Private Prisons

Inmates at San Francisco Jail Forced Into Gladiatorial Combat as Sheriff’s Deputies Placed Wagers

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At just 150 pounds, it was hardly fair to pit Ricardo Palikiko Garcia against an opponent well over twice his size. But Garcia had to fight him — or else he’d allegedly face torture. 

Like the gladiators of old, Garcia and others were forced into pugilistic matches, local authorities said. Four sheriff’s deputies then placed bets on their bouts.

“Deputy’s betting against me and forcing me to fight and if I don’t fight, then he’s basically telling me that he was going to beat me up, cuff me, Tase me all at once,” Garcia said in an audio recording.

Investigators fear the fights may have gone on for a while. For Garcia, there was a lead-up. Deputies forced him to do pushups to train for fights.

– From the CNN article: Inmates Forced Like Gladiators to Fight as Deputies Took Bets

You know something’s just not right in your culture when you see a headline about prisoners engaging in gladiatorial combat while incarcerated, and the first thing that comes to your mind is, “this reminds me of a similar story from last year.”

Indeed, all it took was a quick search and I uncovered an article I wrote last March ago titled, FBI Launches Investigation into a Private Prison So Violent it is Called “Gladiator School,” which noted that:

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Profiting from Prisoners – How Jails Partner with Private Firms to Charge for Video Calls While Ending Visitation Rights

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Screen Shot 2015-03-05 at 3.00.15 PMNot coincidentally, free on-site video visits are offered at the jail only three days each week. Remote visits — those visitors pay for — are more frequent. Clearly, Securus’ interest lies in encouraging visitors to use the remote system, and the county stands to gain, too. When Hopkins County signed its deal with Securus in 2012 the company agreed to give the county a 70 percent cut of its profits from video and phone calls. 

Hopkins County is one of five Texas counties that adopted Securus’ video visitation and eliminated in-person, face-to-face visits afterward. 

In September, the Dallas County Commissioners Court nearly approved a contract of its own with Securus that would have explicitly eliminated all in-person visits at the Lew Sterrett Jail in favor of video visitation. 

– From the Dallas Observer article: Captive Audience: Counties and Private Businesses Cash in on Video Visits at Jails

At first glance, it seems like a reasonable enough plan. Private companies offer to install technology in prisons free of charge that allows inmates to make video phone calls to their friends and family on the outside. Make the video calls free when visitors come to the prison itself, but make that process as inconvenient as possible. Then eliminate in person visitation rights.

At that point, even if you travel to the prison itself, the best you can get is a video call with the inmate, the same thing you can do from the comfort and convenience of your own home. Then tack on a hefty fee for remote video calls. Presto! You’ve created a captive market to financially feed off of. It’s like taking candy from a baby.

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Chart of the Day – America’s Prison Population Over the Past 100 Years

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Screen Shot 2015-02-12 at 3.05.01 PMThere are 2.3 million Americans in prison or jail. The U.S. has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of its prisoners. One in three black men can expect to spend time in prison. There are 2.7 million minors with an incarcerated parent. The imprisonment rate has grown by more than 400 percent since 1970.

Recent research suggests that incarceration has lost its potency. A report released this week from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University School of Law finds that increased incarceration has had a very limited effect on crime over the past two and a half decades.

– From today’s Five-Thrity-Eight article: The Imprisoner’s Dilemma

The sickening and absurd rate of incarceration in these United States has been a frequent topic of conversation here at Liberty Blitzkrieg over the years (links at the end). In our national insanity, the U.S. has only 5% of the worlds population, yet 25% of its prisoners. Many of these people have no business being locked in a cage to begin with, and are wasting their lives away for committing “victimless crimes,” i.e. for no good reason.

While the immorality of locking up so many of our fellow citizens for non-crimes should be readily apparent, today’s article from Five-Thirty-Eight offers evidence that America’s incarceration rate has become so saturated that it has absolutely no meaningful impact in lowering crimes rates anyway. The time for prison reform and the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences is long overdue.

