Thread: 30 Signs That The USA Is Being Turned Into A Giant Prison

30 Signs That The United States Of America Is Being Turned Into A Giant Prison



November 29th, 2011
78 comments
If you live in the United States of America, you live in a giant prison where liberty and freedom are slowly being strangled to death. In this country, the control freaks that run things are obsessed with watching, tracking, monitoring and recording virtually everything that we do. Nothing is private anymore. Everything that you do on the Internet is being monitored. All of your phone calls are being monitored. In fact, if law enforcement authorities suspect that you have done something wrong, they will use your cell phone microphone to listen to you even when you think your cell phone is turned off. In many areas of the country, when you get into your car automated license plate readers track you wherever you go, and in many major cities when you are walking on the streets a vast network of security cameras and "smart street lights" are constantly watching you and listening to whatever you say. The TSA is setting up "internal checkpoints" all over the nation, Homeland Security is encouraging all of us to report any "suspicious activity" that our neighbors are involved in and the federal government is rapidly developing "pre-crime" technology that will flag us as "potential terrorists" if we display any signs of nervousness. If you are flagged as a "potential terrorist", the U.S. military can arrest you and detain you for the rest of your life without ever having to charge you with anything. Yes, the United States of America is rapidly being turned into a "Big Brother" prison grid, and most Americans are happily going along with it. The sad thing is that this used to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave".
So what in the world happened?
A fundamental shift in our culture has taken place. The American people have eagerly given up huge chunks of liberty and freedom in exchange for vague promises of increased security.
Our country is now run by total control freaks and paranoia has become standard operating procedure.
We were told that the terrorists hate our liberties and our freedoms, and that we needed to fight the terrorists so that we could keep our liberties and our freedoms.
But instead, the government keeps taking away all of our liberties and our freedoms.
How in the world does that make any sense?
Have the terrorists won?
As a country, we have moved so far in the direction of communist China, the USSR and Nazi Germany that it is almost impossible to believe.
Yes, turning the United States of America into a giant prison may make us all slightly safer, but what kind of life is this?
Do we want to be dead while we are still alive?
Is this the price that we want to pay in order to feel slightly safer?
Where are the millions of Americans that still yearn to breathe free air?
America is supposed to be a land teeming with people thirsting for independence. For example, "Live Free or Die" is supposedly the official motto of the state of New Hampshire.
But instead, the motto of most Americans seems to be "live scared and die cowering".
We don't have to live like this.
Yes, bad things are always going to happen. No amount of security is ever going to be able to keep us 100% safe.
We need to remember that a very high price was paid for our liberty and we should not give it up so easily.
As one very famous American once said, when we give up liberty for security we deserve neither.
The following are 30 signs that the United States of America is being turned into a giant prison....
#1 A new bill that is going through the U.S. Senate would allow the U.S. military to arrest American citizens and hold them indefinitely without trial. This new law was recently discussed in an article posted on the website of the New American....

In what may be a tale too bizarre to be believed by millions of Americans, the U.S. Senate appears ready to pass a bill that will designate the entire earth, including the United States and its territories, one all-encompassing “battlefield” in the global “war on terror” and authorize the detention of Americans suspected of terrorist ties indefinitely and without trial or even charges being filed that would necessitate a trial.

U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham is a big supporter of the bill, and he says that it would "basically say in law for the first time that the homeland is part of the battlefield".
According to the PPJ Gazette, the following are three things that this new law would do....

1) Explicitly authorize the federal government to indefinitely imprison without charge or trial American citizens and others picked up inside and outside the United States;
(2) Mandate military detention of some civilians who would otherwise be outside of military control, including civilians picked up within the United States itself; and
(3) Transfer to the Department of Defense core prosecutorial, investigative, law enforcement, penal, and custodial authority and responsibility now held by the Department of Justice.

#2 U.S. Senator Joe Lieberman is asking Google to install a "terrorist button" on all Blogger.com blogs so that readers can easily flag "terrorist content" for authorities.
#3 Most Americans have no idea how sophisticated the "Big Brother" prison grid has become. For example, in Washington D.C. the movements of every single car are tracked using automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The following comes from a recent Washington Post article....

