Stop me if I've told this story before, but when I became assistant
director of field services, I moved from my comfortable office in the
training center to a spacious but empty room on the main floor. I was
given the go ahead to order what office furniture I felt would be
proper for one of such high status(mid management)
My secretary rushed into my new digs, where I had a temporary desk and
a couple of hand me down chairs. "Here's the catalog", she said. It
was the Washington State Prison Furniture catalog. Before we could
order from other sources, we had to go over the prison catalog.
Whatever I needed in furnishings, if it was in the catalog, I had to
order it. I could write a justification for why it was not
appropriate, but even then I could be ordered to buy it anyway. At
that time our governor was on a financial conservation kick. We
bought the bulky institutional looking furniture from Walla Walla
prison. At the time it didn't matter to me one way or the other.
Later it did. But it did so because of my cheap nature, not because
of the use of prisoners as slave labor. I was really ticked when I
learned how cheap these workers labored, and at the same time the
furniture they produced was marketed at almost the same as the
furniture made privately. And trust me, the prison furniture,
although plenty sturdy, looked like setting a dump truck next to a
sports car.
What I do not know is how the income is factored back into the cost of
operating the prison. I see figures that appear very high, detailing
how much it costs to put up a prisoner for a year. But there is no
accounting for the income he/she might have earned.
Of course now it is even more of an issue to me. Our prisons are out
of control. While we fight to take down a flag in Charleston, Black
men, Brown men, and disenfranchised men...and women, are being shoved
into Labor Camps called prisons. And, like our new For Profit Charter
Schools, it's a money maker for the new private prisons springing up
everywhere. There are those who tell us that prejudice is on its way
out. There are those who point to improvements in racial relations.
But even though that is true, there is another thread that is every
bit as ugly as the worst labor camps ever established in the old
Soviet Union. Private Prisons. Mostly Black and non White forced
labor camps.
Someone needs to rip that blindfold off the face of Lady Justice and
let her see what's going on in this Land of the Free and the Brave.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/23/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What about slave labor camps?
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Monday, June 22, 2015 11:25 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] America's Slave Empire
Instead of Correction Facilities, we should call prisons by their honest
name. Terror Camps.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/22/15, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I had not seen this when I wrote my response to Carl this morning.confinement.
America's Slave Empire
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_slave_empire_20150621/
Posted on Jun 21, 2015
By Chris Hedges
IBWC KC / YouTube
Three prisoners-Melvin Ray, James Pleasant and Robert Earl Council-who
led work stoppages in Alabama prisons in January 2014 as part of the
Free Alabama Movement have spent the last 18 months in solitary
Authorities, unnerved by the protests that engulfed three prisons insteel toilets.
the state, as well as by videos and pictures of abusive conditions
smuggled out by the movement, say the men will remain in solitary
confinement indefinitely.
The prison strike leaders are denied televisions and reading material.
They spend at least three days a week, sometimes longer, without
leaving their tiny isolation cells. They eat their meals seated on their
They are allowed to shower only once every two days despiteour first boycott on McDonald's.
temperatures that routinely rise above 90 degrees.
The men have become symbols of a growing resistance movement inside
American prisons. The prisoners' work stoppages and refusal to
co-operate with authorities in Alabama are modeled on actions that
shook the Georgia prison system in December 2010. The strike leaders
argue that this is the only mechanism left to the 2.3 million
prisoners across America. By refusing to work-a tactic that would
force prison authorities to hire compensated labor or to induce the
prisoners to return to their jobs by paying a fair wage-the neoslavery
that defines the prison system can be broken. Prisoners are currently
organizing in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
"We have to shut down the prisons," Council, known as Kinetik, one of
the founders of the Free Alabama Movement, told me by phone from the
Holman Correctional Facility in Escambia County, Ala. He has been in
prison for 21 years, serving a sentence of life without parole. "We
will not work for free anymore. All the work in prisons, from cleaning
to cutting grass to working in the kitchen, is done by inmate labor.
