Solitary Confinement & Stock Options

The “Police State” is the feeder mechanism for the private prisons industry. They are connected to one another.

Those that have served time for a felony realize that once a person is in the “system”, there is no getting out. You are required, by law, to disclose on a job application whether or not you have ever been convicted of a felony. This alone just removed the majority of the possible jobs that a felon theoretically could have applied for, just for checking the “Yes” box.

The concept of parole is not a bad one on the surface, but those that have had to bend their entire world just to make sure they don’t break any of the additional rules of their parole will tell you that the system of parole is designed to make sure that the offender comes back to prison. Early release is the bait that they use to entice you to bite on accepting parole, but once you do, it is almost impossible for a person to comply with all of the additional rules, restrictions, terms, and conditions. Parole is the feedback loop that keeps people coming back to prison over and over.

So why would the government have any reason to install a revolving door at the entrance to the American prison system?

“Poor people, especially those of color, are worth nothing to corporations and private contractors if they are on the street. In jail and prisons, however, they can each generate corporate revenues of $30,000 to $40,000 a year.” - Chris Hedges, author, and journalist.

The goals of the State are to remain relevant, retain power, and create reality. For those on the edge of society and on the lower rungs of the societal ladder, the State tries to milk them for everything they can. They begin to extract what little money the poor have through the sale of drugs that the State imports and distributes covertly, with the assistance of the cartels.

A total of 80% of all states has gotten on the “private prison slave labor” bandwagon. Incarcerated people can be paid slave wages for their work, and by slave labor, we mean $.16/hour. The products that they build, or the services the inmates provide, allows the private prison to profit from their labor.

Perhaps the description of a “private prison” should actually and more accurately be called a “for-profit prison”. This business model of using slave labor in private prisons, is amazingly beneficial to the companies like CCA and The Geo Group, and, not surprisingly, incredibly unfair to the prisoners.

Private prisons benefit in a number of ways:

• They pay their workers practically nothing, in some cases only $.16/hour
• They have a captive audience that can’t unionize
• There is almost an infinite supply of potential workers
• The prisons sell the items that are made by their slaves
• The prisons also market inmate services

Many of these prison administrators are lobbying corporations to pull their manufacturing from Asia, move those businesses back to the United States, and give them access to their slave labor at prices that are even better than the deals they were getting in Asia.

“We’re not going to some white collar resort prison. No, no, no! We’re going to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison!” – Michael Bolton, Office Space.

The Crack Cocaine Industry & the New Slavery

Once the drugs have subjugated the poor into a permanent lower class of citizens, and they seemingly have nothing left for the State to take, the State takes their freedom through drug sentencing laws that disproportionately target the poor, such as the difference between powder cocaine and crack cocaine. Crack cocaine was created for, and marketed to, the black community. Up until the enactment of the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010, it took 100 times more powder cocaine as crack cocaine to receive the same five-, 10-, or 20-year mandatory minimum prison term.

The emergence of crack cocaine coincides with the rise of private prisons, and that is no accident. Some of these prisons put inmates to work on a variety of things and are paid slave wages, so the prison owners benefit from this because their labor costs are obviously very low.

"We recognize the inherent dignity of the human person and the need to treat every individual with respect. As we have since our inception, we share the responsibility of our government partners when they entrust individuals to our care." – Corrections Corp. of America’s mission statement from their website.

There is a statistic that is splashed around newspapers and magazines that sum up the hypocrisy of the American government. The United States has 4% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prison population. The United States adds hundreds of new laws every single year, with most going completely unnoticed by the general public. At any given moment we are all violating some obscure law from a century ago.

The “Prison Industrial Complex” costs the American taxpayer around $75 billion a year, and it has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to the Sentencing Project, the prison incarceration rate has increased by 500% over the last four decades, with the prison population exploding by over 800%.

About 1 in 36 adults in the United States was under some form of correctional supervision in 2014. Sadly, 41% of juveniles have been arrested by the time they turn 23, setting the expectation that being incarcerated is pretty normal.

“Our prison population, in fact, is now the biggest in the history of human civilization. There are more people in the United States either on parole or in jail today (around 6 million total) than there ever were at any time in Stalin’s gulags. For what it’s worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.” ― Matt Taibbi, The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.

A columnist for The Moscow News points out that dozens of states have legalized the contracting of prison labor to corporations, which include such names as IMB, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, and Dell. Some of these inmates are getting approximately $2/hour. What a bargain.

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course, we did.” - John Ehrlichman, Nixon domestic policy chief.

