By Cortland Pfeffer with Irwin Ozborne
Guest Writers for Wake Up World
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“Prisoner number [XX]… It is time to go home.” The
most beautiful words she had ever heard. She had dreamt about the day
that phrase would be uttered for the past ten years. Today, she will get
to see her daughter that has been out of her life and begin the process
of reunification.
As she takes her first steps outside the
prison walls in a decade, it is like stepping into a foreign land.
Outside the concrete confinement she is overwhelmed by the simplicity of
feeling the fresh breeze, the sunlight, the green grass, and of course
her family. Her daughter, mother, and brother await her release in what
feels like another world away. Her lower lip starts to tremble
uncontrollably – which it always has done when she becomes emotional –
only to see her 13-year-old daughter’s lower lip mirror that of her own.
Mother-and-daughter are able to embrace for the first time in years as
they share an electric bond that cannot be broken, despite so many
unanswered questions over the years.
“Why is Mom in jail? Why didn’t I
get to have a Mom while growing up? Why wasn’t anyone there to do the
things that everyone else enjoyed with their Mom? Where was my Mom all
this time?”
These are the questions the little girl
repeatedly asked throughout her lifetime without an answer that ever
seemed to make sense. She once even wrote a letter to the judge, prior
to her mother’s sentencing. It was written in 6 year old writing, in a
blue crayon. It said:
“Please help my mommy, I don’t want her to go to jail for a long time. I want her to get better.”
This woman was a prisoner of war — the
War On Drugs. Another unnecessary and ineffective war that has destroyed
far more lives than it has helped. A war that has built the highest
population of incarcerated people per capita in the history of
civilization — and yet the enemy (drug use) is at an all-time high.
The War on Drugs is the longest active
war in American history and continues to run with no end in sight
because it benefits the rich at the expense of the poor. Society’s most
vulnerable people are literally being reduced to a number, while
corporations, politicians, and congressmen that write the laws of the
land are profiting from the lives they are helping to tear apart.
The Great Prison Marketing Scheme:
On June 17, 1971, President Richard Nixon officially declared the War on Drugs:
“America’s public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive.”
A war is defined as a conflict between
different nations or states or different groups within a nation or
state. But, to declare a war on an inanimate object or concept means
that there is no clear enemy – hence, no end.
And this is intentional. In fact, it is one of the greatest marketing schemes never told. It is drawn out as follows:
1) The President tells you the greatest risk to our safety is a concept, object, or philosophy (Communism, Drugs, Terror, etc.).
- Declares a war that is not really a war (Cold War, Drug War, War on Terror).
- The American people are asked to pay the bill because money is not an issue – this is for our safety and security.
- They create a special agency that makes their own laws in their war (CIA, DEA, NSA, Homeland Security, etc.)
2) Laws are changed that support fighting this war – leading to mass incarcerations of anyone not in compliance.
3) The prisons become over-crowded, and therefore, private prisons run by corporations need to be built to house prisoners.
- Corporations are for-profit, which means more prisoners equals more money
- They sign contracts with the government guaranteeing high occupancy rates (usually between 90-100 percent for up to twenty years).
- This gives incentives to lock up more people, because they have to pay regardless as to whether or not the bed is filled
- The quality of care and supervision is poor, because it is a business and they seek cheap labor and cost-cutting techniques like every business
- Corporations then rent prisoners for free labor- also known as slavery
4) The private prisons then lobby Congress to make stricter laws that enable more people to be locked up.
5) Congress obliges because it helps them win elections and:
- Congress makes the laws of the country – and they don’t bite the hand that feeds
- Then, since they know the laws, they buy stock in these same private prisons
- Profit off their investments
6) Then the war against a concept shifts overseas.
- This allows our government to overthrow poor countries under the disguise as a war against our greatest threat.
- Allowing to steal natural resources
- Install a puppet government that benefits our corporate interests
- Politicians that declare war also have stock in Arms manufacturers like General Electric, Raytheon, etc.
- More wars means more arms need to be built
- They profit off their investments again
- In order to overthrow governments without making it obvious to the public, they hire guerilla insurgents to do so.
- They train these rebel groups and supply arms
- In turn, these groups pay for the arms by supplying illegal drugs
7) The CIA returns these illegal drugs into the inner cities of America.
