PRIVATIZING HELL
Prisons, Profits & Politics
Sightings from The Catbird Seat
~ o ~
August 12, 2007
Mainland prison slammed
Two managers quit a facility that holds 696 Hawaii inmates
By Nelson Daranciang, Star-Bulletin
The heads of the education and addiction-treatment programs at a private Arizona prison holding Hawaii inmates abruptly quit their jobs complaining of poor management, inadequate facilities and lack of staffing.
Their resignations came just days before an Aug. 3 incident in which the staff at Saguaro Correctional Facility inadvertently opened security doors, releasing Hawaii inmates from their cells. Seven inmates left their cells when the doors opened, one was injured in a fight with another inmate and a third inmate had to be subdued for refusing to return to his cell, Hawaii Department of Public Safety officials said.
Rich Stokes was the principal at Saguaro Correctional Facility in Eloy. Michael VanSlyke was the facility's addiction treatment manager.
"They essentially walked out," said Steve Owen, spokesman for the Tennessee-based Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the Saguaro facility. "Their leaving was not expected."
Stokes and VanSlyke did not explain their departures to CCA officials but instead sent e-mails to Shari Kimoto, state Department of Public Safety mainland branch administrator.
In the e-mails, Stokes said upper management at the facility spies on staff, controls all communication with the outside, and devalues and degrades inmates and programs for them. He said water runs into cells when inmates take showers because the drains are higher than the surrounding floors, the air-conditioning system experiences frequent failure and staff are often locked in or out of their units because doors cannot be opened.
Gates and doors are opened when they should be closed and closed when they should be open because there are not enough correctional officers, Stokes said, adding that the officers who are there are overworked and undertrained.
VanSlyke's e-mail said Saguaro does not have adequate facilities to treat inmates and will never qualify for inpatient licensing as required by CCA's contract with Hawaii. He also said the qualifications required of counselors made it impossible for him to hire an adequately sized staff in time to start an addiction treatment program....
CCA hires people with no prior experience working in corrections, like Stokes and VanSlyke, for their subject-area expertise, Owen said.
"Its just one of those things where it didn't work out," he said.
Hawaii's Department of Public Safety is sending an inspection team to Saguaro following the Aug. 3 incident.
An audit team was already scheduled to be in Arizona last week, said Louise Kim McCoy, state Public Safety spokeswoman. Deputy Director for Corrections Tommy Johnson is also in Arizona for the audit team's visit, she said.
McCoy said Johnson will be checking the programs at Saguaro, employee training records, staffing and security features of the facility.
Saguaro has a design capacity for 1,896 inmates. As of last week, there were 696 Hawaii inmates housed there, McCoy said.
http://starbulletin.com/2007/08/12/news/story03.html
February 19, 2006
Doing time a long way from home
For Hawaiians in Kentucky, it's 'double punishment'
By Andrew Wolfson, The Courier-Journal
WHEELWRIGHT, Ky. -- It harkens back to centuries past, when felons were banished to penal colonies on distant continents.
One hundred and nineteen Hawaiians -- all women -- are locked behind razor-wire fences at an isolated private prison in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, 4,500 miles from their homes and families.
Most will never get a visitor, no matter how long they're incarcerated.
Emerald Nakamura, 26, of Honolulu, who is serving five years for forging checks, sees her 20-month old son Ikaika once a month -- on a video screen. She said he doesn't recognize her.
"It is very sad," she said. "I think about him all the time."
The Hawaiians are housed at the Otter Creek Correctional Center because of severe prison crowding in their native state, and because incarcerating inmates on the mainland saves Hawaii money.
Even with the price of flying inmates across the Pacific and back, it's still cheaper to house them in the continental United States. It costs $56 per day to house each inmate off the islands, compared with $110 in heavily unionized Hawaii, where a gallon of milk is $6.
Ten years after Hawaii started exporting prisoners, nearly half its 3,858 inmates are lodged in the continental United States -- in rural Mississippi, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky, all in prisons owned by Corrections Corporation of America.
The Nashville-based company says it has saved the state $158 million since 1998.
But prisoner-rights advocates in Hawaii say it is a false economy.
"The cost per bed may be cheaper, but not when you include the cost of broken families," said Kat Brady, coordinator for the Community Alliance on Prisons in Honolulu. "It is hard for a woman to come home after three or five or 10 years and say, 'I'm your mom,' when her child has never been able to visit her."
The Hawaii Department of Public Safety doesn't dispute that sending inmates out of state is hard on them, said Shari Kimoto, who runs its mainland branch. But she said the agency has no choice because the people of Hawaii don't want prisons built in their back yards, and the remaining open areas that can still be developed are prized for resorts.
