Prison

Prison  (Social engineering,  social control)
A converted prison gymnasium at San Quentin, 2007
Type	Government
Interest of	Josh Begley
Building where people who have violated the law can be sentenced to. Rich people evade this place. Politicians, too..... Bankers, yes central bankers too. Unlike in Monopoly, people aren't thrown into prison by random chance...one would think. Interestingly enough, in the 2000s that has proved to be the least of a prosecuted person's concerns.

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.

US

Full article: US/Prison

The US locks up a larger proportion of its citizens than any other nation state. Non-violent prisoners have been locked up for life. The US prison system has 10% private prisons.

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).

Purposes

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.

Profitability

Confining people against their will uses up a lot of resources, and so in this age of privatized 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.

Political power

In 2020 The Lancet published a letter by 117 doctors from 18 countries that concluded:

“Should Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has warned, he will effectively have been tortured to death. Much of that torture will have taken place in a prison medical ward, on doctors' watch. The medical profession cannot afford to stand silently by, on the wrong side of torture and the wrong side of history, while such a travesty unfolds. In the interests of defending medical ethics, medical authority, and the human right to health, and taking a stand against torture, together we can challenge and raise awareness of the abuses detailed in our letters. Our appeals are simple: we are calling upon governments to end the torture of Assange and ensure his access to the best available health care before it is too late. Our request to others is this: please join us...”
117 doctors (February 2020)  https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30383-4/fulltext

Secret Prisons

Soviet Union

Vladimir Lenin brought back forced labor of political prisoners in labor camps from 1918, the "Main Directorate of Camps" internationally now known as GULAG became a system extensively utilized by the Soviet Union. Although Nikita Khrushchev had denounced the system of Soviet totalitarianism these prison camps were a product of after Josef Stalin died, Khrushchev secret speech denouncing it was silenced and prevented from being widely published. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his 1973 book The Gulag Archipelago: An Experiment in Literary Investigation' became the first of an intensive raw and brutal series of insights into the system of these secret sites, which caused it to be picked up by the public, becoming a widely used tool in propaganda by Shin Bet and the US and Russian TV well into the 2000s..

The KGB had confiscated many of Solzhenitsyn's gathered information from 1959 until 1967 and tried to delete all traces of drafts of the book during the Cold war, assassinating several holders of reserve master copies of the book.

World War 2

In 1939, the British War Office sequestered a mansion in London (owned by a friend of Winston Churchill named Philip Sassoon) called Trent Park for “special purposes,” with no comment further made on why or what would be conducted there. The site - a mansion in fine condition - houses Adolf Hitler’s captured generals, POWs and other military officials that were captured on the African or European continent. The mansion was nowhere classified as a prison or internment camp, and after brief interrogation, many generals were treated exceptionally well in the mansion, being able to go daily hiking around the perimeter and getting gifted expensive drinks, not realizing the building was in fact a government non-declared prison where every room was bugged from top to bottom.

In 2010 the BBC revealed dozens of protocols and several bombings were ordered because of information gained in Trent Park.

The success of the plan led to other plans such as Operation Epsilon - where Nazi-scientists who were responsible for The Nazi atom bomb programme were placed in a different mansion. The US had their similar own secret prison called "P. O. Box 1142", after the mailing address, a separated section of an US Army base in Virginia. This US secret prison formed the basis of Operation Paperclip, where the Nazis who were brought in by the US would form and lead new US top-secret military science projects, although being sought for war crimes in ally-occupied Germany.

Cold War

Up until the late-stage golden age of TV, which occurred somewhere in the 1990s in the west, many prison camps fit the term for black sites as social media, cable-TV & intercontinental travel weren't as normal as in the 2000s and journalists simply couldn't report these locations. Many countries and entities have utilized prison camps for engaging in numerous illegal activities, often during war-time, including rape, abduction, illegal drug trade & experimental research-projects.