[Almost no prisoner] in Alabama is paid. Without us the prisons, which
are slave empires, cannot function.
Prisons, at the same time, charge us a variety of fees, such as for
our identification cards or wrist bracelets, and [impose] numerous
fines, especially for possession of contraband. They charge us high
phone and commissary prices. Prisons each year are taking larger and
larger sums of money from the inmates and their families. The state
gets from us millions of dollars in free labor and then imposes fees
and fines. You have brothers that work in kitchens 12 to 15 hours a
day and have done this for years and have never been paid."
"We do not believe in the political process," said Ray, who spoke from
the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Ala., and who is
serving life without parole. "We are not looking to politicians to
submit reform bills. We aren't giving more money to lawyers. We don't
believe in the courts. We will rely only on protests inside and
outside of prisons and on targeting the corporations that exploit
prison labor and finance the school-to-prison pipeline. We have focused
McDonald's uses prisoners to process beef for patties and packageall the others.
bread, milk, chicken products. We have called for a national Stop
Campaign against McDonald's. We have identified this corporation to
expose
There are too many corporations exploiting prison labor to try andweeks.
take them all on at once."
"We are not going to call for protests outside of statehouses," Ray
went on.
"Legislators are owned by corporations. To go up there with the achy
breaky heart is not going to do any good. These politicians are in it
for the money. If you are fighting mass incarceration, the people who
are incarcerated are not in the statehouse. They are not in the parks.
They are in the prisons. If you are going to fight for the people in
prison, join them at the prison. The kryptonite to fight the prison
system, which is a $500 billion enterprise, is the work strike. And we
need people to come to the prisons to let guys on the inside know they
have outside support to shut the prison down. Once we take our labor
back, prisons will again become places for correction and
rehabilitation rather than centers of corporate profit."
The three prisoners said that until the prison-industrial complex was
dismantled there would be no prison reform. They said books such as
Stokely Carmichael's "Ready for Revolution" and Michelle Alexander's
"The New Jim Crow," along with the failure of prison reform movements,
convinced them that the only hope to battle back against a prison
system that contains 25 percent of the world's prisoners was to
organize resistance. And they find no solace in a black president.
"To say that we have a black president does not say anything," Ray said.
"The politicians are the ones who orchestrated this system. They are
either directly involved as businessmen-many are already millionaires
or billionaires, or they are controlled by millionaires and
billionaires. We are not blindsided by titles. We are looking at what
is going on behind the scenes. We see a coordinated effort by the Koch
brothers, ALEC [the American Legislative Exchange Council] and
political action committees that see in prisons a business
opportunity. Their goal is to increase earnings. And once you look at
it like this, it does not matter if we have a black or white
president. That is why the policies have not changed. The laws, such
as mandatory minimum [sentences], were put in place by big business so
they would have access to cheap labor. The anti-terrorism laws were
enacted to close the doors on the access to justice so people would be
in prison longer. Big business finances campaigns. Big business writes
the laws and legislation. And Obama takes money from these people. He
is as vested in this system as they are."
In Alabama prisons, as in nearly all such state facilities across the
United States, prisoners do nearly every job, including cooking,
cleaning, maintenance, laundry and staffing the prison barbershop. In
the St. Clair prison there is also a chemical plant, a furniture
company and a repair shop for state vehicles. Other Alabama prisons
run printing companies and recycling plants, stamp license plates,
make metal bed frames, operate sand pits and tend fish farms. Only a
few hundred of Alabama's 26,200 prisoners-the system is designed to
hold only 13,130 people-are paid to work; they get 17 to 71 cents an
hour. The rest are slaves.
The men bemoaned a lack of recreational and educational programs and
basic hygiene supplies, the poor ventilation that sends temperatures
in the cells and dormitories to over 100 degrees, crumbling
infrastructures, infestations of cockroaches and rats, and corrupt
prison guards who routinely beat prisoners and sell contraband,
including drugs and cell phones. These conditions, coupled with the
overcrowding, are, they warned, creating a tinderbox, especially as
temperatures soar. There was a riot in St. Clair in April. There has
been a rash of stabbings and fights in the prison.