Kimoto acknowledges that separation is particularly hard on women, who traditionally have been the primary caregivers in their families. But that is where her sympathy ends.
"I don't think they had their children or families on their mind when they did their crimes or did their drugs," she said.
The Hawaiians have been held at Otter Creek since September, when CCA reopened it as a women's prison; 399 Kentucky women also are held in the facility, which once housed about 600 men from Indiana and also was the scene of a nine-hour riot in July 2001.
But the Hawaiians went unnoticed outside of Wheelwright, a former coal camp, until Sarah Ah Mau, 43, died mysteriously Dec. 31 after complaining for a month of a stomachache. The cause of her death is still under investigation.
Hawaiian news organizations reported that she'd told family members before her death that her pleas for medical attention went ignored. CCA said in a statement that her care was appropriate.
A Courier-Journal reporter was allowed to interview 10 of the Hawaiians but barred from asking any questions about Ah Mau's death; Warden Joyce Arnold also insisted that the prison's security director monitor the interviews.
Adjusting to Kentucky
About half the women are serving time for using and selling crystal methamphetamine -- known as ice -- which swept through the islands in the 1990s.
The women interviewed said they deserved to be punished but questioned the fairness of being sent so far from home.
"It is like a double punishment," said Deenie Tanele, 33, who has been locked up since 1999 for smoking and selling ice and will serve out her term until 2009.
The U.S. Supreme Court, however, ruled in a case from Hawaii in 1983 that an inmate has no "justifiable expectation that he will be incarcerated in any particular state."
Most states, including Kentucky, ship only a few inmates to other states, usually for security reasons. (Kentucky has 19 housed elsewhere; Indiana has none, according to corrections departments in both states.)
Wisconsin, which six years ago had more than 5,000 prisoners out of state, leading the nation in that category, brought the last of them home last year, said John Dipko, a spokesman for the state corrections department.
The state acted in part so its prisoners would have more family support and be less likely to commit more crimes, Dipko said.
Otter Creek is the fourth stop for many of the Hawaiian women. They were removed from prisons in Texas, Oklahoma and Colorado after other private companies allegedly violated contracts by refusing to provide promised vocational training and drug treatment.
In Colorado, two of the inmates allegedly were sexually assaulted, and inmates had to teach their own vocational classes.
The women say their hardest adjustment in Kentucky has been to the weather. The average February temperature in Wheelwright is 35 degrees, compared with 73 in Honolulu.
"The cold is unbelievable," said Iwalani Carroll-Vierra, 27, who is also serving time for selling ice and noted that she must sleep fully dressed because she is allergic to her blankets.
The Hawaiians also have had to allow for subtle but significant cultural differences, said Catherine Samuel, 65, who is serving 20 years to life for murder.
For example, guards have confused a hand symbol that signifies good luck in Hawaii with a gang sign, she said. Hawaiians also are more likely to touch one another and hold hands, which Samuel said has been confused with prohibited lesbian advances.
Arnold, the warden, said officials are aware of the differences, which she said came into play earlier this month when an inmate innocently put her hand on an officer's shoulder. Arnold said the inmate nonetheless was placed in segregation under the prison's zero-tolerance policy for touching employees. Kimoto said Hawaiian prisons have the same policy.
As a concession to the Hawaiian diet, prisoners are served rice at least once a day and fresh fruit at least once a week. They also may practice hula and other native dances for one hour twice a week, and they will be allowed to celebrate King Kamehameha Day each June 11, to honor the monarch who unified the Hawaiian Islands.
But Arnold acknowledged that it is hard for the Hawaiians to watch as Kentucky inmates get visited weekly by their families and friends, while nobody comes to see them.
A few have received visits from friends from the mainland, Arnold said, but most say traveling from the islands is so expensive that they're not expecting any visits from home....
Inmates such as Patsy Kahaunaele, 36, who is serving 10 years for selling and using ice, said she worries most that her family members will die and she won't be able to bury them.
The state of Hawaii won't pay to fly inmates home for funerals. They are allowed to listen on the phone, and the state will send them a videotape, Kimoto said.
'Life has been taken away'
Several prisoners praised an intensive drug-treatment program offered at Otter Creek, and said they have more freedom there than at Hawaii's single, crowded women's prison on the island of Oahu.
But Samuel said the private prison has been slow to provide them with prescription medicines they got for years at other facilities.