Fun Facts about the American For-Profit Prison System

• For every 100,000 Americans, there are 716 people in prison
• There are currently 133,000 prisoners in for-profit prisons
• For-profit prisons hold 19% of the federal, and 7% of the state prison population
• More than 50% of all immigrants detained are held in private prisons
• Detained immigrants account for $5.1 billion in revenue for the industry
• 60% of US prisoners are non-violent
• 40% of ex-cons return to prison within three years of their release
• 1 in 3 black men will serve time in prison in their lifetimes
• 1 in 6 Latino men will serve time in prison in their lifetimes
• From 1990 – 2009 the number of inmates in for-profit prisons increased 1,664%
• The private prison industry is estimated to be worth $70 billion
• Correction Corporation of America housed 90,000 inmates in their 62 facilities
• In 2011, CCA generated revenues of $1.7 billion
• From the years 2008-2012, the CEO of the GEO Group made $22,000,000
• CCA is comprised of more than 16,000 dedicated professionals
• 41 of the 62 private prison contracts have minimum occupancy clauses (80%-100%)
• Arizona, Louisiana, Virginia, and Oklahoma have occupancy quotas of 95%-100%
• Three Arizona private prisons have occupancy quotas of 100%
• GEO Group operates 106 facilities in the U.S., with $1.5 billion in revenues in 2011
• The GEO Group CEO, George Zoley, made $5.7 million in 2011
• In 2012, the GEO Group and CCA combined to generate $3.3 billion in revenue
• GEO Group & CCA spent $25 million on lobbying and $10 million in political donations
• $21,000/year is the cost of an average minimum-security inmate in federal prison
• $33,000/year is the cost of an average maximum-security inmate in federal prison
• Some prisons pay $100,000/year per prisoner

When a hotel isn’t running at full capacity, they may beef up their advertising campaign in order to drum up more business. Should the prison industry find itself with too many vacancies, they might have to start enforcing some of the more unusual laws on their books to make sure all of those very uncomfortable beds are filled.
There are estimates that the number of federal regulations carrying criminal penalties may be as high as 300,000, but the truth is that nobody is sure how many laws there actually are. This is the height of insanity.

Kids for Cash

When you incentivize people to fill private prisons with “customers”, you are in a very large gray area, and we’re not just talking about the color of the concrete. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the Pennsylvania “Kids for Cash” trial of former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr.

This judge was falsely convicting kids of crimes from 2003-2008, sentencing them to extended jail sentences at a pair of private youth detention centers, and then collecting “kickback” money from the owner of these facilities. Total estimates were in the area of around $2 million. Kids as young as 10 years old were sentenced to years in jail for petty theft, many of them were first-time offenders.

When former Judge Ciavarella was found guilty, his attorney actually had the audacity to ask for a “reasonable sentence” because he had already suffered enough because of the unfair media attention.

"The media attention to this matter has exceeded coverage given to many and almost all capital murders, and despite protestation, he will forever be unjustly branded as the 'Kids for Cash' judge." – The attorney for former Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr.

The “real” judge was unmoved. He sentenced Ciavarella Jr. to 28 years in a federal “pound-you-in-the-ass” prison, where his dance card is surely filled nightly, among other things.

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court tossed about 4,000 convictions issued by Ciavarella between 2003 and 2008, saying he violated the constitutional rights of the juveniles, including the right to legal counsel and the right to intelligently enter a plea.

A second judge was also convicted of receiving bribes from the private prison industry and sent to prison for over 17 years. No doubt the convicted judge is great at braiding hair by now, and if you are wondering why he wears his boxer shorts backward, there is a very good reason for it, just ask everyone in his cell block.

It is important to remember that not all prisons are physical. The prison in our minds can be just as effective for controlling and limiting our actions; in large part because we don’t even know that we are in a prison.

Nobody likes to admit that they have been had, or tricked, or manipulated because it makes us feel like we aren’t smart enough to stay out of the traps. It is embarrassing to admit, but we have all been fooled in one way or another.

The “War on Drugs” has been an abject failure for stopping the flow and use of drugs in the United States, but that is based on the assumption that stopping drug use was the mission. Once you understand that the real reason for the “War on Drugs” was to demolish the inner-cities and put brown and black people in prison for long stretches, while simultaneously diminishing their ability to ever get a decent job once they get out, or be able to vote, we see that actually it was “Mission Accomplished”.

“The fact that war is the word we use for almost everything—on terrorism, drugs, even poverty—has certainly helped to desensitize us to its invocation; if we wage wars on everything, how bad can they be?” ― Glenn Greenwald, A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency.

Charlie Robinson, author, The Octopus of Global Control.
This is an excerpt from the book The Octopus of Global Control, now available on Amazon.