Prisoners have assaulted 10 guards in St. Clair during the last four
stomach diseases.
"The worst thing is the water," said James Pleasant, a St. Clair
prisoner who has served 13 years of a 43-year sentence. "It is
contaminated. It causes kidney, renal failure and cancer. The food causes
We have had three to four outbreaks of food poisoning in the last fourget."
months."
He said that the prolonged caging of prisoners and the closing of
rehabilitation programs, including education programs, guarantee
recidivism, something sought by the corporations that profit from
prisons. An estimated 80 percent of prisoners entering the Alabama
prison system are functionally illiterate.
"Sleeping on a concrete slab is not going to teach you how to read or
write," Pleasant said. "Sleeping on a concrete slab will not solve
mental health issues. But the system does not change. It does what it
is designed to do. It makes sure people are driven back into the
system to work without pay."
"For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth
and that anything could be done to us," Ray said. "Then the word 'nigger'
became
politically incorrect. So they began calling us criminals. When you
say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not
matter. It means he or she is a nigger. It means they deserve what they
Prisons, the men said, have increasingly placed larger and largermost.
financial burdens on families, with the poorest families suffering the
Prisoners, too, suffer as a result.confinement.
"If you don't get money from your family, your poverty blocks you out
from buying items at the commissary or making phone calls," Council
said. "You can't communicate with your family. If you don't have
someone to send you money you can't even buy stamps to write home.
They [authorities] are supposed to give us two free stamps a week, but
I have never seen them do it in my 16 years of incarceration. We pay a
$4 medical co-pay if we make a sick call. Every additional medication
we receive is $4. If you have a cold and you get something for
sinuses, pain meds and something for congestion, that becomes a $16
visit. And if you get $20 from a family member, the state will take
$16 off the top to pay for the visit. You end up with $4 to spend at a
jacked-up canteen. There are a lot of brothers walking around in debt.
..."
"It takes brutality and force to make a person work for free and live
in the type of conditions we live in and not do anything about it,"
Ray said. "The only way they made slavery work was to use force. It is
no different in the slave empire of prisons. They use brutality to
hold it together. And this brutality will not go away until the system
goes away."
The men described numerous horrific beatings by guards.
Pleasant said, "They stood me up against the wall [with my hands
cuffed behind me]. There were about 10 officers. They started
swinging, punching and hitting me with sticks. They knocked my legs
out from under me. My face hit the floor. They stomped on my face.
They sent me to the infirmary to hide what they did, for 30 days. When
I looked in the mirror I could not recognize my facial features. This
was the fourth time I was beaten like this."
I asked the three men, speaking to me on a conference call, what
prison conditions said about America. They laughed.
"It says America is what it has always been, America," said Ray. "It
says if you are poor and black you will be exploited, brutalized and
murdered. It says most of American society, especially white society,
is indifferent. It says nothing has really changed for us since
slavery."
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/ America's Slave
Empire
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/americas_slave_empire_20150621/
Posted on Jun 21, 2015
By Chris Hedges
IBWC KC / YouTube
Three prisoners-Melvin Ray, James Pleasant and Robert Earl Council-who
led work stoppages in Alabama prisons in January 2014 as part of the
Free Alabama Movement have spent the last 18 months in solitary
Authorities, unnerved by the protests that engulfed three prisons insteel toilets.
the state, as well as by videos and pictures of abusive conditions
smuggled out by the movement, say the men will remain in solitary
confinement indefinitely.
The prison strike leaders are denied televisions and reading material.
They spend at least three days a week, sometimes longer, without
leaving their tiny isolation cells. They eat their meals seated on their
They are allowed to shower only once every two days despiteour first boycott on McDonald's.
temperatures that routinely rise above 90 degrees.
