General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAll you need to know about Southern "justice" ...
1903
2015
The plague thats called the private prison industry. The new Plantation system.
States arent filling enough beds for the private prison companies, so now, taxpayers are being sued because there arent enough criminals.
These arent frivolous lawsuits, either. Several government agencies knowingly signed contracts with private prison companies that guarantee a minimum occupancy or quota. In fact, In the Public Interest has found that nearly 2/3 of the contracts have quota clauses. In California, for example, there is a guarantee of 70 percent occupancy and in Arizona, nearly 100 percent.
Elessar Zappa
(14,085 posts)I didnt know that the private prisons had quotas to fill. That really gives states the incentive to lock more people up.
Phoenix61
(17,020 posts)gets gain time. Wouldnt want anyone leaving early. The part that really pisses me off is if those dollars were spent on mental health services, drug rehab, job training etc we wouldnt need so many prison beds.
Elessar Zappa
(14,085 posts)These private prisons need to be abolished. The state-run prisons are pretty awful too but not as bad as the private ones.
marble falls
(57,350 posts)... pretty soon we had prisoners from all over the country. Including Haitians, one of whom I met, who kept up with me for a couple of years when he was released. That kid had no business being put in jail. Southern justice is plainly racist.
What happened was: a prisoner committed suicide by banging his head on the concrete sink stand all day one Saturday. Six prisoners escaped in one incident, and a murderer escaped in another. One of the six broke into a house about a quarter mile away from our house, beat both older residents badly, raping the wife.
We have a certain amount of petty theft here, drug crime is mainly misdemeanor possession - speed, but no violent crime. The private company also gave the Sheriff a kickback on each prisoner. This sheriff was voted out but never charged for using inmates as unpaid help in his BBQ pit building business and landscaping company.
smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)This is totally fucking insane?
And let me guess which race becomes the "filler population".
WhiskeyGrinder
(22,460 posts)State-run prisons routinely sell the labor of incarcerated people to private companies in a wide variety of industries.
Elessar Zappa
(14,085 posts)I wish we had a Supreme Court that would rule that kind of stuff illegal.
marble falls
(57,350 posts)WhiskeyGrinder
(22,460 posts)marble falls
(57,350 posts)... is worse.
White guys working a subcontract for Prison Industries at Leavenworth for under a dollar an hour is working on the plantation, too.
panader0
(25,816 posts)He made a bout $1.50 an hour to pick on the vine tomatoes. He said it was much better than
sitting inside all day, even if the money was small. I don't know how much the prison made from
each inmate.
marble falls
(57,350 posts)... interest from a private company looking to get close to a form of slavery, whole other thing.
Had to be California, that's the highest wage I've heard of. How much of it did he get to keep?
18 months sounds like a pot charge.
paleotn
(17,989 posts)Of course petty drug charges have replaced vagrancy as a means to incarcerate and exploit.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/origin-prison-slavery-shane-bauer-american-prison-excerpt.html
marble falls
(57,350 posts)... violation or DWB - driving while black. I've read 70% of drug arrests derive from traffic stops.
samnsara
(17,650 posts)..cop notes. He carried around a tablet and pencil like Joe Friday. I have them all..an entire box full. Ive been reading them and he was a fair and just cop just like he was as a civilian in his later years. A good man. There needed to be more like him.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)Encouraging ignorance and poisonous bias with "All you need to know about anything" in a couple of cherry picked pictures is just plain wrong. For everyone, not just the trumpists.
Over the 20th century, average IQ increased across the nation. It'd be interested to learn what's happening to it in this current mean, anti-knowledge trough. It can't be good.
IF anyone wants to know anything about "southern justice," that will require some effort to learn about it. A brief emotional reaction tells no one anything. A quick glance at the people who tune in for their fixes from people like Hannity should make that clear. They know it all too.
marble falls
(57,350 posts)... there till my thirties and then spending almost 30 more in Arizona and Texas, I think I have a pretty good grasp of the facts supporting my opinion.
I am not claiming racists all live in the south or that northern cops can't be racist. Akron's cops are pretty racist, but they're not as into it as most Texas or Arizona cops are.
I'd much rather be in a lockup in Ohio than in Texas, for sure.
PoC are incarcerated in the US out of proportion to population all over the US. The worst is in the South.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)people need to know -- that it is an acceptably accurate and complete picture -- is wrong. In more than one way.
This is not a post-truth world. Rampant dishonesty and bigotry are having an especially big moment right now, but this will pass.
marble falls
(57,350 posts)Why are black American incarcerated at an even higher rate in the South than in the North.
Why is Angola Prison, for example,
https://ccnmtl.columbia.edu/projects/caseconsortium/casestudies/54/casestudy/www/layout/case_id_54_id_547.html
Angola State Prison: A Short History
Angola State Prison.
Courtesy Louisiana State Department of Corrections
Angola State Prison was located on land that was originally an 8,000-acre plantation in West Feliciana Parish, in a remote region of Louisiana. The nearest town was 30 miles away. The plantation was named Angola, after the homeland of its former slaves. It traced its origins as a prison back to 1880, when inmates were housed in the old slave quarters and worked on the plantation. In those years, a private firm ran the state penitentiary. After news reports of brutality against inmates, the state of Louisiana took control of Angola in 1901.
