With all the malarkey, studies, and obfuscation the mainstream / mass media has spewed out over the past 15 or so years about crime, you’d think someone would get the story right! So far, no one has. What an enormous shame
Finger pointing at Russia
The far right, the capitalist right, and part of the middle spend decades shouting and finger pointing at the totalitarian prison gulags in Stalinist Russia. They made an icon out of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and his works, including the marvelous Gulag Archipelago. All those gulag phsons were referred to as proof of an ‘Evil Empire” a failed, decadent and totalitarian system, a police state seeped in corruption, suppression and oppression. So prisons were needed everywhere.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. With the far right and rapacious capitalists leading the way, the 50 United States of America combined with the federal government now incarcerate more people than China. (China has 1.4 million individuals in prison.) Further, there are 166 prisoners in China per 100,000 people, compared with 187 in Taiwan, 210 in Singapore, and 614 in the United States. The world average is 105. (Ref. New Ghosts, Old Ghosts: Prison and Labor Reform Camps in China, James Seymour and Richard Anderson, M.E. Sharpe (publisher), 1998). Obviously the Republican Party and some like minded Democrat fellow travelers have adopted Cecil B. DeMille’s dictum: “Preach against it, while you wallow in it!” Finger pointing at China, Russia, and others, while slyly not mentioning America, has made good show; and after all, there’s no business like show business.
Crime statistics misleading
Then there are the shocking American crime statistics. In the nine largest American cities, according to recent figures from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, arrests are made in only 20 percent of all reported crimes, and well over 112 of all crimes go unreported. So of all crimes committed, arrests are made in no more than 10 percent of the cases. Upwards of 90 percent of all American criminals are never so much as arrested! (NAFTA advocates should note that the arrest to reported crimes in Mexico city in 1997 was approximately 3 percent!) Add to all this the forgotten innocents in American p@sons, the estimated millions of Americans who commit crimes by deliberately not reporting or under reporting taxes owed, corporate crime, and the hundreds of thousands of persons who annually enter the U.S. of A. illegally (a crime) and the true American crime situation comes into 20-20 focus.
Prisons un@ed to crime
The hard fact is that in America prisons as we have them have nothing to do with crime. Anyone who believes American prisons have anything to do with crime or criminals no doubt also believes in the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. To address the American crime problem with force/repression/incarceration it would be necessary to lock up 35-40 million Americans. A police state is very expensive- much more than a welfare state. As it stands now, the simple truth is that American prisons are poor houses. And they are big business for capitalism: Capitalism’s latest and most milkable cash cow. Captive consumers. Captive consumer mentality. Slave labor. A dumping ground for unsaleable (els6where) merchandise; Prisoncrats buy anything. Who sees? Who cares?
And the show is not over. Hard right and disingenuous, rapacious, capitalist propaganda notwithstanding, prisons are created and sustained for prison administrators and employees, not for prisoners. Politicians and Prisoncrats know this scientific truth, which is:
Whatever may be said, or believed, to the contrary, institutions of all kinds are run for the benefit of the custodians, not for the patients, prisoners, clients, or even customers. An institution is an organism, and every organism is designed to serve its own ends first, whether those ends be administrative or pecuniary.
Crime colleges and poor houses
Capitalists are living their dream here and now: turn American into a fascist police state, turn a profit on all fronts, and turn their backs on fellow Americans. Meanwhile, although American prisons today are nothing more than poor houses and warehouses, they do function as crime colleges. As the recidivist rate proves, the more individuals incarcerated the more recidivists there are in training! The life ,blood of big business and capitalism is repeat customers, and in the prison business, repeat customers are called “recidivists.”
Rapacious capitalists have discovered a perpetual motion device, an ever-blooming money tree. In some states, such as Texas, which pay no prisoner wages, what could be better than absolute slave labor? Squeeze the life blood out of poor house residents. Plutocrats know that American prisons have nothing to do with crime, but rely on Abe Lincoln’s statement-You can fool all of the people some of the time” – to rest certain that the American public will not catch on. By Robed J. Zani No. 328938
Michael Unit, 12-A-39
Rt. 1, Box 4500
Tennessee Colony, Texas 75886