Lorraine Robinson, the director of a Honolulu-based program that helps female inmates re-enter civilian life -- Ka Hale Ho'ala Hou No Na Wahine (Home of Reawakening for Women) -- said that being so far from home makes it hard for the women at Otter Creek to hold out hope.
"They are on shaky ground to begin with," she said of the many who are addicted to drugs, depressed and lacking resiliency, "and this makes it worse."
Deborah Mainnaaupo, 54, who is serving 20 years for attempted assault, said the Hawaiian women feel like "we are all on death row. Life has been taken away from us. It is too cold. They should leave us in Hawaii, where we belong."
Looking out the barred windows of the visiting room to the barbed wire, cliffs and mountains outside, Kahaunaele laughed at the security that keeps the Hawaiians locked inside.
"I don't think it would be possible for us to escape," she said. "But even if we could, where would we go?"
© 2006 The Courier-Journal
See related stories at: http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/current/ln/prisoners
October 3, 2005
Prisons for profit:
Inside the big business of CCA
Years of problems yield few answers
By Kevin Dayton, Advertiser Staff Writer
Corrections Corp. of America, a pioneer in the private prison industry, has control over nearly half of Hawai'i's prison population in what may be the state's biggest venture into privatization.
Publicly traded CCA is the nation's largest private provider of jail and prison services to government agencies, and has the country's sixth-largest corrections system, behind only the federal government and four states.
It owns and operates 39 facilities and manages 38 others. The company also owns three facilities that are leased to other operators. In all, CCA is present in 19 states and the District of Columbia.
Founded in 1983, the Nashville, Tenn.-based company has grown into a behemoth that employs 15,000 workers to oversee 62,000 inmates, including about 1,830 inmates from Hawai'i. CCA reported revenues of $1.15 billion last year, and last week became Hawai'i's sole provider of Mainland prison space.
The company is expected to collect $36 million from Island taxpayers in mostly nonbid contracts this year.
All but one of the prison contracts were awarded without formal competitive bidding because, technically, they are government-to-government agreements, which are exempt from state procurement rules.
The contracts are with governmental entities such as Pinal County in Arizona, the Watonga Economic Development Authority in Oklahoma and the Tallahatchie County Correctional Authority in Mississippi, which subcontract the work to CCA.
Hawai'i Department of Public Safety officials said they invite other companies to compete for the contracts in an informal process, but the nonbid arrangement gives the state greater flexibility to negotiate for services.
In order to broaden the field of potential providers, the state issued a request for proposals when seeking a new facility to house women inmates, said Marc Yamamoto, purchasing specialist for the Department of Public Safety. CCA's Otter Creek Correctional Center in Kentucky was selected, and last week about 80 women inmates were transferred there.
As for male inmates, an official familiar with the history of the prison contracts said that since the late 1990s, CCA has been the only private operator with enough suitable beds available to house all of the men Hawai'i must send to Mainland prisons. The official asked not to be identified because the official is not authorized to discuss the issue with the media....
The company has been dogged by controversy over its financial stability and management, labor practices, and safety problems that led to escapes and deadly violence. Some critics argue it is wrong for a business to profit from the imprisonment of human beings.
CCA spokesman Steve Owen said the company is simply filling a dire need for more prison beds while saving state and federal governments millions of dollars....
The company's most notorious incidents occurred at Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown, which opened in 1997. During the first year of operation, when the prison held 1,500 inmates from the District of Columbia, there were 13 stabbings, including two fatalities. The prison was supposed to hold only medium-security inmates, but more than 100 had to be moved after it was discovered they actually had higher security classifications.
The deaths of several inmates while under prison medical care brought additional scrutiny, and when a group of five murderers and another inmate escaped, Ohio Gov. George Voinovich wrote a letter to U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno in July 1998 saying he wanted the prison closed.
A lawsuit filed by inmates alleging unsafe conditions at the Ohio prison resulted in a $1.65 million settlement with CCA. The prison closed in 2001 when the District of Columbia withdrew its inmates, but CCA reopened the facility last year to accommodate federal detainees.
More recent CCA troubles include a five-hour riot involving inmates from Washington, Colorado and Wyoming at Crowley County Correctional Facility in Colorado in July 2004. Nineteen inmates were injured in that melee. A Colorado Department of Corrections report found prison staff were inexperienced, undertrained and spread too thin to control the inmates. The night of the riot, fewer than 35 corrections officers were on duty for more than 1,100 prisoners.
The company referred to the trouble in its 2004 annual report. "While disappointing, inmate disturbances are an unfortunate part of our business," the report said, noting that the incidents led to significant changes in the company's management structure and operations.