Nevada

Nevada is home to "Area 51", the common name of a highly classified US Air Force airfield and test location officially called Homey Airport (KXTA) or Groom Lake (after the salt flat situated next to its airfield). The place is steeped in history with UFO sightings (stimulated by spooks such as Ulius Amoss and W. Stuart Symington) that has caused virtually all theories regarding the need for such secrecy to be just "conspiracy theories", nevertheless in 2013, the CIA released an official history of the U-2 and OXCART projects from the 1950s up until the 1970s which acknowledged the existence of Area 51 in response to a FOIA request submitted in 2005.

In 2012, a BBC crew who attempted to walk past security "watching TV" and enter the base was held a gunpoint, detained for 12 hours, while the FBI took their equipment, told the crew "that this incident was so serious that Washington had to call London to advise that 12 'Brits' had just breached security at America's most top-secret military base and that we all were at one point going to jail for six months", and that they escaped the punishment named "make you disappear and your body will never be found", being tailed by FBI for the remainder of their stay in the US, raising questions what is happening there.

In the 2010s several websites hosted by US military-veterans accused the US Air Force black projects developed in Nevada as responsible for the "black triangle planes" sighted in the US. The spotted triangles would belong to the "TR-3B Aurora Anti-Gravity Spacecraft".

California

Alcatraz was already known for decades, if not more in the 1950s but the prison in fact housed several political and foreign dissidents that were placed there specifically because of the "silence rule" reported by dozens of prisoners. Communicating between prisoners was completely forbidden and met with severe violent consequences. Spooks like Morton Sobell - who was sent there in the 1960s - had no chance of communicating whatsoever with unknown handlers, with other politically high-profile individuals getting to see new (for that time) methods of security apart from the violent crackdowns as the prison was noted to "not have any public oversight, both geographically and politically.".

After the closing of Alcatraz, USP Marion was created as a high-tech replacement for Alcatraz, and 500 of its prisoners were transferred there. A new prison regime with the vague, name of "CARE" was implemented, which later became the "Control Unit". In 1990, former warden Ralph Arron told Mother Jones that “The purpose of the Marion Control Unit is to control revolutionary attitudes in the prison system and the society at large". recalling the government even requested more severe prison regimes. These regimes became the basis of the new US national Supermax-prisons.

Kentucky

The High-Security Unit in the federal women’s prison of the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, was created in 1986 to place political prisoners belonging to any organization that, according to the Bureau of Prisons, “attempts to disrupt or overthrow the government of the U.S." The HSU in fact, was nothing more than 16 individuals' isolation cells separately build and placed from the prison itself. Within two years, the prison was shut down after media coverage.

In secret the prison made the women live in constant artificial lights 24 hours a day, without any personal property and with a camera and visual surveillance every minute. Contact with the world was severely limited and visits restricted. There were frequent cavity searches done by male guards considered "constant sexual harassment" by prisoners. The women were also subjected to tests such as waking them every hour during the night, or every half hour after several complained. The American Civil Liberties Union later concluded the goal of the prison was "ideological conversion", as the regime was deemed not proportional at all.

Chile

Amnesty International, the US Senate and the Chilean Truth and Reconciliation Commission described the Esmeralda BE-43 ship as a "floating prison" for political prisoners of the Augusto Pinochet-administration from 1973 to 1980. with at least over hundred individuals held without trial and tortured, including foreign nationals. It was known as the "torture centre" among political dissidents. To this day, the ship is used by the Chilean Navy and met with dozens of protests by Chilean exiles every time it comes to shore in foreign waters.

Europe

The Kosovo War for example included many "ad hoc" prison camps where spontaneous rape, murder, and genocide took place, with many of the victims murdered and buried and the perpetrators never been found..

COVID-19

Quarantine hotels = Pandemic prison, Dutch police arrested people for leaving a hotel.

An Australian woman was arrested for setting fire to one in Queensland.

• Melbourne’s Centre for National Resilience
• Howard Springs Quarantine Facility

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

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