More than 250 cameras in the District and its suburbs scan license plates in real time, helping police pinpoint stolen cars and fleeing killers. But the program quietly has expanded beyond what anyone had imagined even a few years ago.
With virtually no public debate, police agencies have begun storing the information from the cameras, building databases that document the travels of millions of vehicles.
Nowhere is that more prevalent than in the District, which has more than one plate-reader per square mile, the highest concentration in the nation. Police in the Washington suburbs have dozens of them as well, and local agencies plan to add many more in coming months, creating a comprehensive dragnet that will include all the approaches into the District.

#4 In some American schools, RFID chips are now being used to monitor the attendance and movements of children while they are at school. The following is how one article recently described a program that has just been instituted at a preschool in California....

Upon arriving in the morning, according to the Associated Press, each student at the CCC-George Miller preschool will don a jersey with a stitched in RFID chip. As the kids go about the business of learning, sensors in the school will record their movements, collecting attendance for both classes and meals. Officials from the school have claimed they're only recording information they're required to provide while receiving federal funds for their Headstart program.

#5 Increasingly, incidents of misbehavior at many U.S. schools are being treated as very serious crimes. For example, when a little girl kissed a little boy at one Florida elementary school recently, it was considered to be a "possible sex crime" and the police were called out.
#6 But what happened to one very young student in Stockton, California earlier this year was even worse....

Earlier this year, a Stockton student was handcuffed with zip ties on his hands and feet, forced to go to the hospital for a psychiatric evaluation and was charged with battery on a police officer. That student was 5 years old.

#7 In the United States today, police are trained to respond to even the smallest crimes with extreme physical force. For example, one grandfather in Arizona was recently filmed laying unconscious in a pool of his own blood after police rammed his head into the flood inside a Wal-Mart on Black Friday night. It was thought that he was shoplifting, but it turns out that he says that he was just trying to tuck a video game away so other crazed shoppers would not grab it out of his hands.
#8 Did you know that the government actually sets up fake cell phone towers that can intercept your cell phone calls? The following is how a recent Wired article described these "stingrays"....

You make a call on your cellphone thinking the only thing standing between you and the recipient of your call is your carrier’s cellphone tower. In fact, that tower your phone is connecting to just might be a boobytrap set up by law enforcement to ensnare your phone signals and maybe even the content of your calls.
So-called stingrays are one of the new high-tech tools that authorities are using to track and identify you. The devices, about the size of a suitcase, spoof a legitimate cellphone tower in order to trick nearby cellphones and other wireless communication devices into connecting to the tower, as they would to a real cellphone tower.
The government maintains that the stingrays don’t violate Fourth Amendment rights, since Americans don’t have a legitimate expectation of privacy for data sent from their mobile phones and other wireless devices to a cell tower.

#9 U.S. border agents are allowed by law to search any laptop being brought into the United States without even needing any reason to do so.
#10 In the United States of America, everyone is a "potential terrorist". According to FBI Director Robert Mueller, "homegrown terrorists" represent as big a threat to American national security as al-Qaeda does.
#11 Most Americans are not that concerned about the Patriot Act, but that might change if they understood that the federal government has a "secret interpretation" of what the Patriot Act really means. U.S. Senator Ron Wyden says that the U.S. government interprets the Patriot Act much more "broadly" than the general public does....

"We’re getting to a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the American government secretly thinks the law says."

#12 The FBI is now admittedly recording Internet talk radio programs all over the United States. The following comes from a recent article by Mark Weaver of WMAL.com....

If you call a radio talk show and get on the air, you might be recorded by the FBI.
The FBI has awarded a $524,927 contract to a Virginia company to record as much radio news and talk programming as it can find on the Internet.
The FBI says it is not playing big brother by policing the airwaves, but rather seeking access to what airs as potential evidence.