There also have been problems at CCA prisons holding Hawai'i inmates, including violence, drug smuggling and contract violations. Still, state prison officials say CCA has generally done a good job and has been quick to make changes when deficiencies are pointed out.
CCA's formula for success includes buying or building prisons in rural or depressed communities such as Tutwiler, Miss., and Wheelwright, Ky., providing needed jobs in areas with high unemployment.
That strategy helps CCA keep its wages relatively low, which is critical because labor is the primary cost in operating a prison. The starting pay for a CCA corrections officer at the Tallahatchie County Correctional Facility in Tutwiler is about $8.40 an hour, compared with $13.20 for a new guard in Hawai'i.
In the late 1990s, CCA teetered near bankruptcy as thousands of beds remained empty and states began withdrawing inmates from private prisons. A surge of new contracts from federal agencies seeking space for increasing numbers of criminals and immigration detainees helped the company rebound in recent years.
Since CCA relies on government contracts, it has not shied away from playing politics.
The company last year contributed $100,000 to the DeLay Foundation for Kids, a charity established by U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay. DeLay resigned as Republican majority leader last week after he was indicted in connection with a Texas political fundraising scandal.
In Montana, which is a CCA client, the company donated $10,000 to help finance an inauguration ball for Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer. In the state of Washington, another client, CCA has made political contributions to Republican and Democratic organizations and candidates.
Hawai'i Gov. Linda Lingle accepted a $6,000 corporate contribution from CCA in 2002, the maximum allowed in a four-year campaign cycle, and an identical sum in February of this year for her 2006 re-election race.
< < < FLASHBACK < < <
March 1, 2003
Lingle appoints
public safety director
The federal prosecutor is currently
serving the U.N. in Bosnia
By Richard Borreca, Star-Bulletin
Gov. Linda Lingle appointed veteran federal prosecutor John Peyton as the new director of the Department of Public Safety. His appointment was immediately praised by Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, chairwoman of the Judiciary Committee, who said the state would be "getting a running start with someone like him."
Bob Awana, Lingle's chief of staff, said yesterday that Peyton, currently serving in Bosnia with the United Nation's Independent Judicial Commission, would be able to start work at the end of April or beginning of May.
Awana called Peyton "a bright, experienced, tough cop."
As an assistant U.S. attorney in Honolulu in 1985, Peyton successfully prosecuted Ronald Rewald for swindling about $20 million from Hawaii residents. Rewald was sentenced to 80 years in prison but was let out of federal prison in 1995 after suffering a back injury and being confined to a wheelchair.
Peyton also served as the chief litigator for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Honolulu Prosecutor Peter Carlisle described Peyton, 58, as being "capable of taking on any kind of assignment you give him."
"I didn't think he was coming back to Hawaii. We are very lucky to get him," Carlisle said.
Peyton will be the third person put in charge of the Public Safety Department since Lingle became governor. She first named Stephen Watarai, a Honolulu assistant police chief, to the post, but he withdrew after saying the police retirement pay schedule made it too costly for him to leave the city.
Hanabusa, whose committee would handle the public safety director's confirmation, had been critical of Watarai's experience. He is also being investigated by police internal affairs and the city ethics director because of allegations that he had ordered police officers to work during a charity golf tournament for a police charity and then take the extra day off with pay.
Watarai denied the charges.
Lingle then named James Propotnick, a retired first deputy U.S. marshal for Hawaii, as interim public safety director....
Hanabusa said in Peyton's case, his relative lack of experience in running a prison would not be a handicap, because of his experience as a manager.
"He is clearly someone with superb credentials and is a true manager.
"What is necessary is someone who can manage these very different types of duties. Someone who can go to a foreign country and help them set up a judicial system has got to be able look at our prison system and make sense of it," Hanabusa said...
Cabinet nominations confirmed
The state Senate gave unanimous approval yesterday to five Cabinet nominations made by Gov. Linda Lingle.
Mark Bennett was confirmed as attorney general. Bennett is a former assistant U.S. attorney.
Others confirmed yesterday include Micah Kane, Hawaiian Home Lands director; Rodney Haraga, transportation director; Brigadier Gen. Robert Lee, adjutant general; and Russ Saito, comptroller and director of the Department of Accounting & General Services.
Office of the Governor
State Department of Public Safety
September 17, 2004
Prison Riot Followed
Increase in Inmates
By Deborah Yetter & Mark Pitsch, The Courier-Journal
The inmate riot Tuesday at a private Eastern Kentucky prison followed a dramatic increase in inmates and cutbacks in privileges such as free time outdoors, prison officials said.
