Prison
 Prison    | |
|---|---|
 A converted prison gymnasium at San Quentin, 2007 | |
| Type | institution |
| Interest of | Josh Begley |
Prisons are places where people are held against their will, typically by authorities, generally as a result of a legal infraction or on grounds of poor mental health, although Illegal detention is increasingly used on suspected "terrorists". Prisons around the world vary widely in appearance.[1]
Contents
Official Narrative
The official narrative is rather confused on this point. Wikipedia lists several justifications for locking up people, with little in the way of empirical evidence. As with its partner institution, school, discussion is encourage about how it should happen rather than why or whether.
Problems
As Ivan Illich, Angela Davis and others have argued, the evidence appears to show that such treatment tends to promote rather than reduce crime, so makes sense only from a point of view of retribution rather than harm reduction or damage restoration.
War on Drugs
- Full article:
“War on Drugs”
- Full article:
The "War on Drugs" has provided a huge boost to prisoner numbers (now around half US prisoners are incarcerated for non-violent drug offences), and allowed prison populations to keep growing even as rates of other crimes dropped.
US
- Full article: US/Prison
- Full article: US/Prison
The US locks up a larger proportion of its citizens than any other nation state. Non-violent prisoners have been locked up for life. The prison industry is largely privatised.[citation needed]
Profitability
Confining people against their will uses up a lot of resources, and so in this age of privatised prisons allows a small number of people to garner immense profits, providing an incentive to increase incarceration rates. Some judges have been found to be involved in corrupt "cash-for-prisoners" scams.
Prisoner abuse
In 2015, EFF reported that a FOIA request had revealed at least one inmate in a South Carolina prison was receiving more than 37 years in isolation for using Facebook.[2] In 2015, an autopsy of Samuel Harrell revealed that he died not, as authorities had claimed an overdose of synthetic marijuana (K2), but of homicide after "physical altercation with corrections officers" (interviews suggested that as many as 20 corrections officers kicked, punched and dragged him down a flight of stairs while he was handcuffed).[3]
In 2020 The Lancet published a letter by 117 doctors from 18 countries that concluded:
“Should Assange die in a UK prison, as the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture has warned, he will effectively have been tortured to death. Much of that torture will have taken place in a prison medical ward, on doctors' watch. The medical profession cannot afford to stand silently by, on the wrong side of torture and the wrong side of history, while such a travesty unfolds. In the interests of defending medical ethics, medical authority, and the human right to health, and taking a stand against torture, together we can challenge and raise awareness of the abuses detailed in our letters. Our appeals are simple: we are calling upon governments to end the torture of Assange and ensure his access to the best available health care before it is too late. Our request to others is this: please join us...”
117 doctors (February 2020) https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30383-4/fulltext [4]
See Also
Examples
| Page name | Description |
|---|---|
| Belmarsh Prison | Britain's Guantanamo Bay |
| Gaza | An enclave of Palestine in the south west corner of Israel |
| Howard Springs Quarantine Facility | Australia's first concentration camp, with two thousand beds, used from November 2021 for mandatory quarantine. Closed in July 2022 |
| Melbourne’s Centre for National Resilience | This massive and expensive facility had thousands of beds meant for mandatory quarantine during "the Covid "pandemic". Closed its doors in October 2022. |
| Rheinwiesenlager | US army run concentration camps in Western Germany |
| US/Prison | The highest per-capita incarceration rate in the world |
Related Quotations
| Page | Quote | Author | Date |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rap | “Speaking to Bill Maher, the rapper Ice Cube said "Follow the money, You go high enough you start to see literally the same people who own the labels own the private prisons, so you know it seems really kind of suspicious, if you want to say that word, that you know the records that come out are really geared to push people towards that prison industry." Maher commented "But they didn't make you write those lyrics". Ice Cube answered: "it's not about making somebody write the lyrics, it's about being there as guard rails to make sure certain songs make it through and certain songs don't. Certain flavors are exposed. You know, some records are made by committee"” | Bill Maher Ice Cube | July 2023 |
| Peter R. de Vries | “We already lost the War on drugs long ago, and the policy is bankrupt, it has led to nothing, yes, full prisons, a clogged justice system and it didn't help one bit because you can find a coffee-shop on every corner of the street and even with record-braking catches of shipments of cocaine in the harbour, it doesn't mean anything. We're dealing with a extreme high demand in the world with $300.000.000.000 profit for drug traffickers with $100.000.000.000 of it cocaine alone, with the same 100.000.000.000 for the worldwide diverse police and justice agencies used, amounting to nothing. You can't just maintain this repressive policy. You need to make this more of national health crisis.” | Peter R. de Vries | 2020 |
Related Documents
| Title | Type | Publication date | Author(s) | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Document:Private Prisons Criminalized Rap | Letter, E-Mail | 24 April 2012 | Unknown | |
| Document:The Economics of Incarceration | article | 5 February 2012 | Nile Bowie | "The number of people imprisoned under state and federal custody increased 772% percent between 1970 and 2009, largely due to the incredible influence private corporations wield against the American legal system..." |
| File:MaleRapeInUSPrisons.pdf | report | April 2001 |
