Prison

Prison
A converted prison gymnasium at San Quentin, 2007
Type	institution
Interest of	Josh Begley

Prisons are places where people are held against their will, typically by authorities, generally as a result of a legal infraction or on grounds of poor mental health, although Illegal detention is increasingly used on suspected "terrorists". Prisons around the world vary widely in appearance.

Official Narrative

The official narrative is rather confused on this point. Wikipedia lists several justifications for locking up people, with little in the way of empirical evidence. As with its partner institution, school, discussion is encourage about how it should happen rather than why or whether.

Problems

As Ivan Illich, Angela Davis and others have argued, the evidence appears to show that such treatment tends to promote rather than reduce crime, so makes sense only from a point of view of retribution rather than harm reduction or damage restoration.

Growth

The number of people imprisoned under state and federal custody increased 772% percent between 1970 and 2009, largely due to the incredible influence private corporations wield against the American legal system.

War on Drugs

Full article: “War on Drugs”

The "War on Drugs" has provided a huge boost to prisoner numbers (now around half US prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent drug offences), and allowed prison populations to keep growing even as rates of other crimes dropped.

US

OECD incarceration rates per 100,000 citizens, by International Centre for Prison Studies

The singular position of the self-styled 'land of the free' deserves special mention in an article on prisons, since it has lead the global "war on drugs", which has been a boon to the private prison industry. The US locks up more people than any other country, both proportionally and in absolute numbers.

Life sentences

In 2012, almost 160,000 US prisoners were serving life sentences. Of these, 49,000 are serving life without possibility of parole, an increase of 22% since 2008. The ACLU reported that over 3000 of these were for minor, non-violent crimes, for example theft of a jacket valued at $159. The reports wrote that the US was “virtually alone in its willingness to sentence non-violent offenders to die behind bars.” Life without parole for nonviolent sentences has been ruled a violation of human rights by the European Court of Human Rights.

Torture

US prisoners have reported being tortured to the point of unconsciousness by guards.

Profitability

Confining people against their will uses up a lot of resources, and so in this age of privatised prisons allows a small number of people to garner immense profits, providing an incentive to increase incarceration rates. Some judges have been found to be involved in corrupt "cash-for-prisoners" scams.

Prisoner abuse

In 2015, EFF reported that a FOIA request had revealed at least one inmate in a South Carolina prison was receiving more than 37 years in isolation for using Facebook. In 2015, an autopsy of Samuel Harrell revealed that he died not, as authorities had claimed an overdose of synthetic marijuana (K2), but of homicide after "physical altercation with corrections officers" (interviews suggested that as many as 20 corrections officers kicked, punched and dragged him down a flight of stairs while he was handcuffed).

See Also

• Set of radio shows on incarceration

 

Examples

Page name	Description
Belmarsh Prison	Britain's Guantanamo Bay
Gaza	An enclave of Palestine in the south west corner of Israel
Howard Springs Quarantine Facility	Australia's first concentration camp, with two thousand beds, used from November 2021 for mandatory quarantine. Closed in July 2022
Melbourne’s Centre for National Resilience	This massive and expensive facility had thousands of beds meant for mandatory quarantine during "the Covid "pandemic". Closed its doors in October 2022.
Rheinwiesenlager	US army run concentration camps in Western Germany
US/Prison	The highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Rap	“Speaking to Bill Maher, the rapper Ice Cube said "Follow the money, You go high enough you start to see literally the same people who own the labels own the private prisons, so you know it seems really kind of suspicious, if you want to say that word, that you know the records that come out are really geared to push people towards that prison industry." Maher commented "But they didn't make you write those lyrics". Ice Cube answered: "it's not about making somebody write the lyrics, it's about being there as guard rails to make sure certain songs make it through and certain songs don't. Certain flavors are exposed. You know, some records are made by committee"”	Bill Maher Ice Cube	July 2023
Peter R. de Vries	“We already lost the War on drugs long ago, and the policy is bankrupt, it has led to nothing, yes, full prisons, a clogged justice system and it didn't help one bit because you can find a coffee-shop on every corner of the street and even with record-braking catches of shipments of cocaine in the harbour, it doesn't mean anything. We're dealing with a extreme high demand in the world with $300.000.000.000 profit for drug traffickers with $100.000.000.000 of it cocaine alone, with the same 100.000.000.000 for the worldwide diverse police and justice agencies used, amounting to nothing. You can't just maintain this repressive policy. You need to make this more of national health crisis.”	Peter R. de Vries	2020

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:Private Prisons Criminalized Rap	Letter, E-Mail	24 April 2012	Unknown
Document:The Economics of Incarceration	article	5 February 2012	Nile Bowie	"The number of people imprisoned under state and federal custody increased 772% percent between 1970 and 2009, largely due to the incredible influence private corporations wield against the American legal system..."
File:MaleRapeInUSPrisons.pdf	report	April 2001

Many thanks to our Patrons who cover ~2/3 of our hosting bill. Please join them if you can.