From Five-Thirty-Eight:

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Florida Moves to Make “Bullying” and “Cyber-Bullying” a Crime Punishable by a Year in Prison

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Apparently, having only 5% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s prisoners isn’t a high enough incarceration rate for America. As such, some states are looking for ways to imprison more of its citizens for non-violent offenses. In this case, I refer to a bill advancing in Florida’s state Senate that would make “bullying” a crime, including “cyber-bullying” online. The bill is a reaction to the tragic suicide of 12-year old Rebecca Sedwick, who took her own life after suffering harassment from her peers.

As tragic as Rebecca’s death is, who hasn’t suffered the harassment of offensive and insensitive people in their lives? No one. This is particularly bad amongst juveniles, but even in the adult world you are bound to cross paths with some raging sociopath at one point or another. Unfortunately, this is simply a fact of life and a sad reflection of our state of consciousness. It is not something that can ever be legislated away with the stroke of a pen.

The only thing this will do is further increase an already bloated and absurd domestic prison population (in 2012 police made an arrest every 2 seconds), as well as provide the context to stifle free speech. After all, defining what constitutes criminal “bullying” or “cyber-bullying” will be extraordinarily difficult and will open the doors to criminalizing all sorts of free speech. While the intention may be noble, this sounds like an absolutely horrible idea.

From Think Progress:

A Florida bill advanced in the Senate this week to make bullying a crime, including cyber-bullying online. The new offenses criminalize a range of “harassing” behavior, both in-person and on the Internet. And a second conviction would send perpetrators to jail for a year, criminalizing what is primarily a problem among youths.

The bill comes in response to concerns of escalating bullying, especially cyberbulling, and is named for 12-year-old Rebecca Sedwick, who committed suicide in September 2013, after two teen peers allegedly harassed her over her dating of a particular boy. While Rebecca’s case did not involve LGBT harassment, bullying has been a particular concern among LGBT youth.

The bill establishes that someone who “willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly harasses or cyberbullies another person commits the offense of bullying” — a misdemeanor — and that those who engage in such harassment accompanied by a threat are guilty of a third-degree felony.

A felony for bullying? Seems way overboard…

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How Debtors’ Prisons are Making a Comeback in America

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Apparently having 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of its prisoners simply isn’t good enough for neo-feudal America. No, we need to find more creative and archaic ways to wastefully, immorally and seemingly unconstitutionally incarcerate poor people. Welcome to the latest trend in the penal colony formerly known as America. Debtors’ prisons. A practice I thought had long since been deemed outdated (indeed it has been largely eradicated in the Western world with the exception of about 1/3 of U.S. states as well as Greece).

From Fox News:

As if out of a Charles Dickens novel, people struggling to pay overdue fines and fees associated with court costs for even the simplest traffic infractions are being thrown in jail across the United States.

Critics are calling the practice the new “debtors’ prison” — referring to the jails that flourished in the U.S. and Western Europe over 150 years ago. Before the time of bankruptcy laws and social safety nets, poor folks and ruined business owners were locked up until their debts were paid off.

Reforms eventually outlawed the practice. But groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union say it’s been reborn in local courts which may not be aware it’s against the law to send indigent people to jail over unpaid fines and fees — or they just haven’t been called on it until now.

The Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law released a “Tool Kit for Action” in 2012 that broke down the cost to municipalities to jail debtors in comparison with the amount of old debt it was collecting. It doesn’t look like a bargain. For example, according to the report, Mecklenburg County, N.C., collected $33,476 in debts in 2009, but spent $40,000 jailing 246 debtors — a loss of $6,524.

Don’t worry, I’m sure private prisons for debtors will soon spring up to make this practice a pillar of GDP growth.