It also came after allegation of inmate abuse and mistreatment increased and visits from friends and family were cut back, an inmate advocate said.
The Lee Adjustment Center near Beattyville took in 400 new prisoners from Vermont about four months ago, raising the population to about 800 men, officials said yesterday.
Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the prison for the Kentucky Corrections Department, does not believe those factors explain the riot in which inmates set two buildings on fire, spokeswoman Louise Chickering said yesterday.
“There is no justification for the destruction those inmates did,” she said.
But advocates for inmates and others with the prison industry said crowding, cuts in privileges and an influx of inmates far from home created an explosive situation there.
“Usually when there’s a prison riot it occurs after months or years of intolerable conditions,” said Barry Kade, a Vermont lawyer and a member of the Alliance for Prison Justice, an advocacy group which works to improve conditions for Vermont inmates.
Kade and others said private prison companies are profit driven to increase inmate populations. Nashville-based Corrections Corporation, the country’s largest private prison company, gets a daily rate of $38.44 for each Kentucky inmate it houses at the Beattyville prison and $42.50 per inmate from Vermont.
Kade said he has received an increasing number of complaints from Vermont inmates since they were sent to Kentucky this year to relieve prison crowding in their home state.
Of the nine inmates who officials said started the fires, five were from Kentucky and four from Vermont.
The increasingly common practice of states sending inmates to private prisons in other states has exacerbated problems, said some outside observers.
“It’s very clear that shipping prisoners far from their families is not good criminal justice policy,” said Peter Wagner, assistant director of Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit policy and research group in Massachusetts....
Corrections Corporation also experienced riots in July at prisons it runs in Colorado and Mississippi – both of which house out-of-state inmates. The company, which operates three private prisons in Kentucky, also had a nine-hour riot in 2001 by inmates at its Otter Creek Correctional Complex in Floyd County, which housed Indiana inmates....
“I think this latest uprising fits into this general pattern of unhappiness by prisoners who have been transported out of state,” said Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, a Vermont-based magazine about the prison industry.
Vermont inmates at Beattyville complained to Kade that visits from friends and family – who must drive about 1,000 miles to Kentucky – were cut to two hours a week. Free time on the yard was cut and some inmates alleged they were mistreated through physical abuse or by being put into isolation without have committed any violation, he said....
Kentucky, Vermont and Corrections Corporation have all said they plan to investigate Tuesday’s riot. Kade said he will ask for an outside investigation.
September 20, 2004
No Date Given On Transfer
Of Female Inmates to Utah
By Vicki Viotti, Honolulu Advertiser
The state Office of Youth Services would not say today when six girls housed at the Hawaii Youth Correctional Facility will be transferred to an unnamed juvenile detention facility in Utah.
State officials last week said the transfer would be for 60 days and would allow the Office of Youth Services time to repair a building and relieve overcrowded housing conditions at HYCF.
Members of the faith and social services community planned to gather this morning outside the state Capitol to rally against the planned transfer.
“If there are only six girls, it’s unbelievable they can’t be accommodated,” said the Rev. Sam Cox, treasurer of the Interfaith Alliance of Hawaii, one of the organizations opposing the transfer.
Cox said that he and others have heard that the transfer would take place today, but Sharon Agnew, director of the Office of Youth Services, said she could not disclose scheduling or other details....
Kat Brady, legislative coordinator for the Hawaii Juvenile Justice Project, said the response from the community has been a flood of e-mails calling the Office of Youth Services plan “outrageous.”
“We know that in Hawaiian culture, strength is family, and since their mission is to strengthen families, what the heck are they doing?” Brady said.
“Have they done any work to help the parents prepare?”
March 26, 2004
Crossing Lines
By Kathy Kelly, Voices in the Wilderness
This weekend, I’m preparing for an April 6, 2004 entry into the Pekin FCI (Federal Correctional Institute) in Peoria. I’m one of several dozen people who, on November 22, 2003, crossed the line at the US Army’s military combat training school in Fort Benning, Ga....
I could be harmed in prison, but that certainly could have happened to me while in Bagdad or several other places I’ve traveled by choice. I don’t feel anxiety beyond normal fear of the unknown.
The cruelty of prison rests in locking up people who are often already feeling remorse and low self-esteem because of past actions and then heaping upon them more reasons to feel badly about themselves and allowing almost no means to improve their situation. Parents separated from their children, feeling that they’ve screwed up their lives, are often snarled at by counselors and guards who say they should have thought about their loved ones before they started causing trouble.