8) They then arrest people and put them into private prisons (from which they profit),
by selling the same drugs they brought into the country (from which
they profit) to arm rebel groups to overthrow governments and install
puppet governments which support U.S. Corporations and gain further
profit (in which the law-makers also have stock interests).
This approach to increasing the prison
population has been incredibly successful, with more than a
700% increase in incarceration rates since 1972. It is such a brilliant
concept that we have recently followed suit by launching a War on
Terror — another war without a clear enemy, against a concept,
which will never have a definitive outcome, and which only profits those
with heavy stock interests (i.e. John Kerry, US Secretary of State, has
made $26 million off his investments directly related to the War on
Terror; but that is not a conflict of interest??)
This is not freedom, this is fascism.
The US proudly claims to be “Land of the
Free” yet it has more people locked up than any other civilization in
the history of the world, with the majority of them in there for non-violent
drug offenses. The United States is home to only 5% of the world’s
population, but holds almost a quarter of the world’s prison population,
while the total correctional population nears 7 million (including
people on parole, probation and juvenile detention, but not including
detained refugees and military prisoners).
War on Drugs Race
All the drug laws in America have their
racist and discriminatory foundations. The first drug-law came in 1875
in San Francisco, which was a banning of Opium Dens as a discrimination
against Chinese-American immigrants. National headlines linked cocaine
to causing violent behavior in African-Americans and laws were soon put
in place. Marijuana was first used recreationally in the Southwestern
United States by Mexican immigrants 1920’s, and laws were established
that was geared at incriminating Mexicans.
But these were just the early battles
before war was officially declared. Today, approximately 12% of the
US population is African-American, but they make up 60% of the nation’s
male inmates (source: U.S. Department of Justice). There are also more
African-American men incarcerated in the U.S. than the total prison populations in India, Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Japan, Germany, Finland, Israel and England combined, while the
US currently has more black men and women behind bars per capita than
in the Apartheid-era South Africa. Furthermore, a 2012 registry of exonerated criminals showed that African-Americans make up 50% of all innocent people imprisoned in the US.
In June of 1971, Nixon declared the War
on Drugs making most street drugs illegal with stricter penalties. Two
years later, the DEA was created to enforce drug laws and bring those
“criminals” to justice.
More arrests, meant more people in jails
and prisons. The prisons started to overflow and they need for more
prisons arose. Corporations got involved and built private, for-profit
prisons. They arrange contracts with the government to remain at high
occupancy’s, further incentives for the government to arrest non-violent
drug offenders and keep them for longer sentences.
In the notorious, “Kids for Cash
Scandal” two judges in Pennsylvania were convicted of taking cash
payments from private prisons as bribery to sentence more juveniles to
fill their beds. They were locking up kids for minor offenses — such as
mocking a school principal on Myspace, or trespassing in a vacant
building — changing innocent lives forever, all for sums of money. And
these are just the judges that got caught.
The prison industry spends millions of
dollars each year lobbying with the US Congress to change and
retain laws that allow locking up more and more people for non-violent
drug offenses. In turn, many members of Congress – the people who write
the laws – have investments in private prisons, encouraging them to keep
these laws that help their stock portfolios.
Prison Labor
An increased prison population helps out
more than just the prison industry, many other corporations have
invested in prison labor. At least 37 states have legalized contracting
of US prison labor – a workforce of over 2 million, or around 1 in every 110 Americans – including
corporations such as IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Dell,
Honeywell, Target, and many more mount their operations inside of
prisons.
This is also known as slavery.
In fact, this idea of convict leasing
arose after the Civil War. The South was built by stealing Native
American land and utilizing free slave labor to build America into one
of the wealthiest nations on Earth. But after slavery was abolished and
African-Americans were emancipated, the corporations needed cheap
labor. Freed slaves started getting charged with petty crimes and
sentenced to many years in prison. Once in prison, they were leased to
work, picking cotton and building railroads – just slavery with a
different name.
Since the Drug War launched in 1971, the
prison population has skyrocketed, locking up Americans and, in
particular, African-Americans at an alarming rate, to work for free for
corporations. As a society, we really have not changed, we have just
found new and creative ways to hide our human rights crimes better.
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