Tweet
The NYT yesterday had a feature length article entitled Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own which details the plight of the town of Central Falls, RI, and its residents after making a decision to have built a "for profit" jail in their community. Central Falls is 60% Hispanic and INS began making raids in the town and incarcerating, without judicial process or even telephone access to the outside world, undocumented town residents, some of whom had lived there for 20 or more years.
The town floated a bond to build the prison with the expectation that they would receive a per prisoner cash flow from the private company that runs the prison. But, as it turned out, the prison uses more town resources per inmate than it pays out.
It’s a long article, but well worth the read. The ludicrousness of the US private prison system and INS policies are strikingly revealed.
3 Comments
digg is open
Dugg.
Great post, Bilbo. Thank you.
Americans love prisons! After all, aren’t we’re “The land of the free”? The true believers chant “We’re Number One!” and it is indeed so! We have set a high bar for the rest of the world in the “Corrections” Business! We have solid leads in all major incarceration metrics. We Americans, it seems, love the prison experience as long as it isn’t ours personally!
After all, aren’t we’re “The land of the free”? The true believers chant “We’re Number One!” certainly must be the case about something, and conveniently, we have set a high bar for the rest of the world! We have established solid leads in all of the major metrics of incarceration. The key Number of Imprisoned, the Percentage of the Population Imprisoned, and most especially, the number of Individuals Imprisoned for Nonviolent Crimes!
Between the war on people who have crossed their imaginary line and the war on drugs, law enforcement is getting well fed by confiscating property without due process, the
“justice”lawyer system is doing quite well, the only losers are the people. The Legislature listens to no one but themselves and the people directly profiting from their decisions-”Them that has the gold makes the rules!”-and constantly declares that the law must be ever more draconian in order to “Send the right message” to all those would be offenders. We have quite quietly become the most punitive Nation on Earth.