One Nation, Under Guard ... incarceration is big business

Bad news about the impending police state here in America: it’s already here. From the indefinite detention (without trial) of terrorism suspects both foreign and American to the escalating militarization of our nation’s police forces, there’s little to indicate that any level of government is willing to “walk back” the overreach of law enforcement, much of which stems from the Patriot Act’s anti-terrorism aims.

One Nation, Under Guard

HERE by Tim Cushing  3rd 2012

from the with-liberty-and-justice-for-some dept

The worst part is that we’re all paying for it. Our tax dollars are being used to put our friends and neighbors in prison. Our money is used to turn 14-year-old boys into sexual offenders and incarcerate large numbers of minorities. It’s extracted complicity and as long as those in power continue to see no reprisal for these actions, it will continue until it’s truly too late

The New Yorker recently published a piece on incarceration in America, highlighting some very disturbing facts about the “land of the free:”full Article HERE

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education. more

HERE

So, what’s contributing to this continued escalation of imprisonment? (Hint: it’s not an increase in violent crime. Those numbers are at their lowest level in nearly a half-century.) No, the problem is that the justice system has been put into the position of redefining “criminal activity” while simultaneously having its sentencing discretion removed by national policies:

William J. Stuntz, a professor at Harvard Law School who died shortly before his masterwork, “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice,” was published, last fall, is the most forceful advocate for the view that the scandal of our prisons derives from the Enlightenment-era, “procedural” nature of American justice. He runs through the immediate causes of the incarceration epidemic: the growth of post-Rockefeller drug laws, which punished minor drug offenses with major prison time; “zero tolerance” policing, which added to the group; mandatory-sentencing laws, which prevented judges from exercising judgment.

Exhibit A: The War on Drugs. Nothing has been more ineffectual, for a greater period of time, than the supposed War on Drugs.

This plays right into the hands of the beneficiaries of draconian, zero-tolerance policies: privately-owned prisons.

The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

This is at least as chilling as watching our representatives blithely trampling our civil rights, perhaps even more so as you realize that there is likely some connection between mandatory sentencing and the lobbying efforts of private prisons. ” There has also been little serious effort made towards scaling back either the War on Drugs or the War on Terrorism, despite all evidence pointing to minimal success in either venture.

” The solution seems to be to cast the net wider and worry about sorting out the innocents after a few hours (or days) in lockup”. (see full article HERE )

“The collected legislative bodies of the United States are pitching in as well, with 40,000 new laws scheduled to go on the books in 2012 alone.” (see full article HERE )

The FOIA request for information on all immigrants in detention on Oct. 3, 2011, turned up a list of nearly 32,300. Forty percent of those held by ICE had not been convicted of a crime, nor were they awaiting criminal trial. Despite what the term “illegal immigration” implies, simply being in the country without status is a civil, not a criminal, offense.
That’s about 13,000 non-criminals sitting in detention centers funded by taxpayer dollars and, in some cases, directly benefiting private corporations. (see full article HERE)

With the expansion of federal surveillance laws and the increase of so-called “secret laws,” the government is slowly turning its citizens into criminals, often with the assistance of local law enforcement. (see full article  HERE )

  HERE