The men have become symbols of a growing resistance movement inside
American prisons. The prisoners' work stoppages and refusal to
co-operate with authorities in Alabama are modeled on actions that
shook the Georgia prison system in December 2010. The strike leaders
argue that this is the only mechanism left to the 2.3 million
prisoners across America. By refusing to work-a tactic that would
force prison authorities to hire compensated labor or to induce the
prisoners to return to their jobs by paying a fair wage-the neoslavery
that defines the prison system can be broken. Prisoners are currently
organizing in Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Ohio,
Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Texas, Virginia and Washington.
"We have to shut down the prisons," Council, known as Kinetik, one of
the founders of the Free Alabama Movement, told me by phone from the
Holman Correctional Facility in Escambia County, Ala. He has been in
prison for 21 years, serving a sentence of life without parole. "We
will not work for free anymore. All the work in prisons, from cleaning
to cutting grass to working in the kitchen, is done by inmate labor.
[Almost no prisoner] in Alabama is paid. Without us the prisons, which
are slave empires, cannot function.
Prisons, at the same time, charge us a variety of fees, such as for
our identification cards or wrist bracelets, and [impose] numerous
fines, especially for possession of contraband. They charge us high
phone and commissary prices. Prisons each year are taking larger and
larger sums of money from the inmates and their families. The state
gets from us millions of dollars in free labor and then imposes fees
and fines. You have brothers that work in kitchens 12 to 15 hours a
day and have done this for years and have never been paid."
"We do not believe in the political process," said Ray, who spoke from
the St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Ala., and who is
serving life without parole. "We are not looking to politicians to
submit reform bills. We aren't giving more money to lawyers. We don't
believe in the courts. We will rely only on protests inside and
outside of prisons and on targeting the corporations that exploit
prison labor and finance the school-to-prison pipeline. We have focused
McDonald's uses prisoners to process beef for patties and packageall the others.
bread, milk, chicken products. We have called for a national Stop
Campaign against McDonald's. We have identified this corporation to
expose
There are too many corporations exploiting prison labor to try andweeks.
take them all on at once."
"We are not going to call for protests outside of statehouses," Ray
went on.
"Legislators are owned by corporations. To go up there with the achy
breaky heart is not going to do any good. These politicians are in it
for the money. If you are fighting mass incarceration, the people who
are incarcerated are not in the statehouse. They are not in the parks.
They are in the prisons. If you are going to fight for the people in
prison, join them at the prison. The kryptonite to fight the prison
system, which is a $500 billion enterprise, is the work strike. And we
need people to come to the prisons to let guys on the inside know they
have outside support to shut the prison down. Once we take our labor
back, prisons will again become places for correction and
rehabilitation rather than centers of corporate profit."
The three prisoners said that until the prison-industrial complex was
dismantled there would be no prison reform. They said books such as
Stokely Carmichael's "Ready for Revolution" and Michelle Alexander's
"The New Jim Crow," along with the failure of prison reform movements,
convinced them that the only hope to battle back against a prison
system that contains 25 percent of the world's prisoners was to
organize resistance. And they find no solace in a black president.
"To say that we have a black president does not say anything," Ray said.
"The politicians are the ones who orchestrated this system. They are
either directly involved as businessmen-many are already millionaires
or billionaires, or they are controlled by millionaires and
billionaires. We are not blindsided by titles. We are looking at what
is going on behind the scenes. We see a coordinated effort by the Koch
brothers, ALEC [the American Legislative Exchange Council] and
political action committees that see in prisons a business
opportunity. Their goal is to increase earnings. And once you look at
it like this, it does not matter if we have a black or white
president. That is why the policies have not changed. The laws, such
as mandatory minimum [sentences], were put in place by big business so
they would have access to cheap labor. The anti-terrorism laws were
enacted to close the doors on the access to justice so people would be
in prison longer. Big business finances campaigns. Big business writes
the laws and legislation. And Obama takes money from these people. He
is as vested in this system as they are."
