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"The degree of civilization in a society
is
revealed by entering its prisons."
Fyodor Mikhailovich
Dostoevsky
"Ernesto Zedillo of Mexico, César Gaviria of
Colombia, and Henrique Cardoso of Brazil, "all conservative politicians, blamed
the US emphasis on criminalization for the continuing toll caused by drug
trafficking, and called for an approach based on public health, including the
legalization of marijuana." - Associated Press
"Reserve costly prison beds for people we are
afraid of, not for people we're mad at." - Pat Nolan, member of California
State Assembly from 1974 to 1994, GOP leader from
1984 to 1988, two years in fed pen for
bribes
"Every
friend of freedom must be
as revolted as I am by the prospect of turning the US into an armed camp, by
the vision of jails filled with casual drug users and of an army of enforcers
empowered to invade the liberty of citizens on slight evidence. Most of the
harm that comes from drugs is because they are illegal." -
Milton
Friedman
"Cornell's (Cornell
Corrections) Donald C. Wyatt facility later became a case study at the
Harvard Design School's Center for Design Informatics.
This was
an indication of the wave of business and investment opportunities prisons and
law enforcement presented to everyone from architects to construction companies
to real estate and tax-exempt bond investors.
Harvard's case study
mentions that Cornell arranged for the facility to be constructed by Brown
& Root of Houston, a subsidiary of
Halliburton.
Brown & Root/KBR's constructed detention facilities at
Guantanamo Bay,
prisoner of war camps in Iraq and won
contracts to build detention centers for the
Department of Homeland Security."
- Catherine Austin
Fitts
When
Richard Nixon declared a "war on drugs"
the transnational elite
understood that incarcerating inmates at rates that ultimately rival the former
Soviet Union and
repressive Middle Eastern regimes
is not only an excellent profit center but an effective method of social
control.
Prisons grew overcrowded and understaffed in the conversion
of public prison systems into new
private systems of
incarceration and forced labor.
This draconian 'war on drugs' is
not a war on 'drugs'.
This draconian 'war' is
a war on people that use drugs
excessively.
With PHRMA pushing drugs on television
24/7 in combination with
addiction recovery
specialists we have an incarceration
pipeline.
"Prohibition of alcohol fell flat
on its face.
The prohibition of other drugs rests on an equally
wobbly foundation.
In declaring 'war on drugs',
we have declared war on our fellow citizens.
War requires enemies we can
demonize, fear and loathe.
Current policies expose the
embarrassingly
meager return on our massive law
enforcement effort of $167 billion a year.
It is time to accept
drug use as a right of adult Americans, treat drug abuse as a public health
problem and end the madness of an unwinnable war."- Norm Stamper, former chief
of the Seattle Police Department.
Cannabis was made illegal to
increase the fortunes of William Randolf Hearst, the
DuPont family and
all the quack medicine
producers of Rockefeller Medicine,
descendents of the Medicine
show.
Cannabis oil remains visible in the body for 30 days whereas
coal ash derivative water soluable
chemicals wash out of the body in a few hours.
"I had my deep
secrets, and I assumed my male friends had theirs, though none as shameful as
mine - when I was 5, I was
forced into a sexual act by a gang of kids who laughed at me.
I
didn't reveal that secret until I was 60 years old and in a 12-step program
into which I'd stumbled because of the
booze and
drugs I'd used to Novocain the pain
of my shame and self
doubt." - Karl Fleming
Supreme Court Justice
Anthony M. Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee,
noted in a speech to the American Bar Association that "our resources
are misspent, our punishments
too severe, our sentences too long".
The resulting study suggested
that Congress repeal mandatory minimum sentences suggesting that the laws tend
"to be tough on the wrong people".
"Longer mandatory sentences are worth
so much to private prison stocks.
A prisoner in jail for a minimum of
20 years has a projected 25 year cash flow associated with incarceration, as
opposed those eligible for early parole.
Passing laws regarding
mandatory sentencing that increase the need for prison capacity can increase
the value of private prison company stock without those companies getting
additional contracts or business.
The passage of - or
anticipation of - a laws that
will increase the demand for private prisons is
a "stock play" in and
of itself." - Catherine Austin Fitts
"Looking to America as a role model for drug
control is like looking to apartheid
South Africa for how to deal with race.
America leads the world in
per-capita incarceration rates, with less than 5% of the world's population but
almost 25% of the world's prisoners.
About 500,000 people are in
American prisons and jails today for violating a drug law; that's almost 10
times the total in 1980.
Despite this dismal record, America has
succeeded in constructing
a global drug
prohibition regime modeled after its own
highly punitive approach.
Rarely has one nation so successfully promoted its own failed policies
to the rest of the world." - Ethan Nadelmann 02/08
1982
US spends $9 billion on incarceration.
1985 US spends $36 billion on police, courts and
incarceration.
1999 US spends $49
billion to incarcerate individuals.
2002
England, Italy and Germany have incarceration rates of around 100
per 100,000 of population whereas America has in an incarceration rate of 436
per 100,000.
2004 2.1 million
prisoners behind American bars compare to the rate of incarceration in the
USSR under Stalin and
Iraq under Hussein.
An
individual convicted of petty theft in California - a
theft of less than $400 - who is sentenced to
serve any time in jail may be charged with
a felony if caught stealing
again and punished with up to three years in state prison.
5,500
individuals are serving third strike prison sentences in California including
more than 100 serving a minimum of 25 years for petty theft.
2005 America spends $167 billion on incarceration.
Seven million Americans, about 3% of the total American population, is
incarcerated or on parole or probation.
California spends $573 million.
13,000 individuals, 9% of California prison population are three
strikers.
For a three striker, 25 years, the cost of incarceration is
$750,000.
