A disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself. ~ Hannah Arendt At his 1963 March on Washington Dr. King said, “We have come here today to dramatize an appalling condition.” And so we have. Because today, with for-profit prisons a burgeoning growth industry, the incarceration rate of people of color can be extrapolated to the population at large. Indeed, one out of every one hundred adults in America today is incarcerated, and one out of every thirty-two is somewhere in the system – either on probation, on parole, or behind bars. Put another way, the United States has five percent of the world’s population and twenty-five percent of the world’s prison population. And more than half of these arrests are for marijuana. The FBI puts
the number of marijuana arrests over the last decade alone at 7.9
million. This was not caused by the laws of supply-and-demand for weed.
This was caused by the laws of supply-and-demand for prisoners and,
hence, for profits. Since 1984, when privatization of prisons was made
legal again, after having been stamped out in 1928 due to gross abuses
against prisoners in the name of profit, the for-profit prison industry
has moved quickly to expand into as many states as possible before
enough resistance could be amassed to stop them. And with each new
prison constructed, there is a need for more prisoners to fill it. In the intervening years, lobbyists for the
corporate, for-profit prison industry have spent millions of dollars
per year writing laws and implementing strategies to put people in
prison for as long as possible. The harsher the policies and the longer
the sentences, the more money flows into these corporations from the
government. And nothing grows the prison population better than the War
on Drugs -- a war funded by taxpayers, some of whom are later fed into
the machine, including those you’ve met, and others you will meet, in
these pages. Big Money Machine  Three Strikes is one of a systematic web of
laws designed to incarcerate the maximum number of people for the
longest possible time; a web of laws that creates a self-perpetuating
money machine for its creators – a cabal of corporations and lawmakers
with the shared goal of growing America’s prison population for profit; a
web of laws written by special interests and introduced by the
legislators they have bought with campaign contributions. Just one small
example of the way our democratic system of government has been
hijacked by the corporate thugs, greed-heads and fixers of America’s
sprawling prison cartel. Former Navy journalist and “conserva-tarian” co-founder of All American Blogger,
Duane Lester reports that in only three decades CCPOA has become one of
the most powerful political forces in California. In an article published by FreeRepublic.com,
he wrote that the union has contributed millions of dollars to support
Three Strikes and other laws that lengthen sentences and increase parole
sanctions (the sentences imposed when a parolee violates the terms of
parole). After then-governor Pete Wilson backed Three Strikes, the prison-guard union donated a cool million to his campaign. Don’t Look For The Union Label On a much more insidious scale, a
right-wing lobby group, the American Legislative Exchange Council
(ALEC), writes ‘model bills’ (legislation to be enacted in one state and
replicated in others, also known as ‘copy-cat laws’) for corporate
sponsors like Koch Industries, Exxon Mobile, BP, American Bail
Coalition, R.J. Reynolds, Wal-Mart, Phillip Morris, Pfizer, AT&T,
and Glaxo Smith Kline, to name a few – including bills specifically
designed to exploit cheap prison labor on behalf of profit-making
corporations. Writing for thenation.com, labor journalist Mike Elk and blogger Bob Sloan detail ALEC's “instrumental role
in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades,”
explaining how ALEC pioneered some of the toughest sentencing laws on
the books today – mandatory minimums for nonviolent drug offenders,
Three Strikes laws, and so-called truth-in-sentencing laws, which
require violent offenders to serve 85% of their sentences before being
considered for release. After ensuring that more prisoners would be
incarcerated for longer and longer periods, ALEC then “paved the way for
states and corporations to replace unionized workers with prison
labor.” The “convict lease program,” instituted in
the South after the Civil War, was the precursor to today’s for-profit
prison industry. The then-governor of Mississippi imprisoned freed
