US rates of incarceration beat those of any European country to include Russia and former satellites of Stalin's Soviet Union. By the time you read this, more than 2.3 million adults will have been locked up in 'big houses' throughout the US. That number far exceeds some 1.8 million adult prisoners representing the total prison population of 36 European countries where the aggregate population is 2.7 times that of the US.
A recent Pew study fingers a trend that had been embraced by Bush's Texas --the rapid outsourcing of prison construction and management throughout the US. Over this period, crime rates have risen. It was Texas under the incompetent rule of then Governor George W. Bush that became known as the gulag state of Texas for having turned a social problem into just another GOP scam, a get rich quick scheme, another way in which GOP blood-suckers feed at the public trough. Convicts are no longer people but a source of cheap, slave labor. Guilt or innocence is of no concern to corporate robber barons. It is an Orwellian nightmare of waste, graft, and fascism in which no one is held to account.
After months alone in his cell, Scot Noble Payne finished 20 pages of letters, describing to loved ones the decrepit conditions of the prison where he was serving time for molesting a child. Then Payne used a razor blade to slice two 3-inch gashes in his throat. Guards found his body in the cell's shower, with the water still running.
"Try to comfort my mum too and try to get her to see that I am truly happy again," he wrote his uncle. "I tell you, it sure beats having water on the floor 24/7, a smelly pillow case, sheets with blood stains on them and a stinky towel that hasn't been changed since they caught me."
Payne's suicide on March 4 came seven months after he was sent to the squalid privately run Texas prison by Idaho authorities trying to ease inmate overcrowding in their own state. His death exposed what had been Idaho's standard practice for dealing with inmates sent to out-of-state prisons: Out of sight, out of mind.
It also raised questions about a company hired to operate prisons in 15 states, despite reports of abusive guards and terrible sanitation.
Hundreds of pages of documents obtained by The Associated Press through an open-records request show Idaho did little monitoring of out-of-state inmates, despite repeated complaints from prisoners, their families and a prison inspector.
It is no surprise that filthy rich, GOP robber barons would find big bucks in the prison business, a process that begins when the 'state' outsources every aspect of penal industry --prison construction, staffing, operation. Profitability is directly related to the number of inmates who are ultimately arrested and convicted, often upon the flimiest evidence. Certainly, the money to be made in the prison business is directly related to arrest and conviction rates. Corporate profits drive the system --not justice
The lesson to be learned is that if you don't care about your soul and just want to get rich, forget about real estate! Set your sites high. Operate your own gulag archipelago of robotized prisons to warehouse 'evil doers' to include those were merely fall through the gaping, yawning holes in a 'safety net' that never was.
The United States holds the dubious distinction of having the largest incarcerated population in the world, with 2 million people behind bars as of year-end 1999.2 With only 5% of the world's population, the US holds a quarter of the world's prisoners In the 1990s alone, more persons were added to prisons and jails than in any other decade on record.
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In a continued examination of those states that lead the national trend in increasing levels of incarceration, the Justice Policy Institute turns a focus on the state of Texas. The Lone Star State's criminal justice system is particularly worthy of scrutiny at this time, as the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reported in August, 2000 that Texas, for the first time, leads the nation in imprisoning its citizens: Texas now has the nation's largest incarcerated population under the jurisdiction of its prison system. Since 1990, Texas has lead the nation's 50 states with an annual average growth rate of 11.8%, about twice the annual average growth rate of other state prison systems (6.1%). Even more important to the national context, since 1990, nearly one in five new prisoners added to the nation's prisons (18%) was in Texas.
As the GOP "Enronized" the great state of Texas, an assembly line criminal justice system, in cahoots with a medieval, privatized prison system, proved to be an oxymoron. It was "criminal" but hardly "justice". Despite the GOPs "worst" efforts, crime in Texas, always a topic of much discussion and study, has gotten worse. Texas is big on capital punishment, but even its industrialized application of the death penalty just cannot kill off the criminals as fast as they procreate and multiply. The GOP may be seeking a "final solution".
