Psychopaths Rule.

       It's common knowledge, or should be, that prisons are institutions of brutality, where violence is arbitrary, justice is varied on a whim, human rights are removed at the will of an individual, physical and psychological health is of little concern to the authorities, control and authority is all that matters. It is the control and authority of individuals who interpret these in their own manner according to their own particular mood or disposition. All this goes on in our towns and cities and we calmly go about our daily business.

    Some prison have a more brutal reputation than others, but a recent report from America, puts Alabama prison system right there at the top of the festering heap of callous brutal savagery that stinks of psychopaths give free rein.

The Alabama Report:

 

      Alabama prisons have used ”cruel and unusual punishment” on inmates by allowing correctional officers to perform routine beatings, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said following an investigation.
      “Our investigation found reasonable cause to believe that there is a pattern or practice of using excessive force against prisoners in Alabama’s prisons for men,” Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband for the department’s Civil Rights Division said.
     An investigation of 13 Alabama prisons found that 12 of them had correctional officers using excessive, and sometimes deadly, force on inmates that violated their Constitutional rights.
       Excessive force by corrections officers included the use of batons, chemical spray, and physical beatings involving kicking prisoners, which often resulted in serious injuries. Two Alabama prisoners died from excessive force incidents in the last months of 2019 alone.
       In one fatal incident in October 2019, “the level of force used caused the prisoner to sustain multiple fractures to his skull, including near his nose, both eye sockets, left ear, left cheekbone, and the base of his skull, many of which caused extensive bleeding in multiple parts of his brain,” according to the DOJ.
       The 28-page report released on Thursday highlighted multiple instances of officers using excessive force on inmates, with some of those times including when there was no physical threat to the employees' safety. The report also found officers would “use force as a form of retribution and for the sole purpose of inflicting pain".
     One instance stated how an officer “brutally hit, kicked and struck a handcuffed prisoner” in a medical unit while calling himself the “reaper of death”. The prisoner reportedly “begged for the officer to kill him”, according to four nurses who witnessed the incident.
      Low staffing and overcrowding in Alabama prisons was credited in the report as a trigger for officers to become “tired, stressed, overworked and angry”.
     “After carefully reviewing the evidence, we conclude that there is reasonable cause to believe that conditions in Alabama’s prisons violate the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution and that these violations are pursuant to a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of rights protected by the Eighth Amendment. Specifically, we have reasonable cause to believe that the correctional officers within the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) frequently use excessive force on prisoners housed in Alabama’s prisons for men. Such violations are pursuant to a pattern or practice of resistance to the full enjoyment of rights secured by the Eighth Amendment,” the DOJ said Thursday in a letter to Alabama Governor Kay Ivey.
       This report comes as the DOJ first started looking into the Alabama prison system starting in 2016. The department already found that the prison system was “deliberately indifferent” to prisoner-on-prisoner attacks on sexual abuse. Investigations also found officials failed to maintain facilities that were “sanitary, safe, or secure”.
    “Ultimately, Alabama does not properly prevent and address unconstitutional uses of force in its prisons, fostering a culture where unlawful uses of force are common,” the most recent report stated.
     Ms Ivey said in a statement that her administration was hopeful they could reach a resolution to all the department’s allegations.
      “I am as committed as ever to improving prison safety through necessary infrastructure investment, increased correctional staffing, comprehensive mental-health care services, and effective rehabilitation programs, among other items,” the governor said.

      So the governor said, and we heard Bla bla bla bla! Prisons must crumble to dust for freedom and justice to flower.

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Slavery And The Prison Struggle.

       A fact that is little broadcast by our babbling brook of bullshit, the mainstream media, is that it was the “abolition” of slavery, (we all know that it didn't really get abolished, just transformed), that gave a tremendous boost to the industrial revolution. As the slave owners were obliged to release their slaves, they were richly compensated by tax payers money for their loss. As they found themselves with buckets full of cash, they looked around to see how they could make it grow. So the the new industrial era got under way. This little map gives you some idea of the money that flowed into the pockets of the genteel folks of Edinburgh, who had their hands well dipped in slave ownership. This avalanche of tax payers money to slave owners, was repeated across the UK and elsewhere. 

 

      In support of the ongoing US prison strike, 325 has an interesting article that explains how today’s US prison system is more or less a continuation of the slave system that built empires. During the European imperialists expansion, slavery and indentured servitude were the backbone, the fertiliser, of capitalist growth and imperialist expansion. Little has changed, capitalism still thrives on slave labour, allied to cheap labour.