slaves and then leased them out to a private party who could work them
to death, and often did, with no pay. It took churches, families, and
civil libertarians sixty years to wipe these laws off the books and the
Reagan Administration no time at all to bring them back. Only a lobby funded by profit-driven
corporations would replace preexisting laws with legislation like the
Prison Industries Act, allowing “the employment of inmate labor in state
correctional institutions and in the private manufacturing of certain
products.” A federal program called PIE (Prison Industries Enhancement
Certification Program) conveniently certifies prison work programs for
exemption from federal restrictions on prisoner-made goods in interstate
commerce. Prison labor for private profit was illegal
before ALEC came along. Now the lobbyists have instituted two federal
programs to regulate and certify prison labor. Just goes to show what
money can buy. In Florida, an outfit calling itself PRIDE
(Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises) now runs
forty work programs where inmates manufacture “tons of processed beef,
chicken and pork,” as well as office furniture and other commercial
items – for twenty cents an hour. Aside
from the obvious slave labor issue, here’s another concept for you: the
intersection of processed meat with prison hygiene. I’ve heard the
stories about prison conditions -- a hundred-and-twenty to two-hundred
inmates in gym-sized rooms; fifty or more sharing a single filthy
toilet, without privacy or sanitation. “Some guys just shit in the
shower,” said a friend who spent a few eye-opening nights at L.A.’s Twin
Towers. And these guys are processing tons of meat that wind up, among other places, in school lunches. Granted, prison laborers featured on a
recent exposé on CNBC, entitled “Billions Behind Bars,” worked in
facilities outside the prison, and wore gloves. But that was a single
example in Colorado – a 6,000-acre complex with fifty businesses,
including a goat farm and a fish farm, staffed by inmates. Colorado
Correctional Industries, a division of the state Department of
Corrections, which runs the complex, is on “a mission to save taxpayers’
money while helping to rehabilitate Colorado’s inmates.” Perhaps. They
also happen to garner $56 million per year in revenue. But elsewhere,
and for twenty cents an hour, how motivated could long-term prisoners be
to maintain pristine job-site sanitation standards? Especially when
they work under threat of punishment if they refuse to work? In a 2007 letter to prisonersolidarity.org,
an inmate wrote that he and other prisoners at Ohio State Penitentiary
had been trying for seventeen months to call attention to inhumane
conditions such as “broken toilets that leak profusely, the urinals that
overflow onto our feet, and the lack of ventilation that results in
fumes and condensation that are unbearable at times.” Even if they are
transported elsewhere to work, how clean can they be? Yet, these are the
living conditions many inmates endure. Conditions bad enough to cause
one man to commit suicide at Dickens County Correctional Center in Spur,
Texas – a prison run by the for-profit prison company, GEO Group, Inc. How could GEO, or any corporation, justify
making people live in such deplorable conditions? Because it’s cheaper,
according to the inmates’ rights group Partnership for Safety and
Justice in Portland, Oregon. In an msnbc.com article entitled "Suicide Reveals Squalid Prison Conditions," the organization’s program director, Caylor Rolling stated, “they cut corners because the bottom line is making money.” Papers, Please  In the old days of publicly run prisons, it
paid to let a prisoner go when his time was up or his rights were about
to be violated. Not only was it the right thing to do, it saved the
public money. And therein lies the rub. In voters’
minds, the chief attraction of private, for-profit prisons is that
they’re thought to save taxpayer dollars. Not so. In fact, just as
health-care costs ballooned when corporations got in the game and began
charging fifteen dollars per box of tissues -- as if a patient in a
hospital bed were raiding the mini-bar in a luxe hotel rather than
receiving medical care -- so have prison costs increased by virtue of
the profit incentive of private-prison corporations. And where do their
profits come from? Some come through the newly-legalized exploitation of
the prisoners themselves, but the bulk come from you, the taxpayer.