...by year's end 1999, there were 706,600 Texans in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day. In a state with 14 million adults, this meant that 5% of adult Texans, or 1 out of every 20, are under some form of criminal justice supervision. The scale of what is happening in Texas is so huge, it is difficult to contrast the size of its criminal justice systems to the other states' systems it dwarfs:
There are more Texans under criminal justice control than the entire populations of some states, including Vermont, Wyoming and Alaska.
According to Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates, one quarter of the nation's parole and probationers are in Texas. California and Texas, together, comprise half the nation's parolees and probationers.
The number of people incarcerated in Texas (in prison or jail) reached 207,526 in mid-year 1999. Only California, with 10 million more citizens, has more people in both prison and jail.
Texas has a rate of 1,035 people behind bars for every 100,000 in the population, the second highest incarceration rate in the nation (second only to Louisiana). If Texas was a nation separate from the United States, it would have the world's highest incarceration rate--significantly higher than the United States (682), and Russia (685) which has 1 million prisoners, the world's third biggest prison system. Texas' incarceration rate is also higher than China (115), which has the world's second largest prison population (1.4 million prisoners).
If the US shared the incarceration rate of Texas, there would be nearly three million Americans behind bars (2,822,300)--instead of our current 2 million prisoners.
The Texas prison population tripled since 1990, and rose 61.5% in the last five years of this decade alone. In 1994, there were 92, 669 prisoners in Texas. This number had increased to 149,684 by mid-year 1999.
The Texas correctional system has grown so large that in July 2000, corrections officials ran out of six digit numbers to assign inmates, and officially created prisoner number 1,000,000.
Texas is called the gulag state for good reasons. Certainly, justice in Texas is applied inequitably. Minorities --primarily black and hispanic --are disproportionately represented in the Texas gulag system but under represented in the State legislature, the various city councils, and the state judicial system. For example, blacks represent only 12% of the Texas population but comprise 44% of the total incarcerated population. Whites make up about 58% of Texas' total population, but only 30% of the prison and jail population.
While one out of every 20 Texas adults is under some form of criminal justice control, one out of 3 young black men (29% of the black male population between 21 and 29) are in prison, jail, parole or probation on any given day.
One out of every four adult black men in Texas is under some form of criminal justice supervision.
Blacks in Texas are incarcerated at a rate seven times greater than whites. While there are 555 whites behind bars for every 100,000 in the Texas population, there are an astonishing 3862 African Americans behind bars for every 100,000 in the state. This is nearly 63% higher than the national incarceration rate for blacks of 2366 per 100,000.
If Texas' black incarceration rate was applied to the United States, the number of blacks behind bars on a national level would increase by half a million. There are currently an estimated 824,900 African Americans in prison and jail in the US The new figure, 1,346,370, would increase the number of African Americans incarcerated in the US by 63%.
The GOP are consistent to the point of boring. Therefore, what the GOP has done to Texas is a clue to the effect Bush/GOP rule has had nationally, globally. The GOP modus operandi is premised as it is upon delusion, lies, spin, claptrap ideology and bullshit! The increasingly absurd campaign of John McCain is proof of that. Failing to wage an effective "war on terrorism" abroad, the GOP presides over rising crime rates at home, throughout the nation.
The GOP has always been fond of waging wars on crime though the party itself is a crime syndicate.
Five years of crime rates show that murders, robberies, rapes and other violent offenses last year were returning to the peak, set in 2002. Crime dropped dramatically after that, the figures show.
In 2006, an estimated 1,417,000 violent crimes were committed, a sharp increase from the 1,360,000 reported in 2004 and approaching the estimated 1,425,000 in 2002.
