America's Forced Labor Camps

[Jara sang]

http://www.unicor.gov/index.cfm

Federal Prison Industries' greatest success is impossible to quantify: the extent to which it has prevented inmate unrest that would have been costly - in lives as well as dollars. This success is also obscured by the snarl of contentiousness over programs for inmates and sales to the Federal Government. But as one Federal warden commented in an interview, "When you get inmate idleness, you get discontent, and that breeds rebelliousness . . . If they burn this place down, it would cost $30 million to rebuild." In the face of an escalating inmate population and an increasing percentage of inmates with histories of violence, UNICOR's programs have helped ease tensions and avert volatile situations, thereby protecting lives and Federal property. Prisons without meaningful activities for inmates are dangerous prisons, and dangerous prisons are expensive prisons. The work and education programs of Federal Prisons Industries have played an essential role in protecting lives, preserving stability, and saving money in America's Federal Prisons.

[Dave Reynolds]

1. Well, it IS prison.

Remember the old ball and chain, making little rocks out of big rocks? Sentenced to "hard labor"?

It is not meant to be a vacation.

[Jara sang]

2. When was the last time you vactiomed in a jail cell?

Oh, it's great fun.:sarcasm:

[greenisin]

8. I don't know when the last time it was...

since I don't know what vactiomed means.

[Dave Reynolds]

11. Not me, just my stepson.

Three meals a day and nothing to do but watch TV, according to him. He liked it so much he has been back three or four times. Is this the idea of internment that is preferred?

I was in just long enough to get my head split open by an officer whom I annoyed.

[RazzleDazzle]

6. Well, there's an old saying that answers your comment very well

People are sent to prison AS punishment, not to be punished.

Get it? A prison sentence is sufficient punishment all by itself. There's nothing that says they should get bad treatment of any type on top of that.

[Dave Reynolds]

12. I do not support bad treatment,

but they should have to do something while there.

I know, I know, just surviving to make it out....

But I agree with keeping them occupied.

[Cleita]

3. This is how the concentration camps got started in Germany.

At first they were work camps for the criminal element, but when the Germans started making other parts of their population illegal like Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals, they needed a place to take all these felons. Oh, it had become a felony to be born something illegal btw. That made you a criminal.

So I see more of this happening here in the USA. Now that the illegal felons who come here to pick your lettuce and grapes for your wine are going to be regarded felons, we are going to have to put them somewhere. Those work camps look promising for such an endeavor.

Then of course we are going to have to round up all those who have been here for awhile who can't produce their papers. Then of course that makes the children and old people related to them felons. Ah, then how are they going to find the final solution?

[booley]

4. here' s one problem I see

if people are making lots of money off of prison labor..doesn't that mean that those people have a financial incentive to have as many prisons with as many prisoners as possible? And can't people with such a financial incentive use the money t hey are making to hire lobbyist to influence (buy) politicians who write the laws that send people to prison?

Or am I being knieve in thinking that lots of money could inlfuence the way people think?

[minyks]

5. I

am lost for words, prison what do you all want them to be like?

[Canuckistanian]

7. Just prisons, that's all

Is it too much to ask? Not indentured slavery to make money$$$ for the jailors.

Or, here's a thought, why not use the money to benefit society by making prisoners useful, productive members of society?

Like educating them, teaching them a skill so that maybe, MAYBE they could choose to do some good rather than commit more crimes?

Prison is meant to take freedom away. And isn't that the greatest punishment one can impose on a citiizen?

What do you want, torture?

(oh, and welcome to DU...)

[ultraist]

9. And they want to charge "illegal aliens" with a felony

Hmmm...more labor camp workers.

[Karenina]

10. Old news. Time to fill 'em up!!!

The Gatekeeper: Watch on the INS
by Alisa Solomon
Detainees Equal Dollars
The Rise in Immigrant Incarcerations drives a prison boom
August 14 - 20, 2002

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0233/solomon.php

It was a shaky spring for the correctional workers of Hastings, Nebraska (pop. 24,064), as the stagnation in the nation's prison population and the increasingly high costs of incarceration jostled the sleepy town, some two hours' drive from Lincoln. On April 9, the 84 employees of the Hastings Correctional Center were told that the 186-bed facility would be closing at the end of June. State funds were scraping bottom, and the $2.5 million annual price tag for the prison was too big a burden to carry. "We really didn't know what we would do," says Jim Morgan, who had been working at HCC for 15 years and lives to this day in the house where he was born. "There aren't a lot of job opportunities out here, and most of us have homes and kids and couldn't even think about moving somewhere else." For two months, the workers scrambled, filling out applications at nearby meatpacking and cardboard-container plants and anticipating long hours in the unemployment office.

Then salvation came from, of all places, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Days after HCC closed as a state prison in June, it reopened as an INS detention center.

<snip>

Immigrant Incarceration Booms

Quite the contrary. The number of INS detainees—people being held administratively as they await the outcome of deportation proceedings—tripled since 1994, from an average daily population of 5532 to nearly 20,000 last year. Some have been apprehended at the border, others nabbed for staying in the country without documents, and still others have completed prison sentences for crimes that have made them deportable. On any given day, the INS holds about 4500 of them in facilities the agency runs itself, while some 2000—many of them asylum seekers—languish in private lockups under contract with the INS. Some 10,000 are farmed out to county and state prisons. For the INS, that's still not enough. The proposed $6.3 billion budget for fiscal 2003 slates more than $50 million for the "construction of detention facilities."

<snip>

Bidding Wars

Advocates are watching uneasily as the government increasingly courts the private prison operators. They worry about bidding wars among potential jailers, who might be willing to further cut services to detainees in exchange for contracts. Many state and local providers, the advocates charge, already fail to meet the INS's own weak detention standards.

"We have already seen how destructively the profit motive can undermine justice," says Matt Wilch, director of asylum and immigration concerns at Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. "We've seen that trying to keep costs low means setting up in isolated, rural areas, far from attorneys and support networks; avoiding expenses for special medical or dietary needs; attracting low-wage employees who aren't sufficiently professional."