When prisoners, a public commodity, are managed by a private
institution, the public pays. We are not creating savings. We are
creating more prisoners and, these days, turning incarcerated human
beings into corporate assets. Why would a private prison want to see a
prisoner released if with him goes a piece of their income? To find the really heavy hitters in the
game of jailing undocumented immigrants for fun and profit, we must go
to Arizona, where Republican State Senator Russell Pearce teamed up with
ALEC and another for-profit prison company, Correction Corps of America
(CCA), to create Senate Bill 1070, Arizona’s notorious “Papers, Please”
anti-immigrant bill. Courtesy of SB 1070, local detention facilities
rake in $200 per inmate per day ($6,000 a month, or $72,000 a year).
According to “Immigrants for Sale,” Cuéntame’s shattering exposé, “these
private prisons have spent over $20 million lobbying state legislators
to make sure they get state anti-immigrant laws approved,” thus securing
an endless supply of immigrant inmates. Replicated in Utah, Florida,
Ohio, Tennessee and Iowa, ALEC and CCA have built themselves a “perfect
money machine.” Corporate Corrections Companies Meet some of the players in the new,
for-profit prison industry. Correction Corps of America (CCA),
headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee, touts itself as “America’s Leader
in Partnership Corrections.” CCA designs, builds, manages and operates
correctional facilities and detention centers for the Federal Bureau of
Prisons (BOP), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the U.S.
Marshall Service, a couple dozen states, and nearly a dozen counties
across the USA. CCA pocketed $2.9 billion in 2010. Management Training Corporation (MTC),
headquartered in Centerville, Utah, with branches in Texas, Georgia, and
Washington, D.C., operates twenty correctional facilities in Arizona,
California, Florida, Idaho, New Mexico, Ohio and Texas. They have the
capacity to “secure and train 25,310 offenders and detainees at federal
and state correctional facilities across the United States.” Formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections,
GEO Group, Inc., of Boca Raton, Florida, manages and/or owns 116
correctional, detention and residential treatment facilities, boasting
some 80,000 beds. GEO ran the Texas prison where the previously
mentioned suicide took place. Among the many services GEO provides are
Secure Prisoner Escort and Secure Detainee Transportation. Since its
inception in 2008, GEO has transported over 200,000 prisoners and
detainees by land and air. Among the three of them, these for-profit
prison companies own over two hundred facilities with 150,000
bed-spaces, cranking out a tidy five billion dollars a year in profit. A perfect money machine, indeed -- but only
if the system keeps them supplied with prisoners. And how does it do
that, besides detaining defenseless immigrants? By feeding more and more
marijuana and medical-marijuana users into their giant corporate maw. War on (Wonder) Drugs It’s worth repeating here that cannabis was
only outlawed in the first place as an accommodation to corporate
interests. There was no moral imperative to make it illegal, nor is
there one today. It doesn’t kill people, the way alcohol and tobacco do.
According to Lester Grinspoon, M.D.,
Associate Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School,
who has studied it extensively, cannabis is safer than aspirin! To quote
him directly, “Compared to aspirin, which people are free to purchase
and use without the advice or prescription of a physician, cannabis is
much safer: there are well over 1000 deaths annually from aspirin in
this country alone, whereas there has never been a death anywhere from
marijuana.” He went on to say that “it will eventually be hailed as a
‘wonder drug’ just as penicillin was in the 1940s.” Yet the practice of jailing people for
growing, transporting, buying, selling or possessing marijuana, and
locking them up for longer and longer periods of time, continues. In
Louisiana this year, 35-year-old Cornell Hood II was sentenced to prison
for life for having been
caught four times for possession and/or distribution of a substance more
innocent than aspirin and with fewer side effects than any
pharmaceutical painkiller on the market. In Oklahoma, Patricia
Spottedcrow, whose case we examine in an upcoming post, was sentenced to
prison for ten years for having sold $31 worth of marijuana. Ten years.