#13 The federal government has decided that what you and I share with one another on Facebook and on Twitter could be a threat to national security. According to a recent Associated Press article, the Department of Homeland Security will soon be "gleaning information from sites such as Twitter and Facebook for law enforcement purposes".
#14 What you say on your cell phone is never private. The truth is that that the FBI can demand to see your cell phone data whenever it wants. In addition, according to CNET News the FBI can remotely activate the microphone on your cell phone and listen to whatever you are saying....

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.
The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

#15 In some areas of the country, law enforcement authorities are pulling data out of cell phones for no reason whatsoever. According to the ACLU, state police in Michigan are now using "extraction devices" to download data from the cell phones of motorists that they pull over. This is taking place even if the motorists that are pulled over are not accused of doing anything wrong.
The following is how a recent article on CNET News described the capabilities of these "extraction devices"....

The devices, sold by a company called Cellebrite, can download text messages, photos, video, and even GPS data from most brands of cell phones. The handheld machines have various interfaces to work with different models and can even bypass security passwords and access some information.

#16 The federal government has become so paranoid that they have been putting GPS tracking devices on the vehicles of thousands of people that have not even been charged with committing any crimes. The following is a short excerpt from a recent Wired magazine article about this issue....

The 25-year-old resident of San Jose, California, says he found the first one about three weeks ago on his Volvo SUV while visiting his mother in Modesto, about 80 miles northeast of San Jose. After contacting Wired and allowing a photographer to snap pictures of the device, it was swapped out and replaced with a second tracking device. A witness also reported seeing a strange man looking beneath the vehicle of the young man’s girlfriend while her car was parked at work, suggesting that a tracking device may have been retrieved from her car.
Then things got really weird when police showed up during a Wired interview with the man.
The young man, who asked to be identified only as Greg, is one among an increasing number of U.S. citizens who are finding themselves tracked with the high-tech devices.
The Justice Department has said that law enforcement agents employ GPS as a crime-fighting tool with “great frequency,” and GPS retailers have told Wired that they’ve sold thousands of the devices to the feds.

#17 New high-tech street lights that are being funded by the federal government and that are being installed all over the nation can also be used as surveillance cameras, can be used by the DHS to make "security announcements" and can even be used to record personal conversations. The following is from a recent article by Paul Joseph Watson for Infowars.com....

Federally-funded high-tech street lights now being installed in American cities are not only set to aid the DHS in making “security announcements” and acting as talking surveillance cameras, they are also capable of “recording conversations,” bringing the potential privacy threat posed by ‘Intellistreets’ to a whole new level.

#18 If you choose to protest in the streets of America today, there is a good chance that you will be brutalized. All over the United States law enforcement authorities have been spraying pepper spray directly into the faces of unarmed protesters in recent weeks.
#19 In many areas of the United States today, you will be arrested if you do not produce proper identification for the police. In the old days, "your papers please" was a phrase that was used to use to mock the tyranny of Nazi Germany. But now all of us are being required to be able to produce "our papers" for law enforcement authorities at any time. For example, a 21-year-old college student named Samantha Zucker was recently arrested and put in a New York City jail for 36 hours just because she could not produce any identification for police.
#20 According to blogger Alexander Higgins, students in kindergarten and the 1st grade in the state of New Jersey are now required by law to participate "in monthly anti-terrorism drills". The following is an excerpt from a letter that he recently received from the school where his child attends....

Each month a school must conduct one fire drill and one security drill which may be a lockdown, bomb threat, evacuation, active shooter, or shelter-in place drill. All schools are now required by law to implement this procedure.

So who in the world ever decided that it would be a good idea for 1st grade students to endure "lockdown" and "active shooter" drills?
To get an idea of what these kinds of drills are like, just check out this video.
#21 With all of the other problems that we are having all over the nation, you would think that authorities would not be too concerned about little kids that are trying to sell cups of lemonade. But sadly, over the past year police have been sent in to shut down lemonade stands run by children all over the United States.
#22 The federal government has decided to invest a significant amount of time, money and energy raiding organic farms. The following example comes from Natural News....