People who’ve committed crimes, often nonviolent crimes which they honestly regret, (mainly related to drug use and drug trade), shouldn’t be free to continue harming themselves or others through drug traffic. But why take away every other freedom, and why employ other human beings to act as “human zookeepers?”
I’ve felt somewhat insulated from attacks on self-esteem while in prison. I’m proud of line-crossings that protest pouring money into the Project ELF nuclear weapon facility in northern Wisconsin that fast tracks Tomahawk Cruise missiles to maim and kill people in Iraq. Likewise, it’s good to be part of the growing group who’ve crossed the line at a military combat training school in Fort Benning, GA. Graduates of the school have been responsible for massacres, assassinations and tortures. People should be crossing these lines every day of the week. No shame, no stigma here.
But I do feel troubled because I’ve been so distanced, in recent years, from some of the poorest people in our country. I need to better understand what’s happening to them. Am I right when I guess that the media successfully pressures young people in inner cities to consume, to buy, to have brand name this and that? Does this corporate push to buy certain lines of clothing, cosmetics, and cars push people further into an underground economy because they cant’ get a stake in the above ground economies after our education system has badly failed them?
Thinking of how George Fox, who helped found the Quaker faith, would stand on church pews during sermons and urge people to trod gently over the earth, seeing that of god in everyone, I’ve nurtured a fantasy related to court rooms. Suppose one were to stand up on a courtroom bench, risk contempt of court, and ask, “Could we just take a minute to analyze how many are “the raw material” feed this system? I’ll bet that the people making money would be, primarily, white and well educated. They’re the lawyers, the judges, the courtroom personnel.
And I’ll bet that the people feeding the system, keeping the well paid criminal justice system employees in business, would be African American, Hispanic, and Asian. If convicted, the “criminals” could find themselves earning 18 cents per hour laboring, within the prison industrial complex, for major US corporations who can hire prison labor without ever having to worry about paid vacations, benefits, overtime, hiring supervisors, or renting workspace. The prison industrial complex resembles enslavement and might be a precursor to fascism.
I want to nonviolently defy this system.
In 1988, upon entering the Cass County jail in Harrison, MO, my heart sank as I realized how intensely the other 12 women in the cell, a dingy area called “the bullpen,” didn’t want to see a new person encroach on the minimal space allotted to them. Most had already been there for many weeks.
The bullpen was meant to be a small holding cell area, but because the jail was so overcrowded, the six bunk beds, exposed toilet, metal table and spray-mist shower with a ripped curtain became housing for women prisoners awaiting transport. I had just been released from the hospital following major surgery after a lung collapse caused by a congenital abnormality. Friends said that in my prison uniform I could have posed for a Soviet Union poster charging the US with abusing prisoners.
The women prisoners glaring at me were seeing a 90 pound woman with pink eye, a runny nose, tangled hair, an obnoxious cough, and a facial rash. Eying the top bunk assigned to me, I wondered how I’d heave myself up there without stepping on another woman’s bed. And how could I stuff the lumpy mattress I carried into the prison issue casing when I could barely bend down to tie my shoes?
At that point, the most intimidating woman in “the bullpen” laughed, rolled her eyes, and said, “I don’t know what I did so wrong to be locked up with this white motherfu*ker with AIDS!”....
In our world, many of us who live in the US are perched, quite by accident, amidst inordinately luxurious surroundings, relative to the rest of the world. We’re the luckiest. We’re the most blest. And we have the greatest responsibility to build a better world.
My own logic tells me that when US troops “crossed the line,” in March 2003, they trespassed into a sovereign country, Iraq, based on the theory and argument that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction posed an imminent threat to people in the US. Now it’s clear that Iraq didn’t pose even a distant threat to people here.
At Fort Benning, GA, we crossed a line onto two feet of government grass at a place where it’s beyond dispute that graduates of the military combat training school have participated in torture, maiming, disappearance, massacre and assassination when they returned to their own countries....
On Monday, March 29, I’ll go to Madison, WI to face a one-month jail sentence for refusing to pay a $150 fine after twelve of us walked two feet across the line onto the Navy’s ELF/Trident transmitter site located in the northern woods of Wisconsin. ELF (extremely low-frequency waves) is used to trigger nuclear missiles. The ELF system is also used to trigger Cruise missiles. Cruise missiles were the weapon of choice among war planners as the Shock and Awe campaign against Iraq was developed....
Not all peace activists can be part of civil disobedience actions resulting in prison sentences. But for those who can, entering the prisons offers an opportunity to better understand how the once lauded war on poverty has become a war against the poor.
Those of us who ‘do time’ for crossing lines at Fort Benning and at Project ELF will be away from our desks, but we won’t be away from our work.
