling.(3)
Profiting from the suffering of the poor while bailouts and bonuses await the over-leveraged banksters, car companies, and state governments, sets up a prison-industrial complex with a class warfare component that is the domestic mirror of the military-industrial complex sent abroad. This domestic prison system seems to be the only industry left to build upon, and it is here that things become truly frightening. For the federally-owned prison system complex, Federal Prison Industries (UNICOR), more incarceration means a growing supply of cheap labor and a skewing of unemployment numbers, as these inmates are often doing jobs they couldn't even find if they were job hunting on the outside. But it is the private prison system, with its web fully woven throughout the U.S. government, that stands to profit the most from the return of debtors' admission.(4)
The largest private prison conglomerate in the U.S. is Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), which controls more than 47% of all private prison and jail beds nationwide and is able to produce a 13-15% return annually on new real estate investments. Wackenhut (now subsumed into G4S, the largest security company in the world) was of course started by an FBI agent, George Wackenhut, who is famous for developing millions of dossiers on America's "potential subversives" in the sixties, and was exposed as being an integral player within the shadow CIA.(5)
These major security conglomerates are at the top of a growing pyramid of for-profit, international detention center operators that has Wall Street giants like Goldman Sachs simply fawning over the solid, long-term investment potential. Similar to war, when there is a profit to be made off of incarceration, only more incarceration can be expected to follow. The U.S. government certainly seems to be working hard to ensure that the numbers of poor continue to increase, as they are well aware that that programs designed to help the downtrodden are an abject failure every time. Furthermore, the massive government debts that must be repaid directly into the hands of the Federal Reserve-led banking cabal must lead us to an inescapable conclusion: More money is to be made from slavery in the United States, than from freedom.
Other Articles Cited
1. Jill Lepore, "I.O.U. - How We Used to Treat Our Debtors," The New Yorker (April 13, 2009): 35.
2. Wendy McElroy, http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=2229
3. Seth Sandronsky, http://www.counterpunch.org/sandronsky05032005.html
4. Christian Parenti, http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=852
5. John Connolly, "Inside the Shadow CIA," SPY Magazine (September, 1992): Volume 6.
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Friday, October 8, 2010
Cash-Strapped States Resurrect "Debtors' Prisons"
Nadia Prupis
Truth Out
Two reports published by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal a rising trend of patently unconstitutional practices in cash-strapped states, where a growing number of impoverished people are jailed for being unable to pay their legal fees - including charges for use of public defenders, a guaranteed right in the United States. The resurgence of these draconian "debtors' prisons" has been documented in at least 13 of the 15 states with the largest prison populations in the country, including California, Arizona, Michigan and Alabama.
"Incarcerating people simply because they cannot afford to pay their legal debts is not only unconstitutional but also has a devastating impact upon men and women whose only crime is that they are poor," said ACLU senior staff attorney Eric Balaban.
Many states view the fees as a method for helping to alleviate budget deficits. In New Orleans, Louisiana, legal fines comprise almost two-thirds of criminal courts' operating budgets. But the ACLU found in its report, "In for a Penny: The Rise of America's New Debtors' Prisons," that jailing individuals for failing to pay legal fees actually places the financial burden on the state, wasting taxpayer money and resources to keep those individuals in jail or on public welfare as they struggle to pay their overwhelming debts.
Read Full Article
RELATED ARTICLE:
Our Future in Chains: The For-Profit Debtors' Prison System
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Live Superfoods
Print this page
Cash-Strapped States Resurrect "Debtors' Prisons"
Truth Out
Two reports published by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal a rising trend of patently unconstitutional practices in cash-strapped states, where a growing number of impoverished people are jailed for being unable to pay their legal fees - including charges for use of public defenders, a guaranteed right in the United States. The resurgence of these draconian "debtors' prisons" has been documented in at least 13 of the 15 states with the largest prison populations in the country, including California, Arizona, Michigan and Alabama.
"Incarcerating people simply because they cannot afford to pay their legal debts is not only unconstitutional but also has a devastating impact upon men and women whose only crime is that they are poor," said ACLU senior staff attorney Eric Balaban.
Many states view the fees as a method for helping to alleviate budget deficits. In New Orleans, Louisiana, legal fines comprise almost two-thirds of criminal courts' operating budgets. But the ACLU found in its report, "In for a Penny: The Rise of America's New Debtors' Prisons," that jailing individuals for failing to pay legal fees actually places the financial burden on the state, wasting taxpayer money and resources to keep those individuals in jail or on public welfare as they struggle to pay their overwhelming debts.
Read Full Article
RELATED ARTICLE:
Our Future in Chains: The For-Profit Debtors' Prison System
Fresh food that lasts from eFoods Direct (Ad)
Live Superfoods
Print this page
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