Many jurisdictions have taken to hiring private collection/probation companies to go after debtors, giving them the authority to revoke probation and incarcerate if they can’t pay. Research into the practice has found that private companies impose their own additional surcharges. Some 15 private companies have emerged to run these services in the South, including the popular Judicial Correction Services (JCS).

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The United States has More People in Jail than High School Teachers and Engineers

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America has become a gigantic gulag over the past few decades and most of its citizens don’t know, or just don’t care. One of the primary causes of the over incarceration in the U.S. is the absurd, tragic failure that is the “war on drugs”, and indeed nearly half of the folks in prison are … Read more

A Broken, Corrupt and Immoral Criminal Justice System

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You know that the rule of law has essentially vanished when the Attorney General himself feels compelled to state: “America’s legal system, we must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is in too many respects broken.” That is precisely what Eric Holder stated earlier this week, while seemingly taking no responsibility for that fact despite being the top lawyer in the nation. Guess he was too busy protecting his banker masters from prosecution to notice.

In any event, the broken criminal justice system really took center stage earlier this year when the federal prosector Carmen Ortiz drove child prodigy Aaron Swartz to his death by piling on overzealous charges in an attempt to advance her career. Instead she drove a gentle genius to an untimely death. Kudos Ortiz.

In light of Holder’s comment, Bloomberg columnist Clive Crook wrote an excellent article outlining some of the main attributes of out increasingly Kafkaesque legal system. Here are some key excerpts:

“As a prosecutor, a judge, an attorney in private practice, and now, as our nation’s attorney general, I’ve seen the criminal justice system firsthand, from nearly every angle. While I have the utmost faith in — and dedication to — America’s legal system, we must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is in too many respects broken.”

In a widely reported speech this week, Eric Holder delivered that assessment of U.S. criminal justice. Many commended his frankness, but if you ask me he’s confused. A broken system of justice shouldn’t command the utmost faith; it should arouse the utmost skepticism. And his appraisal was actually too generous. America’s criminal-justice system is not “in too many respects broken”: It’s a national disgrace, from top to bottom.

According to a forthcoming report from the American Civil Liberties Union, 2,074 federal inmates are serving sentences of life imprisonment without possibility of parole for nonviolent crimes. Think about that.

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Texas Teen Faces 8 Years in Jail for an Insensitive Joke on Facebook

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A very disturbing pattern is becoming evident all across the nation.  For a country that has 5% of the world’s population yet 25% of the entire planet’s prisoners, we sure do seem to eager to bump that figure up even higher. My guess is the trend has a lot to do with the private prison system in the country, which means higher levels of incarceration equals higher profits.  I think it also has to do with a troubling move toward criminalizing speech and an attack on the First Amendment generally.  This particular case occurred in Austin, Texas and nineteen year old Justin Carter now faces eight years in jail for an insensitive joke on Facebook. Thanks to the site Texas Prison Bid’ness, we can gain some perspective on the private prison industry in the Lone Star State:

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Now, here’s the story from KHOU in Houston:

Justin Carter was 18 back in February when an online video game “League of Legends” took an ugly turn on Facebook. 

Jack Carter says his son Justin and a friend got into an argument with someone on Facebook about the game and the teenager wrote a comment he now regrets. 

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Judge Sentenced to 28 Years in “Cash for Kids” Scheme

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Cash for kids.  Absolutely disgusting, but in a country where all the financial incentives are aligned toward criminal and immoral behavior, it’s hard to find anything surprising at his point. Think about this case and then think about the growing trend of private prisons in America, prisons that are incredibly being given favorable tax treatment.  From the UK Independent:

An American judge known for his harsh and autocratic courtroom manner was jailed for 28 years for conspiring with private prisons to hand young offenders maximum sentences in return for kickbacks amounting to millions of dollars.

Mark Ciavarella Jnr was ordered to pay $1.2m (£770,000) in restitution after he was found to be a “figurehead” in the conspiracy that saw thousands of children unjustly punished in the name of profit in the case that became known as “kids for cash”.

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