Kathy Kelly is a co-ordinator of Voices in the Wilderness - ph. 773-784-8065
For the complete article, and much more, visit http://vitw.us
For more about waging peace, not war, GO TO >>> The Peacemakers
July 21, 2002
Race, class and crime no bar: In fetters, they toil
Online edition of India's National Newspaper, The Hindu
In the U.S., a number of states have passed laws that allow commercial organisations to use convict labour. Prisoners get much less than the minimum wage. Retrenchments are not a problem, there is no sick leave, vacation or overtime, and unions are non-existent. The result, says noted journalist P. SAINATH, is that American corporations are on to a good thing.
THE young executive was gushing. "You know, when I phoned my credit card people while in the United States, I was speaking to a girl in Gurgaon. They'd trained her so well, she had an American accent and was able to tell me what the next day's weather in my part of California would be. Why can't we learn from them?''
The Indian press, too, had run many pieces on this much earlier. Since year 2000, the much heard of, but seldom seen, "girl from Gurgaon" has attained special status. She is a metaphor for the wonders of globalisation and corporate efficiency.
Never mind the need to train the girl in an American accent. The executive had made other calls to his bank's enquiries section and or "credit card people". I asked if he had located who and where they were. He had not.
A pity. Some of those he had spoken to were in places that make Gurgaon look a healthy hill resort in contrast. Possibly, they were convicts in prison. Probably working at much less than the minimum wage. And, quite likely, Black or Hispanic.
Welcome to the new slavery.
Privatised prisons in the United States run by for-profit corporations. And Federal or State-run prisons that allow — often invite — private enterprises to use that labour. Quality control made easy. Unions non-existent. And workers don't get more disciplined than this. Even if the prisons are not private, the State can hold down prison labour for private gain and its own benefit.
"These days," says Business Week (online) "prison labour is as close as your cell phone. Jail-based customer service centres have fielded 800-line requests for airline reservations. According to news reports, prisoners have also wrapped software for Microsoft, produced electronic menu boards for McDonald's, and stitched clingy lingerie for a manufacturer."
In the past 20 years, more than 30 States have passed laws that allow commercial outfits to use convict labour. Such programmes now exist in 36 of the 50 American states.
American prisons...New age "slavery" or
a good business idea?
The corporations that use prison labour at far less than minimum wage include Fortune 500 giants and other famous "brands". Starbucks and Nintendo Game Boy systems are just two of the big names that have done so. Some of these companies do pay minimum wages — many don't. But they pay it to a private corporation that hires or rents out the prison labour. A form of outsourcing that conceals their use of such labour.
But the private corporation chews half off the top of a prisoner's pay check. Or the department of corrections may do that if it is a State-run prison. Which raises the obvious question: why do companies willing to pay the minimum wage not do so to workers outside the prisons, looking for a job?
The answers are fairly simple. Some of the work they're getting done in prisons could cost more than double the minimum wage hourly, outside. And outside, you can't coerce people into doing it for that much less.
The editors of Prison Legal News, a remarkable journal run by prisoners, point to other gains, too. There are no problems of retrenchments and layoffs. Business in a slump? Just send the "workers" back to their cells whenever it suits you. There are no health, insurance or retirement benefits to be paid out, either. Nor is there any vacation time, sick leave or overtime. It allows you to massively undercut any rivals who have qualms about human rights and the treatment of prisoners. And it helps push down wages across the industry.
There is now a large, and growing, pool of prison labour to draw from. The United States has around two million people behind bars. Of these, 63 per cent are Black and Hispanic, although these two communities together form only 25 per cent of the population. With only five per cent of the world's population, the U.S. has nearly 25 per cent of the world's eight million prisoners.
"It's the new slavery," says Randall Robinson. "It's destroying the younger generation of Black people," he told us at Trinity College in Connecticut earlier this year. This leading African-American thinker points to "the built-in bias and discrimination of the system. It ensures this huge pool of labour. In our democracy, we have private prisons. When as private corporations you own prisons, the only way you can get your stocks to go up is to get more prisoners."
"Blacks are just 12 per cent drug users," points out Robinson, "but account for 35 per cent of those arrested for drug use; for 55 per cent of those convicted for use; and 75 per cent of those incarcerated for use."
In the State of Washington, where Starbucks and others milk this situation, Blacks account for less than four per cent of the population. Yet, they make up almost 40 per cent of the State's prison population. In West Virginia, there are 17 Black prisoners for every White one.