It is the latest case of extreme government food tyranny, and one that is sure to have you reeling in anger and disgust. Health department officials recently conducted a raid of Quail Hollow Farm, an organic community supported agriculture (CSA) farm in southern Nevada, during its special "farm to fork" picnic dinner put on for guests -- and the agent who arrived on the scene ordered that all the fresh, local produce and pasture-based meat that was intended for the meal be destroyed with bleach.

#23 It is an absolute disgrace that all of us (including grandmothers and young children) must either go through body scanners that reveal the intimate details of our naked bodies or endure "enhanced pat-downs" during which our genitals will be touched before we are allowed to get on an airplane.
It is also an absolute disgrace that the American people are putting up with this.
#24 Invasive TSA security techniques are not just for airports anymore. Now, TSA "VIPR teams" are actively conducting random inspections at bus stations and on interstate highways all over the United States. For example, the following comes from a local news report down in Tennessee....

You're probably used to seeing TSA's signature blue uniforms at the airport, but now agents are hitting the interstates to fight terrorism with Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response (VIPR).
"Where is a terrorist more apt to be found? Not these days on an airplane more likely on the interstate," said Tennessee Department of Safety & Homeland Security Commissioner Bill Gibbons.
Tuesday Tennessee was first to deploy VIPR simultaneously at five weigh stations and two bus stations across the state.

TSA "VIPR teams" now conduct approximately 8,000 "unannounced security screenings" a year at subway stations, bus terminals, ports and highway rest stops.
#25 More than a million hotel television sets all over America are now broadcasting propaganda messages from the Department of Homeland Security promoting the "See Something, Say Something" campaign. In essence, the federal government wants all of us to become "informants" and to start spying on one another constantly. The following comes from an article posted by USA Today....

Starting today, the welcome screens on 1.2 million hotel television sets in Marriott, Hilton, Sheraton, Holiday Inn and other hotels in the USA will show a short public service announcement from DHS. The 15-second spot encourages viewers to be vigilant and call law enforcement if they witness something suspicious during their travels.

#26 Certain "types" of American citizens are being labeled as potential threats in official U.S. government documents. An unclassified Department of Homeland Security report published a couple years ago entitled "Right-wing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment" claims that a belief in Bible prophecy "could motivate extremist individuals and groups to stockpile food, ammunition and weapons." The report goes on to state that such people are potentially dangerous.
#27 Back on February 20, 2009, the State of Missouri issued a report entitled "MIAC Strategic Report: The Modern Militia Movement". That report warned that the following types of people may be potential terrorists....
*anti-abortion activists
*those that are against illegal immigration
*those that consider "the New World Order" to be a threat
*those that have a negative view of the United Nations
#28 As I have written about previously, a very disturbing document that Oath Keepers has obtained shows that the FBI is now instructing store owners to report many new forms of "suspicious activity" to them. According to the document, "suspicious activity" now includes the following....
*paying with cash
*missing a hand or fingers
*"strange odors"
*making "extreme religious statements"
*"radical theology"
*purchasing weatherproofed ammunition or match containers
*purchasing meals ready to eat
*purchasing night vision devices, night flashlights or gas masks
Do any of those "signs of suspicious activity" apply to you?
#29 Soon you may get labeled as a "potential terrorist" if you are just feeling a little nervous. A new "pre-crime" technology system that is currently being tested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security will soon be in use all over the nation. It is called "Future Attribute Screening Technology" (FAST), and it is very frightening. The following description of this new program comes from an article in the London Telegraph....

Using cameras and sensors the "pre-crime" system measures and tracks changes in a person's body movements, the pitch of their voice and the rhythm of their speech.
It also monitors breathing patterns, eye movements, blink rate and alterations in body heat, which are used to assess an individual's likelihood to commit a crime.
The Future Attribute Screening Technology (FAST) programme is already being tested on a group of government employees who volunteered to act as guinea pigs.