Those sentenced to 25 years to life are effectively wards of
the State for life.
In North Carolina Junior Allen, 65, is released 35
years after incarceration for
stealing a
black and
white
television set worth $140 in
1970.
2007 California
imprisons residents at 4 times the rate it did in
1980.
"California's correctional system is in a tailspin that threatens
public safety and raises the risk
of fiscal disaster.
The failing correctional system is an immediate
crisis facing policy-makers.
Thousands of local jail inmates are let out early every week as a
result of overcrowding and court-ordered population caps." - Little Hoover
Commission, January 25, 2007
Govenor Arnold
Schwarzenegger annonuces his new plan to borrow $7.4 billion to ease prison
overcrowding by building new prisons.
172,000 inmates are packed into
space intended for 100,000 inmates.
2008 1 out of
100 American adults is incarcerated - the highest incarceration rate throughout
recorded history.
"One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is
in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion.
The crime rate has declined
by about 25% in the past two decades.
Despite more spending on
prisons, recidivism rates remain unchanged.
1 of 89 women is behind
bars or monitored, compared with 1 of 18 men." - Pew Center on the
States
California built 30 prisons since 1980 - inmate levels double
design capacity.
A federal judge finds that a least one avoidable death
is occuring per week through sheer neglect and ineptitude even though spending
on health care is up
263% from 2000 to $1.9 billion.
"Our prisons are crowded for one reason:
Too many people behind bars.
We could start by finding a more
appropriate way to deal with those prisoners who are more mentally ill than
criminal, who were re-incarcerated for technical parole violations that pose no
public safety threat, whose offense is mere drug possession, or who are serving
25-year mandatory minimum sentences for non-serious, nonviolent third strikes."
- Sharon Dolovich, professor at UCLA School of Law.
Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan appear in
federal court in Scranton, Pa. to plead guilty to
wire fraud and
income tax evasion for
taking more than $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to two privately
run youth detention centers run by
PA
Child Care and a sister company, Western PA Child
Care.
Judge Michael T. Conahan secured contracts for the two
centers to house juvenile offenders while Judge Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. carried
out the sentencing to keep the centers filled.
"There was a culture of
intimidation surrounding this judge and no one was willing to speak up about
the sentences handed down." - Marsha Levick
More than 500 sentenced
juveniles had appeared before Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. without legal
representation.
Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella Jr. is
sentenced to 28 years in federal prison for taking bribes from the builder of a
pair of juvenile detention centers in a case that became known as Kids for
Cash.
2009 A federal three-judge panel
rules that the California prison system must reduce overcrowding by as many as
55,000 inmates within three years to provide a constitutional level of medical
and mental health
care.
2014
The Prisoners Fighting California's Wildfires
Corporal punishment used to
be carried out in a businesslike fashion.
Bodies were
branded,
amputated, wrenched
apart.
From the stake
to the scaffold, from the pillory to the
gibbet, physical suffering was
produced with elaborate
theatricality as an example to all.
Care was taken that no one
should be unaware of it.
The King, as the
Father of the country acted in the stead of
God.
God, synonymous with Nature, is
invariable and absolute.
Public theatricality came
to a end in the second half of the 18th century.
The monotonous
tumbling of locks and the shadow of the cell block have replaced the
grand ceremonial of flesh and
blood.
The condemned are concealed rather than being placed on
exhibition.
We no longer want to cause the criminal pain;
we want to reeducate him;
we want to
reorient his "spirit."
The change took place throughout Western
civilization in less than a century.
The
Middle Ages had prisons
and jails but was unfamiliar with a rigid system of regimented, fastidious
detention that developed between 1780 and 1820 as Europe and the New World
became covered with penitentiaries.
The shock of corporal punishment and
the silence of reclusion are contiguous phenomena; nor are their differences
only on the surface.
This is a scaling transistion from one method of
social control to another.
Rather than conceptualizing
defying the authority of the King as defying God, defiance of the authority
previously transferred collectively to the
people is seen as a
breach of the social contract between culture members.
People, no
longer punished for apostasy, are instead
excommunicated.
Society islolates and 'reforms' them by
carefully regulating every action.
Control through isolation
requires rigorous regulation of space as security,
rigid regulation of the use of
time and regulation of
physical movements.
"What is so astonishing," Foucault asks,
"about the fact that our prisons resemble our
factories,
schools,
military bases, and
hospitals - all of which
in turn resemble prisons?"
When it is understood that mental illness
has contributed to relatively minor crimes that mental illness is taken into
consideration - as an increased threat.
People with severe mental
illness are medicated with
robust
neuroleptics so that they appear to have
a basic understanding of
court proceedings.
They are then considered sane and convicted as
violent deviant
criminals.
1981 Stephan Lilly is convicted of
DUI, controlled substance possession and misdemeanor assault.
1997 Stephan Lilly, 42, is convicted of assaulting his wife.
2005 A verbal threat against his wife goes down
as second violent felony and strike two.
Upon release Stephan Lilly is
paroled to a group home for those with mental illness but denied the medication
that made him sane enough to go to trial.
After hearing voices that
told him to run around, due to his withdrawal from the
neuroleptics previously
received in jail, Stephan Lilly got into an altercation with a guard.
The legal system addicted Stephan Lilly to extremely potent
neuroleptics, then
aburptly withdrew
them and expected him to remain calm.
The prosecutor noted Stephan
Lilly had been diagnosed schizophrenic.
The prosecutor labeled
Stephan Lilly a violent
deviant criminal offender.
For a verbal threat and physically
detaining the guard, uninjured yet shocked with fear by being pined
against a wall Stephan Lilly, received 25 to life for his third strike.
Two of the these three strikes were based on what was considered
criminally violent felony
verbal threats !
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