Land of the Free
09 01 09 - 16:46‘Land of the Free’ Has World’s Largest Prison Population In the US, over 2.3 million people live behind bars. That’s 750 individuals per 100,000 people, or one out of every 99.1 citizens. In 2008, this registered a total cost of nearly $50 billion, which is an increase of nearly four-fold from twenty years ago- and also over six times the rate of increase in the amount spent on higher education. According to the Pew Center, the increase is mostly due to harsher sentencing requirements, which have had little or no impact on the rate of re-incarceration. Also according to the Pew Center, while one in 30 males aged 24-30 are in prison, for black males, the number is one in nine. These numbers put the US far ahead of it’s nearest rivals in this department. China, the closest contender, with her massive population of over one billion people, holds only 1.5 million of them in prison. US-Chinese relations have often been strained in the past by US objections to the Chinese’s use of prison labor.But in the US, the sale of prison labor is a multi-billion dollar industry, publicly subsidized by the US taxpayer, with all profits made private, and practically no protection or basic human rights afforded to the workers. Prison laborer is used to manufacture everything from license plates to automotive parts, from Gameboy games for Nintendo to lace for Victoria’s Secret, or shrink-wrapping computer parts for Microsoft. It doesn’t stop there- a glut of private interests and corporations ‘lease’ prison labor from State and private prisons alike. Prison laborers make significantly less than minimum wage for their labor, receive virtually no safety protections, are not allowed to unionize, and face terrible consequences if they refuse to work; these are including but not limited to additional time on their sentences, solitary confinement, and the old stand-by, violence.
Let us not forget that recently, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and US Vice-President Dick Cheney became the first men in the long history of their lofty positions to be indicted while holding them- for nothing less than profiteering from exactly this type of prison labor.http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE4AI11B20081119
Hale
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