Prison industrial complex follies

A couple of recent items in the mainstream and not-so-mainstream press illustrate that the prison industrial complex is thriving and in little danger of disappearing without a sustained public outcry against the for-profit management of the country’s prison system.

There are 1.5 million people incarcerated in the United States, and local police departments have ready allies in their poverty-stricken populations. As the New York Times has reported, people are so desperate for money that they are turning in their neighbors and even relatives – many wanted for nonviolent misdemeanor offenses – in order to get the money to pay the utility bill. Some tipsters have called the police so many times that their voices are easily recognizable. Also, they are quick to express frustration if the reward is not immediately available. This is a much better way to make ends meet than using the predatory payday loan establishments that are now proliferating like weeds as part of the urban landscape.

Since many of the people turned in by their friends, relatives and neighbors are likely to find themselves in a privately-run prison, what could be more appropriate than a company man on the federal bench. Enter Gus Puryear, the main attorney for the Corrections Corporation of America and Bush’s nominee to the US District Court in the Middle District of Tennessee. Mr. Puryear did well by the company’s shareholders, as the legal mind behind the $2 million settlement that derailed any civil or criminal action in the murder of an inmate at the hands of CCA prison guards. Whether this qualifies him for a lifetime appointment as a public servant will be up to the Senate Judiciary Committee, and some of the members of that committee are concerned enough to begin asking questions about the case.

Yet it is a stunning illustration of how far we have progressed down the road to a corporatist state that someone so intimately associated with private prison enterprise could be unashamedly selected for a federal judgeship.

Justice American style, II

Every day seems to bring news of more atrocities committed in our so-called justice system. On the heels of news reports about some 60+ people dying in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, we now learn that other immigrants have been drugged with powerful antipsychotic and anti-anxiety medications in the name of creating docile deportees. Individuals with no history of mental illness have been injected with dangerous psychotropics and returned to their home countries in such a drugged state that they are unable to walk or function for days upon their return. Hence those we detain are parted from the drugs they need, sometimes with fatal results, or injected with drugs they don’t need. This process violates established human rights codes, and, as the Washington Post article notes, those escorting the deportees were not allowed to inject any additional doses of the drugs while on layovers in some countries.

This abominable treatment reminds me of the abuses our government highlighted in those Cold War propaganda films, only now we play the starring role. There is absolutely no excuse for this, least of all the fact that we are detaining immigrants who are here without papers. Until we express as much outrage over U. S. corporations crossing our border and decimating the economies of our Southern neighbors we have no room to condemn and abuse those who migrate north in search of survival.

Justice, American style

A recent spate of news reports has clearly illustrated the state of justice in the United States. It is dismal.

An Illinois man was released from prison after serving twenty six years for a murder he did not commit. The actual killer had confided in his lawyers, but they could not say anything about this until their client’s recent death. At least in Illinois the former governor had some notion that justice was ailing, and he called a moratorium on executions because so many death row inmates were being cleared. This has occurred on more than one occasion in other states as well.

In Texas, home of the hyperactive death chamber, a man convicted of rape and murder in Dallas County was freed after twenty seven years in prison. The district attorney’s office, intent on a quick and easy conviction, ignored a solid alibi and eyewitness testimony which implicated others, and neglected to offer exculpatory evidence to the defense. The current Dallas County DA has decided to remedy any past injustices by re-checking all the DNA evidence. Out of 40 cases revisited so far seventeen inmates have been cleared. Despite this and other evidence to the contrary, the state of Texas continues to insist that those brought to trial receive a fair hearing. Hence Texas has wasted no time and scheduled three executions since the Supreme Court decided the Baze v. Rees lethal injection case.

The fact that these individuals served almost thirty years in prison is no coincidence. The “Reagan Revolution” ushered in a tough on crime attitude among local law enforcers which appears to have led to many miscarriages of justice.

Then there are the immigrants held in our country’s detention facilities who face neglectful and abusive treatment while awaiting disposition of their cases. Too many are dying as the authorities confiscate their medications are confiscated and all but ignore their health issues. Haitian American author Edwidge Danticat chronicles this in her book Brother I’m Dying, and in testimony at a House hearing on immigration. She described the treatment her uncle faced at the Krome Detention Center in Miami while awaiting asylum hearings, abuse which led to his death. Now a front page story in the New York Times tells of another abused immigrant who died under very similar circumstances, accused of faking an illness, thrown into solitary confinement and left to die. There was a time when American teenagers were warned not to engage in certain drug-related activities overseas, or they would be thrown into some rat-hole prison and left to rot. But as these news accounts indicate, we have become practitioners of what we abhor in others.