In Alabama prisons, as in nearly all such state facilities across the
United States, prisoners do nearly every job, including cooking,
cleaning, maintenance, laundry and staffing the prison barbershop. In
the St. Clair prison there is also a chemical plant, a furniture
company and a repair shop for state vehicles. Other Alabama prisons
run printing companies and recycling plants, stamp license plates,
make metal bed frames, operate sand pits and tend fish farms. Only a
few hundred of Alabama's 26,200 prisoners-the system is designed to
hold only 13,130 people-are paid to work; they get 17 to 71 cents an
hour. The rest are slaves.
The men bemoaned a lack of recreational and educational programs and
basic hygiene supplies, the poor ventilation that sends temperatures
in the cells and dormitories to over 100 degrees, crumbling
infrastructures, infestations of cockroaches and rats, and corrupt
prison guards who routinely beat prisoners and sell contraband,
including drugs and cell phones. These conditions, coupled with the
overcrowding, are, they warned, creating a tinderbox, especially as
temperatures soar. There was a riot in St. Clair in April. There has
been a rash of stabbings and fights in the prison.
Prisoners have assaulted 10 guards in St. Clair during the last four
stomach diseases.
"The worst thing is the water," said James Pleasant, a St. Clair
prisoner who has served 13 years of a 43-year sentence. "It is
contaminated. It causes kidney, renal failure and cancer. The food causes
We have had three to four outbreaks of food poisoning in the last fourget."
months."
He said that the prolonged caging of prisoners and the closing of
rehabilitation programs, including education programs, guarantee
recidivism, something sought by the corporations that profit from
prisons. An estimated 80 percent of prisoners entering the Alabama
prison system are functionally illiterate.
"Sleeping on a concrete slab is not going to teach you how to read or
write," Pleasant said. "Sleeping on a concrete slab will not solve
mental health issues. But the system does not change. It does what it
is designed to do. It makes sure people are driven back into the
system to work without pay."
"For years we were called niggers to indicate we had no value or worth
and that anything could be done to us," Ray said. "Then the word 'nigger'
became
politically incorrect. So they began calling us criminals. When you
say a person is a criminal it means that what happens to them does not
matter. It means he or she is a nigger. It means they deserve what they
Prisons, the men said, have increasingly placed larger and largermost.
financial burdens on families, with the poorest families suffering the
Prisoners, too, suffer as a result.tp://www.linkedin.com/company/truthdighttp://truthdig.tumblr.com/http://www.
"If you don't get money from your family, your poverty blocks you out
from buying items at the commissary or making phone calls," Council
said. "You can't communicate with your family. If you don't have
someone to send you money you can't even buy stamps to write home.
They [authorities] are supposed to give us two free stamps a week, but
I have never seen them do it in my 16 years of incarceration. We pay a
$4 medical co-pay if we make a sick call. Every additional medication
we receive is $4. If you have a cold and you get something for
sinuses, pain meds and something for congestion, that becomes a $16
visit. And if you get $20 from a family member, the state will take
$16 off the top to pay for the visit. You end up with $4 to spend at a
jacked-up canteen. There are a lot of brothers walking around in debt.
..."
"It takes brutality and force to make a person work for free and live
in the type of conditions we live in and not do anything about it,"
Ray said. "The only way they made slavery work was to use force. It is
no different in the slave empire of prisons. They use brutality to
hold it together. And this brutality will not go away until the system
goes away."
The men described numerous horrific beatings by guards.
Pleasant said, "They stood me up against the wall [with my hands
cuffed behind me]. There were about 10 officers. They started
swinging, punching and hitting me with sticks. They knocked my legs
out from under me. My face hit the floor. They stomped on my face.
They sent me to the infirmary to hide what they did, for 30 days. When
I looked in the mirror I could not recognize my facial features. This
was the fourth time I was beaten like this."
I asked the three men, speaking to me on a conference call, what
prison conditions said about America. They laughed.
"It says America is what it has always been, America," said Ray. "It
says if you are poor and black you will be exploited, brutalized and
murdered. It says most of American society, especially white society,
is indifferent. It says nothing has really changed for us since
slavery."
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