Sunday, October 12, 2014

Private Prison Speech from 2011

I just gave a speech on Private Prisons in the US last week in a class. I researched the hell out of it. Get your mind blown. I wouldve expanded on the link between recidivism and education too but it was timed so I had to consolidate.

Pedro and Emily, a happy married couple exited their house with their son Logan when they were approached by ICE Immigration and Custom Enforcement officers. They handcuffed Pedro in front of his wife and son and took him away. He was held for 19 months on charges of neglecting an order of deportation that had been sent to the wrong address. He was considered an immigrant by the law overnight when his mother made a mistake in a permanent residency interview. Undocumented immigrant or not, the prison made $71,520 dollars for the 19 months he was detained and it greatly effected Logan, his son and his wife. "I was scared, but in the back of my mind I just felt like everything would eventually be OK because I was a citizen and he was married to me," said Emily Guzman, 33, a mental health therapist who was born and raised in the U.S. as stated in Kelsey Sheehy’s article in the Mclatchy Tribune News Service Nov 2011.

This is the reality for all minorities in dealing with the growing prison industrial complex in the US where the “business” gets paid per prisoner, per day. Vince Beiser states in “Jailing for Dollars” in New Leader 1997, Vol. 80: “An industry whose raw materials are incarcerated human beings has every reason to support policies that get more and more Americans thrown in jail for longer and longer sentences, regardless of their objective merits.” We can see this truth in cases like Pedro’s among many others, with policies implemented by politicians who are getting a payoff. This conflict of interest is what has consumed our judicial system and has even put innocent people to death.

I am going to inform you about the detrimental self-serving machine the judicial system has become to make private interests rich. I will explain how private prisons affect minorities, what the causes are and what needs to be done to truly have justice in the US.

 To understand the problem of this so called “need” for private prisons due to overcrowding, we need to look at who is targeted by legislation to get more people in prison for longer periods of time and what conditions have actually led to death for some male inmates from inadequate medical attention, raping of women, and child abuse.

Prison affects everyone. Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice think tank states in “Prison Building Boom” in Nov 2011 found in CQ Researcher: “In some places, kids see more people go to prison than they do leave for work every morning. What kind of message is that sending?”

The sad reality of our obsession with incarceration is evident when comparing our stats to the rest of the world. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.gov, in 2009, a little less than 2.3 million Americans were incarcerated. Albert Hunt breaks down the facts for us in his article “Incarceration: We’re Number One”, in Tulsa World, published this year, “There are 2.3 million people behind bars, almost one in every 100 Americans. The federal prison population has more than doubled over the past 15 years, and one in nine black children has a parent in jail.

With just a little more than 4 percent of the world's population, the U.S. accounts for a quarter of the planet's prisoners, and has more inmates than the leading 35 European countries combined. Almost all the other nations with high per capita prison rates are in the developing world.” The mindboggling statistic that hits home the hardest is that more than 60 percent of America's prisoners are black or Hispanic, though these groups comprise less than 30 percent of the population. If you haven’t noticed, there seems to be something very wrong here. Because of the US having the largest number of people in prison there is a high demand and a “necessity” to build prisons bigger and faster and the proponents of the industry of course claim it can be achieved cheaply through private prisons.

The problem lies with prisons that are supposed to house violent criminals, becoming a business where just like in any other business, shareholders need a return on their investments which translates to more people in prison. The detriment is multiplied when the investors are also the policymakers. GEO Group and Corrections Corp of America are the nation’s two largest companies that build, design, and operate prisons. Peter Cervantes Gautschi explains in ‘Wallstreet and our Campaign to Decriminalize Immigrants’ published by Masterfile premier in Nov 2010, “For the first time, many of those picked up were charged with crimes that carry long prison sentences. Soon after the Bush Administration implemented this change in law enforcement affecting immigrants, Wall Street advisors publicly recommended buying stock in private prison companies like CCA and GEO. One would like to think that bringing this information to Congress's attention would be enough to compel them to abandon policies that criminalize immigrants. This probable hesitation for Congress to act is not merely because of the substantial campaign contributions that Senators and members of Congress receive from the private prison industry. Most members of Congress have personal investments in one or more of CCA's or GEO's major shareholders.”

As I have illustrated, there is a huge conflict of interest in our “justice” system when a certain demographic of people are specifically singled out to make another demographic of people money. Needless to say, this is not how “justice” works, justice is not a business.

So what are the causes of people in prison? Besides greed, racism plays a big part all over the country and it is not just against Hispanic immigrants which we see in the stats regarding African American men. In the Chicago Tribune article entitled “How to scrub the stain of the Burge era” Aug 18, 2011 we hear another example of the US justice system’s vendetta against minorities. “Last year, former Chicago police Cmdr. Jon Burge was convicted of lying under oath about the systematic torture of African-American men that took place for decades at the Area 2 police headquarters.” This police lt was finally convicted of decades of torture of over 100 black inmates to make them confess to crimes they didn’t commit last year. This is not an isolated incident.

Another prime example of the racism in our system deals with the sentencing of violent criminals, especially in murder cases. In Veronica Gonzalez’s article “Racial Disparity Remains Wide in Death Sentences” in the Star News in Aug 2010 she writes: “Radelet and Glenn Pierce, a research scientist in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Northeastern University in Boston, analyzed data from North Carolina from 1980 to the end of 2007 and found that the odds of getting a death sentence are 2.96 times higher for those who kill whites than for those who kill blacks.” Michelle Alexander points out in her article “Cruel and Unusual” in Sojourners magazine in 2011 “Black and whites use drugs at about the same rate, yet African Americans are 10 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug offenses. These are the unbalanced effects of the ‘war on drugs.’”