A Human Right Watch backgrounder early this year brought it out in other ways. It observed that "in 12 States, Black men are incarcerated at rates between 12 and 16 times greater than those of White men. In 15 States, Black women are incarcerated at rates between 10 and 35 times greater than those of White women."
One out of every 14 African American men is now in jail. And one out of every four is likely to be in prison at some point in his lifetime. The fastest growing section of prisoners, though, is Black women, of whom 70 per cent are non-violent offenders and 75 per cent have children.
Tying prisons to commerce will affect all prisoners. Black, though, will do much worse than others. That goes back a long way in history. For decades into the 20th Century, the State of Alabama, for instance, ensured a steady supply of servile Black labour to "U.S. Steel". Its laws were shaped for this purpose. A system that even the Wall Street Journal describes as one "rooted in racism and economic expedience", Alabama, says the Journal, "was providing convicts to businesses hungry for hands... " That is, mainly unpaid hands.
"For many years," writes the Journal, " ‘convict leasing’ was one of Alabama's largest sources of funding."
And for some States and corporations, it could well be so again. The Federal Prison Industries (FPI) has yearly sales of $600 million and it is rising. Profits in 1999 were over $37 million. And that's a government programme. What of private prisons? Or private use of labour in State prisons?
Stan Saunders of the Columbia Theological Seminary writes that "prisons for profit now generate $30-40 billion of revenue annually. The corrections segment of our economy today employs over half a million full time workers."
That's "more than any `Fortune 500' company except General Motors."
Saunders rightly includes prisoners, guards and others in the "corrections industry". If we take just prisoners put "to work", some counts are as low as 100,000. If that is true, it would only show that business is booming. If putting five per cent of the prison population "to work," can rake in such revenues, then the money yet to be made is mind-boggling. Hardly surprising then, that the number of prisoners made to labour for profit goes up each year. Prison workers "employed" by the FPI alone went up 14 per cent two years from 1998.
And in some towns across the U.S., the prison is now the mainstay of the local economy. Crime rates have dropped in the U.S.. Violent crime is down by one-fifth in the last three decades. But incarceration rates, Saunders points out, have quadrupled. Creating a state of siege mindset in the public has helped. Both, media and lawmakers have done that.
People have often been led to act against their own interests. Like in Oregon in 1994. Over 70 per cent of voters there, including union members, voted for a constitutional amendment forcing all prisoners to work 40 hours a week.
The result? As Alan Whyte and Jamie Baker write in analysis for the World Socialist Web Site: "thousands of public sector jobs have been lost to convict labour. And thousands of private sector jobs have been lost as a result of firms that now utilise prison labour."
But as they point out, corporations have gained: "Prisoners now manufacture everything from blue jeans to auto parts, to electronics and furniture.
“Honda has paid inmates $2 an hour for doing the same work an auto worker would get paid $20 to $30 an hour to do.
“Konica has used prisoners to repair copiers for less than 50 cents an hour.
“Toys R Us used prisoners to restock shelves and Microsoft to pack and ship software.
“Clothing made in California and Oregon prisons competes so successfully with apparel made in Latin America and Asia that it is exported to other countries.”
Quite a few public dollars also go to prison farms. These may be government-run, but the labour in these prisons can be hired out to corporations. The giant $178 billion U.S. farm bill (see The Hindu, May 5, 2002) gave subsidies to these and university-owned farms.
"We need to merge the prison and university system," jokes Prof. Eileen Mahoney of San Francisco State University. "It seems the only way we'll ever get money for education. At least, in this social and political climate."
Some private prison groups have had top state level political leaders on their payroll.
Take Wackenhut Corp. for instance. In New Mexico, as investigations by journalist Greg Palast show, it hired the state legislature's Democratic Party leader as a paid lobbyist. It also gave out contracts to one of his companies.
Are these private prisons "efficient"?
For their top bosses and their political friends, yes. For the State and its people, it has cost a bomb. Wackenhut hired untrained guards on the cheap.
Another cost-saving trick: It used fewer guards to control dangerous prisons. A riot in April 1999, points out Palast, "required 100 state police to smother 200 prisoners with tear gas... The putative savings of privatisation went up in smoke literally".
The damage from riots, prisoner and even guard revolt cost millions of public dollars. That, in a single year.
The social costs, though, are beyond measure. The implications for poor minorities and non-convict labour are appalling. Corporate profit resting on a largely racial basis and a servile workforce is legitimate.
Goodbye Gurgaon. Welcome back, Alabama.
P. Sainath is one of the two recipients of the A.H. Boerma Award, 2001, granted for his contributions in changing the nature of the development debate on food, hunger and rural development in the Indian media.
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