Prison State America: Inmates becoming corporate slaves in for-profit facilities

By Ben Swann on RT

For-profit prisons have created a “neo-slavery” in the US, according to award-winning journalist Chris Hedges. Inmates work eight hours per day for major corporations such as Chevron, Motorola, Nordstrom’s and Target, yet only have the possibility of making up $1.25 an hour. In addition, companies that provide services like phone calls overcharge prisoners on even the most basic services, making hundreds of millions in profits annually. RT’s Ben Swann speaks to Hedges, who explains how this shadowy system came into existence.


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Energy Companies Pay Prisons to Cut Power During Heat Waves

Amanda Warren

Another dumpy thing about Ohio, besides their increasing sinkhole problem, is the way they treat their prisoners. There are witness accounts of how privatization has dramatically changed typical jail time. Any major discomfort is acceptable as long as it turns a profit.

This recent absurdity may or may not have to do with privatization, but some signs say yes. As if the prison industry isn't bloated enough, ushering in recruits all the time with new laws waiting to be broken and using prisoners for slave labor (another form of outsourcing) -- Ohio's prisons are now accepting gobs of money to cut power at peak hours.

The Prison Industrial Complex

Dave Hodges

Only the most vile, degenerate and immoral person could feel good about the practice of for-profit institutionalized slavery which dominated the southern economy for 300 years. What is even more unacceptable is that people who knew better, presumably Christian people with a conscience, did little or nothing while evil was triumphing.

Today, America is witnessing the rebirth of institutionalized slavery within its borders and it is indeed a predominantly racist practice with Latinos and Blacks comprising the bulk of the new slaves. And we are also witnessing racist rates of incarceration within our juvenile justice system. This outrageous practice should be decried by every media outlet in the country, but this problem is all but ignored by the mainstream media (MSM).

Why? Because the MSM is making money off of this unholy practice.

Private Prisons and the American Police State

This article was originally written for an interview with New Dissident Radio's Lakota Phillips on Breaking Taboo.

S. Paul Forrest

Activist Post

In the last few decades, the population of our national prisons has nearly tripled.  This phenomenon can be attributed to many factors ranging from the increasing economic insecurity to the War on Drugs.  Statistics tell us that 1 in 18 American men are now incarcerated or being monitored.

Although this number could be reasonably justified as a reflection of our social morality breakdown; America still leads the world in per capita imprisonment, and the privatization of the our corrections system calls into question the motives behind tougher sentencing and the ever-increasing American police state.

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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Our Future in Chains: The For-Profits Debtors' Prison System

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Our Future In Chains: The For-Profit Debtors' Prison System

Michael Edwards

Activist Post

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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