 

From 325:

 Prisons in the USA – The dark side of slavery in American society

        In order to be in the position to understand the importance and necessity of the us prisoners’ struggle, we first need to analyze the role of slavery in the foundation and evolution of the american state and its historical and integral ,until today, link with the capital.
      Slavery in its many forms was actually the foundation on which the omnipotence of american overlordship was gradually built. The root of this phenomenon can be traced back in the era when the christian empires of europe started a race to conquest unknown lands, founding colonialism regimes, in the era of brutal genocides of the indigenous populations and the slave trade of the non-white african population. Since then and until today, the social and political circumstances have rapidly changed, mainly because of a heavy blood tax that has been paid from beneath, towards the direction of the total shaking off of slavery as an institution. However, it continues up until today, more or less covered.
      Today’s prisoners’ class and racial composition, the spreading of private prisons, the institutionalization of enforced labor as a form of criminal sanction, the exploitation of prisoners by big companies highlight the fundamental connection between state-capitalism-slavery and prison.

Slavery in the first colonial systems

      During the first years of the “new world’s” colonization and until the early 18th century, most of the settlers were not free but were under a status of an idiotype slavery, known as “indentured servitude”, which aimed in equipping the colonies with cheap workforce. The “indentured servant” signed a contract according to which she/he was mortgaging her/his freedom and provide her/his work to a master for a period between 5 to 7 years and, in exchange, the latter covered her/his transportation expenses to the colony. In practice, it was happening by the signature of the contract between the “indentured servant” and the ship owner and the subsequent transferring of the contract to the new master, as soon as the ship arrived to the “new world”. The institution was initially introduced in 1619 through Virginia Company. It has been calculated that 80% of the refugees in the american colonies before american revolution were under this status, while only 40% managed to survive. “Interventured servants” consisted of three categories : -----------

Continue reading:

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USA Incarcerated Manufacturing Corporation.

         This post is to remind us that there is a prisoners strike planned for September 9th, in America's prisons, and why. Because of the utter appalling conditions, injustice and corruption of the whole prison system this strike demands our support. Caging animals is is seen as wrong, but we still tolerate the caging of humans, why?
           I doubt that the general public are aware that the so called leader of the free world, The Good Ol' US of A, is also the leader in incarcerating its own people. The US leads the world in nuclear power, and in general military power, to quell any resistance to its hegemony from overseas, but it also has a brutal system to quell any resistance by its own people to the tyranny of its savage system of capitalism.
         The American prison system is one big corporate money making machine, which recruits from the poorest and most disadvantaged sections of its communities. The judiciary in America is part and parcel of that corporate recruiting system. Once incorporated into its caged workshops, you are there for years, you lose all rights, and become a slave in one of the largest corporate money making enterprises in America. No union rights, no holidays, no days off, and punishment if you don't work hard enough.

Some startling facts from Policy.Mic:

      The U.S. imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. 

1. The United States has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of the world's prisoners.

2. The total incarcerated population in the U.S. is a staggering 2.4 million — a 500% increase over the past 30 years. 
3. One in every 108 adults was in prison or jail in 2012.
4. One in 28 American children has a parent behind bars.  
5. At the end of 2007, 1 in 31 adults was behind bars, on probation or on parole.
6. Currently, 65 million Americans have a criminal record.
7. There are more people behind bars today for a drug offense than there were in 1980 for all offenses combined.

More facts HERE:

         The American corporate world have more or less taken over the prison system and are working it to create massive profits. It has nothing to do with punishment or rehabilitation, it is all to do with increasing the numbers of slaves and maximising the profits. 

Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

Read the full article HERE

Episode 198: This week we bring you another installment of our Which Side: Lectures series. This presentation was given by the Tucson ABC on August 2, 2016 in Salt Lake City, Utah at the Boing! Anarchist Collective. The Lecture is called: “Prisoner Support for Prison Abolition: National Prison Strike September 2016“.

In this lecture, members of the Tucson Anarchist Black Cross discuss past and present anti-prison struggles in the United States. The aim of the lecture is to provide historical context to mass incarceration, detail past struggles against prisons and policing by prisoners and folks on the outside alike, and to discuss current forms of creative resistance to the U.S. prison system. The conclusion highlights ongoing efforts to coordinate a national prison strike set to begin September 9th of this year, and note how an abolitionist perspective can inform effective prisoner support work. #fsd

You can find out more about Which Side: Lectures and all the other podcasts in the collective by visiting: http://whichsidecollective.org

Help Contribute: Anyone is free to contribute lectures they’ve recorded from events they’ve attended or speeches they have given. We actually encourage it… So please send your audio or video recordings to Lectures@WhichSideCollective.org #fsd

Episode Sponsor:

This weeks episode is sponsored by Prisoner Support!

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Capitalism And Slave Labour Camps.

