One Out of 136 Americans in Jail

I have personally known about 30 people who have gone to jail for various offenses. One of them is still there! It's getting to the point you can't leave your house without going to jail! And WE, the "unjailed", have to pay for it! I suggest releasing drug offenders. That would alleviate 50% of the problem. Leave jail for violent offenders.

prisons: slave labor factories

History teaches us that slavery was abolished in the United States after the Civil War. History has taught us wrong.

Slavery was never abolished in the United States. Go ahead, take a look at the Constitution. The 13th Amendment reads as follows: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted shall exist within the United States." That means that if you've been convicted of a crime, you are legally allowed to be a slave.

The prison industrial complex is big business in this country, and the U.S. government and corporations are reaping the rewards. Private companies are not only operating prisons but are also using prisoners as workers without paying wages, a practice known as slavery.

The largest private prison operator is called Correction Corporations of America; it operates over 30 prisons nationwide (a number that will soon double when every state prison in Tennessee goes private). Prison bonds provide a lucrative return for capitalist investors.

The following are just a fraction of the companies using slave labor: IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, Boeing, Revlon, Chevron, TWA, Victoria's Secret, Eddie Bauer, K-mart, J.C. Penny, and McDonald's.

Products bought by the U.S government are bought from UNICOR, which is the trade name for Federal Prisons Industries. Yes, prisoners even build desks for members of Congress. UNICOR proudly displays on its web site that it is "where the government shops first."

This isn't about making the streets safe; it's about money and a never-ending supply of cheap labor.

State corrections agencies are advertising their prisoners to the corporations: "Are you experiencing high employee turnover? Worried about the costs of employee benefits? Unhappy with out-of-state or offshore suppliers? Getting hit by overseas competition? Having trouble motivating your workforce? Thinking about expansion space? Then Washington State Department of Corrections Private Sector Partnerships is for you."

When Reagan became president, there were 400,000 prisoners in the United States. Today the number stands at over 2 million. Before you start thinking about those "violent" people, listen to some facts: In federal prisons, only 2.4 percent of the prisoners are there for violent crimes.

It took 150 years for California to build 10 state prisons. But the state has built 21 prisons in the last 10 years alone (only one state university has been built in that time) and this trend isn't stopping. With the three strikes law in effect the state estimates it will have to build 20 more prisons over the next 10 years.

Where does racism come into view? Seventy percent of those being sentenced under the three strikes law in California are people of color. And nationally, 39 percent of African American men in their 20s are in prison, on probation, or on parole. White people make up 82 percent of the nation's population, yet prisons house 72 percent people of color.

What we need to do is wake up and realize that there aren't 2 million people in prison to "make the country safe." They're there to provide a service - their labor. Let's call them what they are: slaves.

The article above is by Michael Scjwartz, a student activist at UCLA and a member of YSA.

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source The Proliferation of Prison Labor, Part 2
In my last entry, "The Proliferation of Prison Labor", I raised concerns about the government corporation UNICOR. By employing thousands of prisoners every year at practically no price and supplying cheap goods to both public and private customers (most notably the Department of Defense), UNICOR is often injurious to American businesses (competing against UNICOR), consumers (who often receive poorly made products from UNICOR), criminal justice policy (as incarceration becomes tied to the desire for cost-free labor), and prisoners working for UNICOR (whose health and safety is often ignored).

Since UNICOR is able to expend so little money in making its products, it is able to outbid its competitors. As Republican Representative Pete Hoekstra of Michigan stated, UNICOR has "decimated the textile business" and had a negative impact on companies that make signs for federal agencies. As many workers, particularly those engaged in textile and office-furniture manufacturing, confront the often debilitating effects of outsourcing labor, their employers must simultaneously struggle to secure or maintain government contracts that have increasingly gone to UNICOR. In other words, UNICOR is bad for many American businesses and its employees.

You got me searching....

This one was in answer to a question as to whether the USA currently had the world's highest prison population ever:


According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London, the U.S. currently has the largest documented prison population in the world, both in absolute and proportional terms. We've got roughly 2.03 million people behind bars, or 701 per 100,000 population. China has the second-largest number of prisoners (1.51 million, for a rate of 117 per 100,000), and Russia has the second-highest rate (606 per 100,000, for a total of 865,000). Russia had the highest rate for years, but has released hundreds of thousands of prisoners since 1998; meanwhile the U.S. prison population has grown by even more. Rounding out the top ten, with rates from 554 to 437, are Belarus, Bermuda (UK), Kazakhstan, the Virgin Islands (U.S.), the Cayman Islands (UK), Turkmenistan, Belize, and Suriname, which you'll have to agree puts America in interesting company. South Africa, a longtime star performer on the list, has dropped to 15th place (402) since the dismantling of apartheid.