#30 The truth is that nobody puts more people into prison than America does. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and the largest total prison population on the entire globe.
To read about some of the crazy things that the control freaks running things have planned for the future, just check out this article by Natural News: "10 outlandish things the 'scientific' controllers have in mind for you in the near future".
Once again, despite all of this outrageous "security", it is inevitable that a lot of really bad things are going to happen in the United States in the years ahead.
When there are incidents of violence, it is also inevitable that there will be calls for even more "Big Brother" security measures.
We are going to be caught in a never ending spiral of tyranny where the "solution" is always even tighter security.
Eventually, we will have lost all of our liberties and freedoms, and we will probably be even less safe than we are today.
Do not be deceived. We could put a soldier on every corner, a video camera in every room of every home and an RFID chip in every citizen but that would not make us "safe".
Every single lawmaker that is backing these laws which strip our liberties and freedoms away deserves to be voted out of office.
If you love the United States of America, please stand up and say something while you still can.
Please use this article and other articles like it as tools. Share them with your friends and your family. If we can get enough people to wake up, perhaps there is still enough time to turn the direction of this country around.
Will the final chapters of the history of the United States of America be mentioned in the same breath as communist China, the USSR and Nazi Germany, or will the final chapters of the history of the United States of America be the greatest chapters of all?
The choice, America, is up to you.

http://endoftheamericandream.com/arc...a-giant-prison

as long as you understand the prisons are now PRIVATIZED and many of these Politicians Writing the laws Have Stock in these prisons then you should also expect them to profit by locking you up by laws that they write

in the same fasion that the politicians that wrote the health care bill have a massive amount of stock in the medical care field

in the same fasion that the politicians that are war profiteering have a massive amount of stock in the military industrial complex

as it sits right now people like John McCain have stock in a company that pays prisoners 23 cents an hour to build parts for the Patriot Missle system

not only does this degrade our industrial base by giving the jobs to prisoners instead of the middle class

not only does it still cost the tax payer the same amount of money for that patriot missle system. but more profit goes to the company that rewards the politicians that have stock in the company

they write laws to put you in jail.... they make BIG BUCKS DOING IT and you the tax payer are going to pay for them to LOCK YOU UP

WHODATHUNKIT ... The are going to get rich on all sides of any issue that comes before them and of course they made Insider Trading LEGAL for Politicians

.... Uuuuh Martha Stewart went to Prison for what? Insider Trading

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

Bttt

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

Related: Private Prison Company to Demand 90% Occupancy

Buying Prisons Is Big Business For Corporate Slave Traders

Breaking News | April 26, 2012

(Glen Ford) The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, this month sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.

For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.


The attempted prison grab is also defensive in nature. If private companies can gain both ownership and management of enough prisons, they can set the prices without open-bid competition for prison services, creating a guaranteed cost-plus monopoly like that which exists between the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.

“If private companies are allowed to own the deeds to prisons, they are a big step closer to owning the people inside them.”

But, for a better analogy, we must go back to the American slave system, a thoroughly capitalist enterprise that reduced human beings to units of labor and sale. The Corrections Corporation of America’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission read very much like the documents of a slave-trader.

Investors are warned that profits would go down if the demand for prisoners declines. That is, if the world’s largest police state shrinks, so does the corporate bottom line.

Dangers to profitability include “relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.” The corporation spells it out: “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.” At the Corrections Corporation of America, human freedom is a dirty word.

But, there is something even more horrifying than the moral turpitude of the prison capitalists. If private companies are allowed to own the deeds to prisons, they are a big step closer to owning the people inside them.

Many of the same politicians that created the system of mass Black incarceration over the past 40 years, would gladly hand over to private parties all responsibility for the human rights of inmates.

The question of inmates’ rights is hardly raised in the debate over prison privatization. This is a dialogue steeped in slavery and racial oppression. Just as the old slave markets were abolished, so must the Black American Gulag be dismantled – with no compensation to those who traffic in human beings.

