[Via... http://www.egroups.com/group/Communist-Internet ] ----- Original Message ----- From: The Infamous Vinnie Gangbox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Sunday, April 29, 2001 3:33 PM Subject: [cpusa] Fwd: [gangbox] Fwd : TRAVELS IN A PRISON NATION Date: Sun, 29 Apr 2001 10:28:19 EDT [Show full headers] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [Add to Address Book] From: "The Infamous Vinnie Gangbox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: [gangbox] Fwd : TRAVELS IN A PRISON NATION from the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS : Published Sunday, April 22, 2001, in the San Jose Mercury News STIR CRAZY How America's get-tough-on-crime attitudes created a prison-industrial complex NON-FICTION GOING UP THE RIVER: Travels in a Prison Nation Joseph T. Hallinan Random House, 263 pp., $24.95 BY JULIA CASS Gene Roberts, the former editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, likes to say that the most important stories don't break, they ooze. He cites the migration of African-Americans from the South to the North after World War II as a historic shift that got little or no coverage at the time it was happening. In ``Going Up the River,'' Wall Street Journal reporter Joseph T. Hallinan examines an equally historic shift that has oozed in the 1980s and 1990s -- the staggering growth of a prison-industrial complex that has become entrenched with little public awareness or media attention. The U.S. prison system has grown tenfold in 30 years, he reports, and the 2 million men and women now behind bars on any given day make up one of the largest migrations in the nation's history. Hallinan spent four years traveling the country and visiting prisons -- talking to prisoners, corrections officers, government officials and residents of prison towns. Looking at the prison boom, he obeyed the dictum of another newspaper editor, Ben Bradlee, formerly of the Washington Post: ``Follow the money.'' The cost to taxpayers has not gone unreported: In some states the budget for prisons now equals or surpasses the budget for higher education. Hallinan looks at the other side of the coin. If all that money is being spent, somebody is making it. For more than a few communities, workers and private businesses, prisons have become profit centers. Hallinan visited some of the small towns with dying industries or closed military bases that have lobbied hard for prisons to provide employment, like Beeville, Texas, a town of 13,000 people and 7,200 inmates, and Hinton, Okla., which wanted a prison so much it built one itself. Other cars on the $37.5 billion-a-year gravy train are contractors and construction workers involved in the prison building boom, along with the fencing business, barbed wire, metal doors, telephone service. Inmates don't get to choose their carriers, and they pay a high rate to AT&T, MCI, etc. -- $1 billion a year, Hallinan reports. Then add the corrections officers and their growing union and, in the past decade, private prison companies that run or build and run prisons in a number of states. For the first time in history, he writes, we have ``prison millionaires.'' One private prison executive talked to Hallinan about ``growing the business.'' Does this involve lobbying for longer sentences? Hallinan believes this kind of pressure is inevitable, given the financial incentives. I wish, though, he had looked at whether interested parties had indeed lobbied for particular sentencing and other criminal justice bills. Hallinan's capsule history of U.S. prisons over the past 50 years turns up no golden age; the era of highly disciplined prisons came at a price of brutality while the era of prisoners' rights brought disorder. No rehabilitation program -- education, counseling, job training -- has been a smashing success in reducing recidivism, though he describes a few he considers promising. In Hallinan's view, it's hard to rehabilitate people who've never been ``habilitated'' in the first place by caring parents and good schools. Public opinion today holds that punishment is more instructive, an idea that reached a pointless extreme in an Alabama prison that actually pays for rocks to be brought in so inmates can break them. At this point, Hallinan demonstrates, the debate over rehabilitation vs. punishment is almost moot anyway because of crowding. Tough mandatory sentencing laws in the past decade have caused the prison population to explode. In a chapter on the impact of mandatory sentences for drugs, Hallinan writes about a family of former moonshiners busted for selling crack cocaine from their trailer on a dirt road in North Carolina. The 76-year-old grandmother gets a 24-year sentence. Even with the building boom, many prisons today have at least twice as many inmates as they were designed to hold, and crowding means less control and more violence. The last prison Hallinan visits is the new one in Wallens Ridge, Va. It is a supermax -- the latest innovation in U.S. prisons. These are designed to keep the system's ``worst of the worst'' isolated in their cells so they can't hurt guards or other inmates. These prisons are expensive and controversial, since isolation makes some of the inmates crazy or crazier. On opening day, Hallinan asks the warden how he will know whether his prison is succeeding or failing. The warden answers, ``If it's a safe day, it's a good day.'' Comments Hallinan. ``That's it. . . . Just a safe day. A secure day. At $110,000 a cell, it seemed a modest hope. But that's what America's prison boom has produced. And the funny thing is, no one complains.'' I reported on prisons in the mid-1990s, and I can appreciate Hallinan's sense that some aspects of U.S. prison and sentencing policies seem stunningly wrongheaded. And I share his amazement that for all the public money being spent on incarceration and all the lives affected (one-eighth of African-American men from age 20 to 34 are in prison any given day) so few people raise questions about what we're doing and whether it's necessary to put so many in prison for so long. For anyone who doesn't know much about prisons, this book should be an eye-opener. Let's hope it starts a real debate. JULIA CASS is a Mercury News editor. © 2000 The Mercury News _______________________________________________________ Send a cool gift with your E-Card http://www.bluemountain.com/giftcenter/ GANGBOX: CONSTRUCTION WORKERS NEWS SERVICE GANGBOX homepage: http://www.geocities.com/gangbox/ comments? email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> "UNION NOW, UNION FOREVER" Your use of Yahoo! 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