Because the private prison system is such a complex issue, we can look at these examples of racism as also an effect. The underlying cause of racism goes back to many variables: insecurity, anger, fear and a lack of education. The system shows flaws from the streets, through the policing actions, through the court system itself to get minorities behind bars to profit the investors. It is hard to deny the motives behind the actions of the state as being anything but racist, unethical and money hungry.

Now I will expound on what needs to be done to combat this injustice at the national level.

In examining hard facts and statistics of prison demographics, and acknowledging the causes in the form of various forms of racism in the system from conviction to punishment, one thing is paramount in the solutions for these flaws: Education. In the Concord Monitor article “Early education prevents crime :Federal initiative will pay dividends” in 2009, Katherine Rogers states, “One of the most effective ways of reducing crime is providing at-risk kids access to quality early education. Research shows that giving children a chance to experience high-quality early learning can reduce later incarceration by a quarter or more - eventually saving our state $25 million every year through reduced prison costs.” A better quality education early on would, hands down, cut crime in all ethnicities and cut down on racism across the board.

Another simple way policy makers are able to criminalize minorities is by stricter drug laws that seem to pertain only to minorities. As stated above, only a certain demographic of people are being prosecuted for illicit drug use and it makes up a large percentage of the prison population. In “A Second Chance for Nonviolent Drug Offenders” printed by Harvard Law Review in 2011 we read “In 1992, 92.6 % of those convicted for crime involving crack cocaine were black, yet the US sentencing commission estimated that 65% of all crack cocaine users are white.” The US govt needs to push for more treatment programs across the board to help all ethnicities, if not legalize some drugs all together.

The question is, what can YOU do? Once again it goes back to education because you need to educate yourselves on who you are voting for, if you are voting. Remember, your votes count for the local and state elected officials even if you are cynical about our presidential indirect democracy. Voting for your local and state officials does count and they’re the ones who are going to make decisions in your state. We need to be proactive and not be afraid to stand up and call out the racism and injustice when we see it. It will affect you someday and that is almost a promise.

I’ve spent months incarcerated. I dealt with gang wars running with a Hispanic gang in jail and I can tell you, we are taught to look at each other differently and it is perpetuated in jail more than anywhere, while we minorities were the only ones in there. At time there was no rep for the wood car because there were so few. I’m not claiming I didn’t deserve to be there but I saw the business first hand as they kept beds filled at all times when they didn’t have to. It was filled with addicts who needed help, and there were no elements of correction in the correctional facility.

Bibliography

 CERVANTES-GAUTSCHI, PETER. "Wall Street & Our Campaign To Decriminalize Immigrants." Social Policy 40.3 (2010): 3. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

Symbolic Racism and Whites' Attitudes towards Punitive and Preventive Crime Policies Eva G. T. Green, Christian Staerklé and David O. Sears Law and Human Behavior , Vol. 30, No. 4 (Aug., 2006), pp. 435-454

Private Prisons Richard Harding Crime and Justice , Vol. 28, (2001), pp. 265-346 Published by: The University of Chicago Press TONY, JOHNSTON.

"Making Crime Pay." Sunday Herald Sun (Melbourne) (n.d.): Newspaper Source. Web. 14 Nov. 2011. Chen, Stephanie.

"Larger Inmate Population Is Boon to Private Prisons." Wall Street Journal. 19 Nov 2008: A.4. SIRS Issues Researcher.Web. 14 Nov 2011. Kelsey Sheehy.

 "Family's saga highlights kinks in immigrant detention system. " McClatchy - Tribune News Service 21 April 2011 ProQuest Newsstand, ProQuest. Web. 15 Nov. 2011. ALBERT R HUNT.

 "Incarceration: We're No. 1. " Tulsa World 27 Nov. 2011, ProQuest Newsstand, ProQuest. Web. 28 Nov. 2011. Hooks, GregoryMosher, ClaytonGenter, ShaunRotolo, ThomasLobao, Linda.

"Revisiting The Impact Of Prison Building On Job Growth: Education, Incarceration, And County-Level Employment, 1976–2004." Social Science Quarterly (Blackwell Publishing Limited) 91.1 (2010): 228-244. Professional Development Collection. Web. 28 Nov. 2011. Masci, David.

"Prison-Building Boom." CQ Researcher 17 Sept. 1999: 801-24. Web. 28 Nov. 2011. "How to scrub the stain of the Burge era. " Chicago Tribune 18 Aug. 2011,Chicago Tribune, ProQuest. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. Veronica Gonzalez.

 "Racial disparity remains wide in death sentences. " Star - News 8 Aug. 2010, ProQuest Newsstand, ProQuest. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. Alexander, M..

"CRUEL AND UNEQUAL. " Sojourners Magazine 1 Feb. 2011: Humanities Module, ProQuest. Web. 29 Nov. 2011. KATHERINE ROGERS, and SCOTT HILLIARD.

"Early education prevents crime :Federal initiative will pay dividends. " Concord Monitor 22 Sep. 2009, ProQuest Newsstand, ProQuest. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

 Winning The War On Drugs: A `Second Chance' For Nonviolent Drug Offenders." Harvard Law Review 113.6 (2000): 1485. Academic Search Premier. Web. 30 Nov. 2011.

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