Source

Buying Prisons Is A Big Business For Corporate Slave Traders :

Prison Industries- Don’t Let Society Improve Or We Lose Business

Breaking News | April 28, 2012 | 0 Comments

(Dina Rasor) One out of every 100 people in the United States is imprisoned. Even though we are 5 percent of the world’s population, we have 25 percent of the prisoners in the world.

We are number one in the world in the number of people we imprison – we even beat China. A normal reaction to this situation would be to try to reform our laws, our judicial system – including sentencing – our prison system and our society so that we would not have the disconcerting distinction of being the number-one jailer in the world.

Instead, in the past decade, there has been a movement to privatize more and more of our state and federal prisons to save money (which has not materialized) and ease overcrowding under the pressure of the courts.

This has led to a wide world of influence peddling, self-dealing and lobbying while preying on a captured group of people to fill prison beds. Just as I have feared that privatizing the logistics of war will encourage private war-service industries to lobby for a hot war or long occupation to keep their industries viable, there has emerged a group of prison industries, state and federal legislators, and other players who will continue to benefit from our disgraceful ranking as the world’s largest warden.

There are two very large and influential prison companies in the United States who are manipulating the system to make sure they have plenty of business: The GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). In the first part of this two-part series, I will explore The GEO Group’s influence peddling; next week, I will look at CCA.
If you have any doubt in your mind that improving society and lowering the number of prisoners in our country (normally considered a worthy social goal) is a threat to the prison industry business, all you need to do is to read about that concern in The GEO Group’s 2011 annual report:

In particular, the demand for our correctional and detention facilities and services and BI’s [a prison industry company Geo acquired in 2011] services could be adversely affected by changes in existing criminal or immigration laws, crime rates in jurisdictions in which we operate, the relaxation of criminal or immigration enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction, sentencing or deportation practices, and the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws or the loosening of immigration laws. For example, any changes with respect to the decriminalization of drugs and controlled substances could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them. Similarly, reductions in crime rates could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities. Immigration reform laws which are currently a focus for legislators and politicians at the federal, state and local level also could materially adversely impact us.

This is an industry that needs misery, long sentences, rounded-up undocumented immigrants and increasing crime to flourish. In order to keep the prison beds filled, The GEO Group and others have paid out millions of dollars to lobbyists, federal and state legislators, and governors to allow our immigration problem to go unsolved, to make sure that no drugs are decriminalized and that an ineffective War on Drugs continues, and to make certain that long term prison sentences, like California’s three-strikes-and-you’re-imprisoned-for-life laws, keep a steady flow of revenue and profits flowing to their shareholders. They are also hoping that our national drop in crime is just a temporary trend.

According to California-drug-treatment.com: “Justice statistics also show that 47.5 percent of drug arrests in 2007 were for marijuana offenses. Also, almost 60 percent of state prison inmates who are serving time for a drug offense had no history of violence or of any significant selling activity.” One can imagine that The GEO Group and others in the industry would be very concerned about the myriad of legislative bills and ballot initiatives floating around the country that threaten to legalize marijuana and reduce their number of paying “beds.”

And The GEO Group does do a brisk business, mainly through the federal and state governments.

According to a thorough report, “Gaming the System,” which was issued last year by the Justice Policy Institute, the “state and federal prison population increased 722 percent between 1970 and 2009,” while as “of 2010, GEO contracts with 13 states, the Federal Bureau of Prison, the U.S. Marshals Service, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In 2010, 66 percent ($842 million) of GEO’s $1.27 billion in revenue was from U.S. corrections contracts. Of the $842 million in revenue, 47 percent came from corrections contracts with 11 states.”

Wells Fargo sees Geo Group and the prison industries as a good investment. According to anarticle by Charles Davis in Salon:

A driving force behind the push for ever-tougher sentences is the for-profit prison industry, in which Wells Fargo is a major investor…. Wells Fargo has been busy expanding its stake in the GEO Group, the second largest private jailer in America. At the end of 2011, Wells Fargo was the company’s second-largest investor, holding 4.3 million sharesvalued at more than $72 million. By March 2012, its stake had grown to more than 4.4 million shares worth $86.7 million.