Len Hart is a Houston based film/video producer specializing in shorts and full-length documentaries. He is a former major market and network correspondent; credits include CBS, ABC-TV and UPI. He maintains the progressive blog: The Existentialist Cowboy
I see the same general connection you do between big business (or what I refer to as the barons of capital) and the proliferation of the gulag in the U.S. Sure, its growth is intimately joined with the corporate drive to squeeze profits from any source it can. As we've learned anything that turns a profit can be marketed in a way to artificially create a continuing need. Yet, I sense there is another way in which the growth of the gulag is connected to capitalism. I haven't yet precisely clarified it but it's related to the imperatives of a socio-economic system based in the exploitation of labor. Capitalism has a driving need to discipline the work force it depends on to create the surplus value it craves. Property laws and the criminal justice system contribute, at least in part, to this imperative. This needs much more thought and development, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this approach.
By the way you might be interested in checking out the page for the OpEdNews political discussion group called "Capitalism - threat to life on earth".
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Cameron James (0 articles, 4 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 19 comments)
on Saturday, March 1, 2008 at 7:33:43 PM
I see the same general connection you do between big business (or what I refer to as the barons of capital) and the proliferation of the gulag in the U.S. Sure, its growth is intimately joined with the corporate drive to squeeze profits from any source it can. As we've learned anything that turns a profit can be marketed in a way to artificially create a continuing need.
And that, I think, is a key point. The GOP is merely the most convenient, obvious offender, perhaps the easiest target, the most visible enabler. Even so, it must remain a target of criticism for its role in enslaving Americans. GOP policies create and exploit income and opportunity inequalities, factors which, in turn, make crime worse while exacerbating numerous 'social ills'. In a masterpiece of circular logic, the GOP simply cites the results of their own policies as justification to continue them. It works the other way, as well. For example, the GOP has tried mightily to subvert Social Security so that they could cite its 'failure' as reasons to kill it off. A favorite GOP tactic is an old tried and true formulaic response: 'it won't solve the problem'. And the GOP will work to make sure it doesn't.
Yet, I sense there is another way in which the growth of the gulag is connected to capitalism. I haven't yet precisely clarified it but it's related to the imperatives of a socio-economic system based in the exploitation of labor.
Is this what you have in mind? GOP policies most certainly make the rich, richer and the poor, poorer. Crime, easily proven to increase with income inequities, becomes the raison d'etre by which large segments of society are simply rounded up, incarcerated and, in many cases, forced to work for masters. Like the bloodsucking vampires they are, the GOP and its elite, robber baron base, can simply use the apparatus of state (in this case the criminal 'in'-justice system) to harvest those who have for various reasons fallen through the 'safety net'.
Thanks for the paper "Capitalism --Threat to Life on Earth".
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Len Hart (123 articles, 159 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 478 comments)
on Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 6:54:23 AM
Wait another year or two when we're neck-deep in a depression and we have hoards of homeless desperate people roaming the streets and they use these new microwave guns to herd us into the FEMA camps they've build all over the country that are now fully staffed and waiting our arrival. By then we're be wishing for the good-old-days of 1 in 10.
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Mr M (4 articles, 0 quicklinks, 9 diaries, 1253 comments)
on Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 8:58:46 AM
Even worse is that as things stand now, their lives are...
... finished. We decry the ricidivism rate in this country but at the same time, we prevent people who have been in prison from getting decent jobs. Then we have the temerity to be surprised when ex-cons commit new offenses. And this is getting worse, people are now not only checking whether or not you have been convicted of a crime, but your credit report can now stop you from getting a job.
Yet another brilliant conundrum. If you are hurting for money and having money problems, you will not be able to get a good paying job. If that isnt one of the more stupid things I have ever heard, I dont know what is.
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Steven Leser (193 articles, 37 quicklinks, 32 diaries, 1298 comments)
on Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 10:18:18 AM
The connections with VP Cheney and Senator Frist amazed even me. The Corrections Corporation of America rhymes right along with Hospital Corporation of America. Where does it end???
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Edward Ulysses Cate (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 217 comments)
on Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 7:35:42 PM
that Dubya was a stockholder in the company. It is no wonder that all illegals are jailed. Many misdemeanor crimes are now felony, for example in Texas to place a ficticious licence plate on a car is a felony. Dont spit on the sidewalk or you might get charged with biological terror.
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john riggs (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 392 comments)
on Monday, March 3, 2008 at 12:03:55 PM
