Please take a few minutes, or bookmark for when you have some time....
This thought provoking piece a freind of mine posted on a Cleveland, Ohio blog.
Mansfield Frazier is a prison activist who spent time in prison a few decades ago. I met Mansfield when we both worked for An Alternative Local Magazines back in the 90's.
He opened my eyes to stuff that this lilly white boy from deep in the bossum of suburbia never would have seen. He was responable for my going into neighborhoods to speak about the democratic party where a white guy was way out of his stomping ground.
Anyway, enough about me. The first few paragraphs are about a local prosecutor and how he came to feed the need of an increasingly hungry prison industrial complex.
Please read it. It brings together a lot of what we progressives don't often get a chance to see.
http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/09/mansfield-the-end-of-an-era-perhaps/
Thus the prison/industrial complex grew by leaps and bounds… to the extent that in the last decade California has built seven new prisons but not one new university — which is the perfect way to insure some other nation will soon supplant as the world’s educational leader. But once private prison corporations started trading in the New York Stock Exchange (funded by outfits like Bain Capital), there was no turning back; the headlong race was on. And to this day no one asks this question: If Corrections Corporation of America’s only “product” is the people it houses in its prisons nationwide, when their stock is traded are they in essence trafficking in human beings? There’s a term for that: slavery.
But a more sophisticated and elaborate “feeder system” was necessary to fuel the prison boom — to feed people into the maw of the criminal justice complex — and that system is comprised of three parts: police who often violate the law by stopping people on the flimsiest of pretexts; prosecutors who are willing to move forward with these “cheap” cases; and the judges who are so afraid of their own reelections they’re willing to send virtually everyone who comes in front of them to prison.
This is important stuff. Please read this.
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