I'm not aware of any attempt to systematically compare imprisonment rates for all the world's sovereign states throughout history, and compiling such a list would be a daunting task. (Fax me those Sumerian jail records, would you?) But Stalin's Soviet Union, with its huge network of forced-labor camps, would surely be near the top. I've seen widely varying figures, but let's use the conservative Britannica number of five million prisoners in the Gulag in 1936. That works out to more than 3,000 per 100,000. The record holder, though, is undoubtedly Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge: the regime forced virtually the entire population into labor camps or prisons during the late 1970s, killing as many as two million of the country's six to seven million people.

Nazi Germany employed millions of slave laborers, but most were foreign nationals during wartime, so the comparison doesn't seem apt. China, though . . . well, 1.5 million prisoners is just the official figure. Chinese human rights activist Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in forced-labor camps for criticizing the government, estimates that 16 to 20 million of his countrymen are incarcerated, including common criminals, political prisoners, and people in involuntary job placements. Even ten million prisoners would make for a rate of 793 per 100,000.

Another nation suspected to have a lot of prisoners is North Korea. The country isn't listed in ICPS statistics, but a recent NBC News investigation put the number of political prisoners alone at 200,000, or more than 900 per 100,000..............



http://www.straightdope.com/columns/040206.html





As of 2006, it is estimated that at least nine million people are currently imprisoned worldwide [1]. It is believed that this number is likely to be much higher, in view of general under-reporting and a lack of data from various countries, especially authoritarian regimes. Since the beginning of the 1990s, the prison population in most countries has increased significantly [citation needed].

In absolute terms, the United States currently has the largest prison population in the world, with more than 2 million [2]. In 2002, both Russia and China also had prison populations in excess of 1 million [3], [4].

As a percentage of total population, Rwanda has the largest prison population as of 2002, with more than 100,000 (of a total population of around 8 million), largely as a result of the 1994 genocide. The United States is second largest in relative numbers with 486 prisoners per 100,000 of population, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, also making it the largest in relative numbers amongst developed countries). New Zealand has the second highest prison population per capita amongst developed countries, with 169 prisoners per 100,000.

In 2003, the United Kingdom had 73,000 inmates in its facilities, with France and Germany having a similar number.

The high proportion of prisoners in developed countries may be explained by a range of factors, including better funded criminal justice systems, a more strict approach to law and order (eg. through the use of mandatory sentencing), and a larger gap between the rich and the poor. In non-developed countries, rates of incarceration may be a reflection of a tendency for some crimes to go unpunished, political corruption, or the use of other mechanisms which provide an alternative to incarceration as a means of dealing with crime (eg. through the use of reconciliation).

Prison population per 100,000 inhabitants
USA 725
Russia 713
UK 124
Canada 102
Germany 98
Italy 92
France 80
Sweden 64
Denmark 61
Iceland 29..........

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison


This one is about NZ, which also has high figures, and it illustrates some of the different ways in which prison stats can be looked at, and also gives some comparisons, including with Oz, which is also pretty high: (and I suspect our three countries have a similarity in that black imprisonment rates are higher than for whites)

http://www.corrections.govt.nz/public/news/strategic-documents/abouttime/stats.html

Yeah, but what kind of crime is there to do in New Zealand-steal each others fish?

Apparently quite a bit!

Except for the sex crimes, women there do more crime than men! I'm staying right here!

Nah, I'd say they just get caught more often....

I knew someone would misinterpret that! I did for a moment.

Take another look....it says nothing about what numbers of men and women commit what crimes...it merely says what percentage of each gender who are in prison are imprisoned for particular crimes.

These are the main categories of crime that get you inside.


I would imagine that there are far fewer women in prison for each category.


It was damned interesting there for a moment, though, thinking that.

But mebbe back to the topic of the numbers of Americans in prison?

I know several people in prison as well. Without exception they all had chance after chance after chance but continued to steal, do drugs, etc and got progressively worse. Prison was the last resort to get them off the streets after they injured someone. Perhaps we'd end up with fewer in prison if we weren't so indulgent? I don't know. No easy solutions here.

so, 135 in 136 are not in jail.

I personally know no-one that has been in jail for any longer than one night.

Don't do the crime if you can't do the time.