Thread: Army Recruits Prisoners to Make Body Armor

Army Recruits Prisoners to Make Body Armor

By Noah Shachtman
March 10, 2011 | 7:00 am



Building parts for Patriot missile systems was just a warm-up, apparently, for a government-owned company that relies on federal inmates making as little as 23 cents an hour. On Wednesday, the U.S. Army announced that it handed Federal Prison Industries a no-bid, nearly $20 million contract to build body armor.

It’s the latest in a decades-long string of military deals for FPI, also known as Unicor. Over the years, the company has supplied parts for F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, the Cobra attack helicopter, and the iconic Patriot interceptor system. (More about that in a second.)

But this deal is particularly odd, because FPI’s track record with protective equipment is, to put it generously, uneven. In May of last year, the Army recalled 44,000 FPI-made protective helmets after they failed ballistic testing. FPI then promptly got out of the helmet business.

That rather serious blemish on FPI’s record hasn’t stopped the Army from going back to the firm for $19,767,468’s worth of bulletproof “Outer Tactical Vests.â€

this is called racketeering

destroy the economy so there are no jobs; no manufacturing

start up a company that politicians can front load on the stock market and undercut the manufacturing in the country so hard that no other company can compete with the wages of a prisoner

create a never ending war

allowing Illegal Aliens into the country just so they can be arrested and put into prison as slave labor making .23 cents an hour

Privatize prisons so that politicians can profit from in their stock portfolio as well as make laws to put more people in prisons to get more money from the tax payer

they are ripping you of coming and going and is the perfect crime

either way; this is Racketeering

Prisoners Help Build Patriot Missiles
By Noah Shachtman
March 8, 2011 12:24 pm
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03 ... -missiles/

Why are Prisoners Building Patriot Missiles?
By Justin Rohrlich Mar 07, 2011 12:30 pm
http://www.minyanville.com/businessmark ... 1/id/33198

Politicians are allowed... by the laws that they created to buy stock in any company that will profit on any laws that they vote on... again .. (This used to be called Racketeering)

in short

~ Start a never ending war to get the tax payer to fund manufacturing that it would normally not do

~ Privitize prisons so politicians can invest in them

~ Destroy the economy so that more crimes are commited for more people to be sent behind bars

~ Allow Illegal Aliens to come into the country to fill the prisons to max capacity

~ Undercut the manufacturing base by using slave prison labor that no country or company in the U.S. Manufacturing can compete with

~ Tax payers pay premium price on the prisoner upkeep basically to the politician that invests in them

~ Invent a company that builds military items on the cheap (Cheap Labor / Slave Labor) .23 cents an hour and sells the items to the international community at PREMIUM Prices

~ Poiticians invest in this manufacturing company as well as companies that supply the material

~ Make more laws to put more people behind bars

~ Keep the Never ending war going by creating more Boogie Men; ficticious or not

Its the perfect crime .. but like I said... its still Racketeering

Now I fully support prisoners being made to be useful to society for a change. However prisons should be run by the local, state, federal level. If by chance a private one those inmates should still be allowed to be considered state/federal available labor pool w/o being charged by the prison.

Now one thing I have to disagree with, how much the prisoners make is BS by the article imo. How much does it cost to provide securitty, food, housing, medical, and everything else for these inmates? They should be glad they are making a single red cent year let alone an hour. They OWE society, I see nothing wrong with while in prison making them pay off that debt. Plus they get some valuable work experience and hopefully come to appreciate work.

We need to put every single prisoner to work who's in the prison system be it for life or 6 months. Clean up the highways, build roads, basic manufacture work and so forth. Hell, let them make barbies for all I care as long as we are making them pay back society in some way.

I agree with reform i would like to see these jobs in privite sector to give people jobs. But it could be worse those jobs could be out sorced in other countrys. But inmates shouldent make a dime. More inmates should be out on our roads picking up trash and mowing but when you drive around what do you see MEXICANS doing that work. You cant blame the MEXICANS blame the ones that hire them. They bid these jobs with state like they always do get the contract and hire cheap labor put the extra money in their pockets so blame the people that hire them. Idont agree with paying prisoners wages but better them than illegals.

Related: The Coup Of 2012: Encroachment Upon Basic Freedoms, Militarized Police State In Ameri

Bttt

Related: http://www.alipac.us/f19/obama-admin...agenda-259951/

Happy Independence Day from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation! (Photo: A female inmate works on an American flag while working in the Prison Industries Authority Fabrics program at the Central California Women's Facility on Thursday, April 5, 2012 in Chowchilla, Calif. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle / SF)

Made in USA by Prison Labor!!!

Bleeding Cash GREEDY CORPORATIS...TS are counting on, and taking advantage of folks' apathy & disdains for prisoners & for "illegal" immigrants to overlook the fact that jobs traditionally performed by skilled workers are taken away from them to be outsourced to cheap prison labor.

Prisoners are exploited by corporations, paid more or less 40 cts/hour, more often less than more, sometimes paid nothing at all, in lieu of the minimum $7.50/hour that corporations would have to pay to law abiding citizens. The difference, quite clearly, contributes to major corporate profits, while folks outside walls are still unemployed and continue to lose their jobs.

When you consider the major corporations that employ prison labor (furniture factories, Microsoft, Boing, IBM, Starbuck, Victoria secret, BP, Sodexo, medical supplies, road signs, military supplies, etc.) you quickly realize that moving jobs back to mainstream America would surely help diminish unemployment figures!!!

So, the higher the incarceration rates, the more outsourcing of jobs to prisons, the higher the unemployment rate, and the more dramatic the race to the bottom for skilled workers.

In the end, here is how the bleeding of the people's cash occurs: 1) incarceration costs paid with our tax money (translated into profits for private prisons and corporations) + 2) unemployment benefits also paid with our tax money for people, whose jobs were outsourced to prisons.

I also believe that the loss of women's rights and the criminalization of women's sexuality is related to for-profit incarceration. One day, a friend of mine raised the following issues on miscarriages, contraception, personhood, etc.: "How could an initiative be on multiple states agenda so suddenly - so out of the blue? What is being swept under the rug by the media?" That's when I understood the connection: The private prison industry is obviously lobbying for more customers! Which other industry or institution would benefit from criminalizing abortion and contraception, you think???

The rationale that some industry creates "jobs" in towns economically deprived, and is therefore justified is morally reprehensible. Hitler's death camps created a lot of civilian jobs also. A job based on locking folks up for economic gains has no justification. It's called human trafficking!!! Don't get fooled by the "it creates jobs" nonsense. Factories, instead of prisons, could also be built in such towns. Instead, factories are investing in prisons to exploit prison labor, instead of paying decent wages to free citizens outside of prisons.

A "job" that results in taking people's freedom away, just so someone can have a "job", a private prison turn a profit, and corporations exploit prison labor, is not a "job"---it's a violent assault on society.

“There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.” Montesquieu

Remember! Germans did not want to know about their Concentration Camps, very much like today's Americans do not want to know about their own Labor Camps, or else they justify their existence for them to cultivate the illusion of a good conscience.

Quote: "In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted… and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie…. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously…even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds…" ~ A. Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. 1, ch. X

We are faced with a very serious situation, folks!!!

~Monique D'hooghe