The GEO Group, which is headquartered in Florida, and other private prison entities have spread plenty of lobbying money around in the Florida legislature to try to further privatize Florida’s prisons. Their first attempt failed after several floor votes, but based on the money they threw around and the money they can make running Florida’s prisons, they will be back to try again.
The Florida Independent reported:

According to the Institute [The National Institute on Money in State Politics], private prison groups have spent a lot of money to influence legislators:

Institute records show that donors from the private prison industry made nearly $1 millionin contributions to Florida campaigns in 2010 – the most the industry has given over the last decade, as illustrated by the Institute’s Industry Influence tool. The majority of the money came from five companies–Geo Group, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), Global Tel* Link, Armor Correctional Health Services, and LCS Corrections Services, Inc.
…
Since the state’s contribution limits cap corporate donations at $500 per candidate per election, these private prison firms gave most of their money to the state Democratic and Republican parties, which can receive unlimited amounts from corporations. The private prison industry demonstrated a signal preference for the Florida Republican Party, giving $783,494 compared to just $143,000 to the Florida Democratic Party.

In 2009, some members of the Texas legislature tried to stop the march of prison privatization in their state, only to find out just how entrenched The GEO Group was in the Texas political system.
From Texaswatchdog.org:

Two state lawmakers from South Texas have financial ties to a private prison firm that runs facilities for the Texas state prison system – at a time when lawmakers are debating sweeping new measures to clamp down on corrections companies.

State Sen. Judith Zaffirini, D-Laredo, and state Rep. Rene Oliveira, D-Brownsville, havefinancial links to the GEO Group, a Florida-based firm that runs 19 correctional facilities in Texas, including nine under contract for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice.

Zaffirini’s husband, Carlos, is a lawyer and advocate for the firm, formerly known as Wackenhut. In December 2007, the Zaffirinis’ hometown commissioners in rural Webb County considered whether to stop supplying water and sewer lines to a local GEO-owned prison after residents voiced concerns about the company’s track record. The Laredo Morning Times reported that Zaffirini put on a spirited defense of the firm, claiming the complaints against his client were ”steeped in emotion and void of logic.”

Oliveira, meanwhile, also has a cozy relationship with the prison company. HisBrownsville law firm serves as its local defense counsel. The House member’s cousin David Oliveira, a partner at the firm, has represented the company on a lawsuit alleging misconduct that one judge described as “reprehensible.”

Texas is still using the private prison industry in their state.

So, according to the people who are pushing for ever-increasing numbers of privatized prisons, this is the right way to deal with prisons – staying away from wasteful and ineffective state and federal governments and turning them over to the cheaper and better-run private companies. Unfortunately for the governments who have turned over more and more of their prisoners to The GEO Group, the outcomes have been abysmal.

Some examples:

Just a few days ago, NPR reported that The GEO Group completely pulled out of the state of Mississippi due to horrendous conditions in one of their youth facilities

One month after a federal court ordered sweeping changes at a troubled juvenile prison in rural Mississippi, the private company managing the prison has announced it is pulling out of the state. A report by the Justice Department describes “systemic, egregious and dangerous practices” at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility.

As those words imply, the official report is scathing.

Federal Judge Carlton Reeves wrote that the youth prison “has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk.”

Walnut Grove, located an hour’s drive east of Jackson, is a 1,450-bed prison that houses inmates ages 13 to 22 who are minors convicted as adults. It is run by GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla., the nation’s second-largest for-profit prison corporation, which posted a profit of $284 million last year. The Mississippi Department of Corrections pays GEO to manage the prison …

• Prison staff had sex with incarcerated youth, which investigators called “among the worst that we’ve seen in any facility anywhere in the nation.”
• Poorly trained guards brutally beat youth and used excessive pepper spray as a first response.
• The prison showed “deliberate indifference” to prisoners possessing homemade knives, which were used in gang fights and inmate rapes.
• Some guards had gang affiliations – a finding confirmed to NPR last year by former inmate Justin Bowling.