       Capitalism, where is it going? I suppose we could look at the most developed capitalist country in the world and gain some idea. America, King Capitalist, the big boy in the game, the pinnacle of capitalist development, what does it show us? Over the last six years, America's wealth has grown by over $30 trillion, a staggering 60%, over roughly the same period, the number of homeless children has grown by the same staggering figure, 60%. In 2013, 2.5 million children experienced homelessness, 1 in 30. According to UNICEF, America has the highest child relative poverty rates in the developed world.
      Homelessness in America is another indicator of what capitalism brings to people, approximately 3.5 million people experience homelessness in America each year. Roughly 15% of Americans, 4.8 million, live in poverty, with 7.7 million classified as living in poor households. These are figures from the crowning glory of capitalism.
      Apart from the poverty and homelessness in America, there is a much more sinister aspect to American capitalism, the road that we are all heading down, its prison system. America incarcerates more people than any other country in the world, its recent figures stand at 2.3 million, of its citizens locked up, mostly Black and Hispanic. America has locked up half a million more people than China, which has five time the population of the US. America, with 5% of the world's population, accounts for 25% of the world's prison population.

      The prison system in America is big business, the system is highly privatised and a wonderful money maker for the corporate world. 

       “The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work, lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”
     The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

        The American prison system is slave labour, with a workforce that can be paid less than a dollar a day, has no union rights or representation, never turns up late, never goes on strike, or makes demands for increase wages, and can be punished for not working hard enough. In some cases, private prison are paid by the government for the number of empty beds they have, as the government guarantees a certain occupancy rate, so logically it pays the state to fill the prisons. This of course encourages big business to build more prisons.
       The US prison business is no small-fry production unit, this is BIG business. The American prison system produces for the American market, 

     100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts pants, tents, bags and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98 percent of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93 percent of paints and paintbrushes; 92 percent of stove assembly; 46 percent of body armor; 36 percent of home appliances; 30 percent of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21 percent of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.”
       When you can get that kind of labor for less than a dollar a day, it’s hard to see the government’s motivation for incarcerating fewer people. And it’s all done at the taxpayer’s expense.

        So let's look at America,  and see the future of capitalism, poverty, homelessness and mass slave labour camps by means of state incarceration. This is our future, unless we do something about it, and do it quick.

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No Freedom While One Prison Stands.

       Remembering the fact that America imprisons more people per head of population than any other country on the planet, almost 1 in 200 American citizens are behind bars, then it is not surprising that those caged humans do not take it in a submissive manner. Another fact about the American prison system is, on the whole, it is a corporate business and profit is God. This is also a trend that is increasing here in the UK. There has been a growing trend in America, of prison protests, and there are plenty, linking up and co-ordinating their efforts in an attempt to alleviate their brutal treatment and suffering. Demanding change can turn these inhumane cage factories into non profitable entities for the corporate world, and they will walk away. At present they are only making a profit because of the appalling conditions and the government subsides, a staggering $39 billion-a-year to fund America’s prisons with the total budget for incarceration being $60.3 billion. By 2020, the Department of Justice reckons it will be spending 30 percent of its budgets on federal prisons.

      There is no doubt what so ever, that prisons are factories, turning out merchandise and the labour is forced and extremely low paid, if at all. By any definition, that is slavery.

       The thirteenth amendment to the US constitution does not abolish slavery. It states: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction” (my emphasis). All prison systems in the US rely on prisoner labor to maintain the facilities. It is prisoners who mop floors, fix plumbing, handle paperwork, and do the many other tasks necessary to keeping the prison running. Prisoners are also farmed out to private corporations seeking cheap labor. All this labor is grossly underpaid (if paid at all) and compulsory; as many prisoners have explained to me, it is a modern form of slavery.

      There can be no place in a civilised society for prisons, prisons don't solve any problems, they only store individuals with problems, and in the process, creating greater problems for them and society in general. The dark shadow of the death penalty also hangs over the American prison system. No individual, institution or group, has the right to condemn another human to death. This barbaric tool of repression from a by-gone era, is a blot on the face of humanity. It also is an expense weapon of repression costing the American tax payer dear,  New Jersey spent $253 million-a-year at $11 million for each inmate. At the start of 2013, 3,125 inmates were on death row. Many prisoners spend many years in this appalling state, most spend at least a decade there, some more than 20 years, the longest time between a conviction and execution was 36 years. There can be no freedom while one prison still stands.

        US prisons may not be able to handle these changes; the current administrators almost certainly won’t. That is not our problem. If prisons cannot run without slavery and torture, then they should not run. Mass work stoppages and hunger strikes, with outside direct action support will make prison financially untenable. We will shut the prisons down. If the increasingly unequal and largely illusory class peace of American capitalism cannot survive without its prisons, then it too should and will end. We can and will abolish slavery and torture in US prisons, along with them we will bring down whatever institutions depend on these intolerable practices.

Read the full article HERE:

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