Second degree felony assault, in which a person bludgeons another
person with a deadly weapon, causing severe bodily injury, carries five
years. Yet you can sell a few “dime bags” of weed and get locked up for a
decade, even when you have no prior arrests and four young children at
home depending on you. Just
as the for-profit health-care industry relies on sick people for
profits, and thus has an interest in keeping them sick, the for-profit
prison industry relies on prisoners for profits, and thus has an
interest in keeping them incarcerated. And though a recent Gallup poll
shows that fully fifty percent of Americans favor legalizing marijuana
and another seventy percent favor allowing doctors to prescribe it, the
fight will really heat up when all those who profit from the War on
Drugs mobilize their efforts against legalization. Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul ~ Bob Dylan, “Masters of War” No Defense for Grumbine and Byron Meanwhile, back in Long Beach, California,
Judge Charles D. Sheldon on September 22, 2011, denied Joe Grumbine and
his former partner Joe Byron an affirmative (medical marijuana) defense
against the felony charges they face for operating two legally compliant
medical marijuana collectives. Consequently, the jury who decides their
fate will not hear a single word about their activities in providing
medical marijuana to patients with a legitimate prescription. The two
Joes will be presented as ordinary street-level drug pushers. In a
political climate where state and federal law enforcement agencies are
targeting dispensaries and their landlords in an apparent effort to wipe
out medical marijuana dispensaries entirely, this is very bad news for
the Joes. If convicted, each will face at least seven years in state
prison. At a pre-trial hearing on October 12, Judge
Sheldon asked for a list of defense witnesses. Attorney Chris Glew,
representing Joe Grumbine, told the judge that, because his client had
been deprived of a defense, he had no witnesses. Incredulous, the judge
repeated his request. Glew repeated the same answer. Commenting that
he’d set aside time for a month-long trial, Judge Sheldon expressed
reluctance to forfeit taxpayer dollars on a trial that would be
considerably shorter than he’d expected. “We didn’t accomplish very much
today,” he groused, and continued the hearing until November 2. Citizen Outrage Grows Outraged over “juror abuse,” a growing
coalition of medical marijuana patients and advocates gathered outside
the courthouse to protest the judge’s ruling. They claim that by denying
the Joes an affirmative defense, Judge Sheldon is denying the jury the
ability to return a fair verdict based on the facts. “A juror can not
take back a guilty verdict,” said one of the protesters, citing the
recent execution of Troy Davis in Texas. In similar cases across the
country, countless jurors are forced to live with the pain of having
returned guilty verdicts based on insufficient or false evidence. Along
with the defendant, the juror pays the price for this abuse of judicial
authority. How can the life of such a man Be in the palm of some fool's hand? To see him obviously framed Couldn't help but make me feel ashamed to live in a land Where justice is a game ~ Bob Dylan, “Hurricane” The next court date is set for Wednesday,
November 2, 2011, at the Long Beach Courthouse. There will be a rally
outside the courthouse at 8:00 AM. Court Support meets at 8:30 AM in
Room 508. The trial begins on November 28. Those wishing to join the rallies, participate in court support, or donate to Grumbine’s and Byron’s legal defense can do so at The Human Solution or phone 951-436-6312 for additional details. ****** In 1995 Cynthia Johnston directed public relations for an online publication, Sources eJournal,
covering intelligence, espionage and terrorism. There, she wrote a
three-part series, “Confessions of a CIA Brat.” She also wrote a
business column, “In the Loop,” for an independent filmmaking web
publication and several pieces for Bay Area computer magazine Micro Times. After Sources
went down in the dot.com crash of the late Nineties, she took a leap of
faith, moved into a funky cab-over camper, and started living curbside
on the streets of San Francisco. She began her first blog before
blogging was a word. Her online journal earned her the opportunity to
write a piece, “Mobile Homeless,” for The San Francisco Chronicle. She’s been blogging ever since. Johnston
began writing about her experience as a medical marijuana patient as
soon as she “got legal.” She went public on behalf of legalization in
1980 with the California Marijuana Initiative and a headline: “Marijuana
Protester Busted at High Noon.”
****** |