“A lot of times, the guards are in the same gang,” Bowling said. “If an inmate wanted something done, they got it. If they wanted a cell popped open to handle some business about some fighting or something like that, it just pretty much happened.” GEO did not give a reason why it was pulling out of Mississippi. Last week, CEO George Zoley said the company was discontinuing its contract at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility that houses inmates with mental illness because the facility had been “financially underperforming.”

Things for The GEO Group aren’t rosier in other countries, either. From a New York Times article last fall:

No country has more completely outsourced immigration enforcement, with more troubled results, than Australia. Under unusually severe mandatory detention laws, the system has been run by a succession of three publicly traded companies since 1998. All three are now major players in the international business of locking up and transporting unwanted foreigners.

The first, the Florida-based prison company GEO Group, lost its Australia contract in 2003 amid a commission’s findings that detained children were subjected to cruel treatment. An Australian government audit reported that the contract had not delivered “value-for-money.” In the United States, GEO controls 7,000 of 32,000 detention beds.

So, who is benefitting the most from The GEO Group’s large financial haul from our state and local prisons? Here are several examples of a current administration official and a campaign staffer who have been through The GEO Group revolving door:

According to “Gaming the System”:

President Obama’s appointed Director of the United States Marshals Service, Stacia Hylton, has strong ties to the private prison industry. In 2010, Hylton started a private prison consulting firm, called Hylton Kirk and Associates, while still working at the Department of Justice as the Federal Detention Trustee. After retiring from the trustee position, Hylton agreed to a consulting contract with The GEO Group worth $112,500. As Director of the U.S. Marshals, Hylton will head an agency that has a long-standing contractual relationship with The GEO Group. In 2010, the U.S. Marshal’s accounted for 19 percent of GEO’s revenue. With Hylton in a position to oversee government contracts with private prisons, the ongoing influence of private prison companies in the public sphere is virtually guaranteed.

Hylton had a long career within the US Marshals Service, went through the revolving door to cash in on the lucrative private prison business and then went back to the top job in the Marshals Service.

According to Open Secrets, Broderick Johnson, who worked in the Congress and the Clinton administration, became a lobbyist for The GEO Group. Last year, he joined the Obama re-election team. His career can be tracked by Open Secrets’ effective chart.

But the executives of The GEO Group, several of whom have gone through the federal government’s revolving door, have done very well in their compensation packages, especially since their business has a high percentage of state and federal money that helps to pay for this compensation through overhead formulas calculated per prison bed:

• George C. Zoley is the founder, chairman of the board and CEO of The GEO Group, with a fiscal 2011 compensation package of $5.7 million.
• John M. Hurley is the senior vice president and president of GEO Detention & Corrections. After working 26 years in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, he supplemented his government pension with a $1.5 million compensation package of $1.5 million.
• Norman A. Carlson is on The GEO Group’s board of directors. After 17 years in the Federal Bureau of Prisons, including a stint as the director, he had a compensation package of $173,500 in 2010, as well as his government pension. In case you are worried that he was not making enough, he made $854,484 in 2007, and he did well in other years.
• Brian R. Evans is the chief financial officer and senior vice president. His compensation package was $1.4 million in 2011.

A worrisome trend for The GEO Group and others in the private prison industry is that crime rates and prison populations in the states are both decreasing. The states who are already strapped for money are also finding ways of dealing with crime through diversion and rehabilitation programs to save the cost of incarceration, but the private prison industry has been working on anti-immigration laws, such as the one in Arizona to help find and imprison immigrants for deportation, which can take years, meanwhile keeping beds filled.

Next week, we will see how CCA ended up in the middle of the immigration debate and related legislation while it hitches up with American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the notorious group responsible for many of the draconian immigration laws, to protect their business and fill their prisons. I will also explore a way to get control of this predatory industry so that it does not continue to corrupt our state and federal prison systems while preying on a group of people who are literally captured – sometimes for life – into the prison industry’s dreadful “bed” system.

Source

Prison Industries- Don't Let Society Improve Or We Lose Business :