who believes the 'problem' is with the 'immigrants'. I mean...I just find it really hard to believe that the U.S. government can spy on anyone, anywhere in the world, and yet millions of people 'sneak' across the border every day. Why is that?..and why is it that the government can continue to spend billions of dollars on detention centers, but they can't afford to secure the border? My answer, is because it's cost effective, to acquire 'captive-labor'. So many people bitch about jobs going over-seas, or immigrants taking American's jobs away from them...but nobody bitches about the jobs going to the prison industry..or the money being made by private prison companies to build and run all our new detention centers needed to lock up those human beings who 'sneak' over the border. The whole thing is pretty sick if you ask me.
A Report on the Injustice System in the USA
Written by: Pauline (a contributing writer to IPFG’s Publication; Payaam Fadaee)
Published in Payame Fadaee, Spring edition 2002
http://www.ashrafdehghani.com/articles-eng...The US ruling class has established the largest forced labour sweatshop system in the world. There are now approximately 2 million inmates in US prisons compared to 1 million in 1994. These prisoners have become a source of billions of dollars in profits. In fact, the US has imprisoned a half million more people than in China which has 5 times the population. California alone has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world. It has more prisoners than France, Germany, Great Britain, Japan and Holland combined while these countries have 11 times the population of California. According to official figures, Iran incarcerates 220 citizens per 100,000, compared to US figures of 727. Overall, the total "criminal justice" system in the US, including those in prison, on parole and on probation, is approaching 6,000,000. In the last 20 years, 1000 new prisons have been built; yet they hold double their capacity.
Prisoners, 75% of who are either Black or Hispanic, are forced to work for 20 cents an hour, some even as low as 75 cents a day. They produce everything from eyewear and furniture to vehicle parts and computer software.
This has lead to thousands of layoffs and the lowering of the overall wage scale of the entire working class. At Soledad Prison in California, prisoners produce work-shirts exported to Asia as well as El Salvadoran license plates more cheaply than in El Salvador, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. A May/99 report in the Wall Street Journal summarized that while “more expensive private-sector workers may lose their jobs to prison labour, assigning work to the most cost-efficient producer is good for the economy.” The February/00 Wall Street Journal reported “Prisoners are excluded from employment calculation. And since most inmates are economically disadvantaged and unskilled, jailing so many people has effectively taken a big block of the nation's least-employable citizens out of the equation.”
Federal Prison Industries (FPI) whose trade name is UNICOR exportsFPI's prison workforce produces 98% of the entire US market for equipment assembly services, 93% of paint and artist brushes, 92% of all kitchen assembly services, 46% of all personal armour, 36% of all household furnishings and 30% of all headset/microphone/speakers, etc. RW. Feb/00 FPI consistently advertises for companies "interested in leasing a ready-to-run prison industry" especially following congressional testimony in 1996 that reported a "pent-up demand for prison labour."
Meanwhile, shareholders profiting from prison labour consistently lobby for the legislation of longer prison sentences in order to expand their workforce. At least 37 states have legalized the contracting out of prison labour to private corporations that have already set up operations inside state prisons.
Prisons' business clients include: IBM, Boeing, Motorola Microsoft, AT&T Wireless, Texas Instruments, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom, Revlon, Macys, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, etc.----------------------------------
California, with the third largest penal system in the world after China and the US as a whole, spends more on prisons than on the entire educational system.
In recent years, California's university and college system cut back 8,000 employees while its Department of Corrections added 26,000. CA has built 19 prisons vs. 1 university in the past 10 years.
The state spends up to $60,000 per year to incarcerate a young person, while only spending $8,000 per year to educate the same youth. Politicians in the state debate whether the death penalty should be applied to 13-year-olds or whether it should be applied "only" to those 14 and up. And new proposals to construct mega-prisons that would hold up to 20,000 inmates each is ‘justified’ by David Myers, West Coast regional president of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison corporation in the US.
He told a reporter that he is building 3 new prisons entirely on speculation because "If you build it in the right place, the prisoners will come. RW. Dec/00
http://journals.democraticunderground.com/stillcool47
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