Throughout the ensuing decades, Angola State Prison faced numerous problems thanks to its geography and administration. The penitentiary was bounded on three sides by the Mississippi River. In 1902, 1912, and 1922, floods destroyed the cropsa key source of funding for the penitentiarys operating costs. During the Great Depression, the prison facilities fell into poor shape after its budget was cut severely. Conditions became so bad that 31 inmates sliced their Achilles tendons to publicize their objections to hard labor and brutality. In the 1950s, a new governor fulfilled his campaign promise to clean up Angola, renovate the old buildings, and add new campsas the prison buildings were called.
In the 1960s, Angola once more fell on hard times and was christened the bloodiest prison in the South because of the high rate of inmate assaults. Again, the penitentiary saw major renovations, improvement in medical care, and other upgrades. By the 1990s, the prison was accredited by the American Correctional Association, a recognition of its adherence to national standards for jails. In 1999, the US Army Corps of Engineers began a four-phase project to improve the nearby levees at a cost of $26 million.
By 2008, Angola State Prison had grown to 18,000 acresthe size of Manhattan. It was a maximum-security prison with an inmate population that was almost completely African-American, while the officers who oversaw them were entirely white. The officers were known as Freemen, not guards.
Angola had numerous enterprises: corn, cotton, soybean, and wheat crops; a license tag plant; printing services; a mattress factory (including suicide prevention mattresses); and a herd of 1,600 cattle. Since 1965, the prison had held a professional rodeo to entertain its inmates, employees, and the general public. Inmates participated in all but one of the events. A portion of the proceeds went toward the Louisiana State Penitentiary Inmate Welfare Fund, which paid for inmate educational and recreational supplies.
One could call Angola a company town. Anyone who worked at the prison lived in one of the hundreds of homes on prison property. The best behaved inmatescalled house boys by the wardenswore white uniforms, performed the landscaping work, and cooked and cleaned the houses, all at no cost to the residents. Other inmates who demonstrated good conduct worked in the fields.
The prison and its employees were part of a tight-knit community, one that Sullivan would find difficult to pry open for leads.
The Texas State prisons around Huntsville in an integrated version of Angola. But Whites are represented way below their share of the population. Why would that be? I say racism that plays a big piece in Southern Justice. Like it or not.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)to encourage improvement. You're mistaken if you imagine that pushing bigoted notions that an entire region of our nation is unremittingly evil and unjust toward black people somehow combats the hostility and divisions of all types that are tearing our nation apart. It's a wholehearted part of it.
Vicious smearing of the south is also extremely unjust to black people themselves, who are a very large and important part of southern culture. They not only live in the south in far greater numbers than anywhere else, 33% in GA, but a very large portion of the nation's black middle class is in the south and many are part of the southern mainstream. And as a whole they are both more religious and more conservative than most Americans, qualifying them for smearing by those inclined to see both as southern evils.
marble falls
(57,350 posts)... incarceration has been brutal to black families and laws unfairly enforced, prosecuted, punished black people out of proportion to the white population.
If that isn't indicative of racism, what is it? Do you think things got fairer and better during the last administration?
Let's contrast two pictures with a third:
GOP Senate
GOP house
and
No racism here? No prison reform needed at all?
There are big problems here. First thing needed: recognize there is a big problem here. Ignoring, normalizing, minimizing the biggest source of it will fix it not a whit.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)You can quote instances of southern injustice from now to this day next year, and it won't make claiming they're all anyone needs to know about southern justice true. That statement is 100% wrong.
The way to fight bigoted attitudes toward others is with truth and decency. Not by embracing it.
marble falls
(57,350 posts)... but always embrace the problem to solve it.
Critical race theory is tough to accept by racists and a lot of we liberals, too. But the real theory here is that truth will set you free once you know it and understand it.
As a liberal I get it: I do not know the whole truth, and a lot of what I know is from my own viewpoint. Trying to live a conscious is very hard to do when we don't know the "others" or their history or even been in their homes.
Elessar Zappa
(14,085 posts)than the rest of the country. Our whole country is racist but the South is worse. I speak from living all over the country.
Hortensis
(58,785 posts)But nothing's that simple. GA at 33% AA is more "virulent" than VT at 1.4% ONLY because AA have always been a big presence in GA. Bigots in VT would get more virulent pronto if there were suddenly black people in every store and workplace.
But here's a truth: Far, far more AA live good lives and hold positions of authority and social leadership in GA than in VT.
Maybe look and see how many AA are moving to VT for a less "virulent" atmosphere, and if you need both hands to count them.
Then check how many are moving to GA and have been for decades now. And one guess if they're coming to seek rabid injustice.
No to bigotry of all kinds and to the ignorance and stupidity required to support it.
underpants
(182,945 posts)Last edited Sat Jul 10, 2021, 10:23 AM - Edit history (1)
In both pictures they are holding hoes.
Second pic. The shorter guy fifth back in the near column - that look.
sop
(10,274 posts)"The overseers whip & noose of history are today echoed in the policemans baton & pistol." - Tom Morello
Marcuse
(7,528 posts)marble falls
(57,350 posts)KS Toronado
(17,364 posts)So sad, they should have been in school.
marble falls
(57,350 posts)luckone
(21,646 posts)Solly Mack
(90,791 posts)wnylib
(21,652 posts)marble falls
(57,350 posts)wnylib
(21,652 posts)Those are the politicized institutions of a dictatorship.
dlk
(11,580 posts)One hand washes the other and taxpayers foot the bill.