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The prison industry in the United States:
big business or a new form of slavery? HUMAN rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells. There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, "no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens." The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.
What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?
"The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself," says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being "an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps."
The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. "This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors."
According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.
CRIME GOES DOWN, JAIL POPULATION GOES UP
According to reports by human rights organizations, these are the factors that increase the profit potential for those who invest in the prison industry complex:
• Jailing persons convicted of non-violent crimes, and long prison sentences for possession of microscopic quantities of illegal drugs. Federal law stipulates five years’ imprisonment without possibility of parole for possession of 5 grams of crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin, and 10 years for possession of less than 2 ounces of rock-cocaine or crack. A sentence of 5 years for cocaine powder requires possession of 500 grams – 100 times more than the quantity of rock cocaine for the same sentence. Most of those who use cocaine powder are white, middle-class or rich people, while mostly Blacks and Latinos use rock cocaine. In Texas, a person may be sentenced for up to two years’ imprisonment for possessing 4 ounces of marijuana. Here in New York, the 1973 Nelson Rockefeller anti-drug law provides for a mandatory prison sentence of 15 years to life for possession of 4 ounces of any illegal drug.
• The passage in 13 states of the "three strikes" laws (life in prison after being convicted of three felonies), made it necessary to build 20 new federal prisons. One of the most disturbing cases resulting from this measure was that of a prisoner who for stealing a car and two bicycles received three 25-year sentences.
• Longer sentences.
• The passage of laws that require minimum sentencing, without regard for circumstances.
• A large expansion of work by prisoners creating profits that motivate the incarceration of more people for longer periods of time.
• More punishment of prisoners, so as to lengthen their sentences.
HISTORY OF PRISON LABOR IN THE UNITED STATES
Prison labor has its roots in slavery. After the 1861-1865 Civil War, a system of "hiring out prisoners" was introduced in order to continue the slavery tradition. Freed slaves were charged with not carrying out their sharecropping commitments (cultivating someone else’s land in exchange for part of the harvest) or petty thievery – which were almost never proven – and were then "hired out" for cotton picking, working in mines and building railroads. From 1870 until 1910 in the state of Georgia, 88% of hired-out convicts were Black. In Alabama, 93% of "hired-out" miners were Black. In Mississippi, a huge prison farm similar to the old slave plantations replaced the system of hiring out convicts. The notorious Parchman plantation existed until 1972.
During the post-Civil War period, Jim Crow racial segregation laws were imposed on every state, with legal segregation in schools, housing, marriages and many other aspects of daily life. "Today, a new set of markedly racist laws is imposing slave labor and sweatshops on the criminal justice system, now known as the prison industry complex," comments the Left Business Observer.
Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy's, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month. The highest-paying private prison is CCA in Tennessee, where prisoners receive 50 cents per hour for what they call "highly skilled positions." At those rates, it is no surprise that inmates find the pay in federal prisons to be very generous. There, they can earn $1.25 an hour and work eight hours a day, and sometimes overtime. They can send home $200-$300 per month.
Thanks to prison labor, the United States is once again an attractive location for investment in work that was designed for Third World labor markets. A company that operated a maquiladora (assembly plant in Mexico near the border) closed down its operations there and relocated to San Quentin State Prison in California. In Texas, a factory fired its 150 workers and contracted the services of prisoner-workers from the private Lockhart Texas prison, where circuit boards are assembled for companies like IBM and Compaq.
Oregon State Representative Kevin Mannix recently urged Nike to cut its production in Indonesia and bring it to his state, telling the shoe manufacturer that "there won’t be any transportation costs; we’re offering you competitive prison labor (here)."
PRIVATE PRISONS
The prison privatization boom began in the 1980s, under the governments of Ronald Reagan and Bush Sr., but reached its height in 1990 under William Clinton, when Wall Street stocks were selling like hotcakes. Clinton’s program for cutting the cutting the federal workforce resulted in the Justice Departments contracting of private prison corporations for the incarceration of undocumented workers and high-security inmates.
Private prisons are the biggest business in the prison industry complex. About 18 corporations guard 10,000 prisoners in 27 states. The two largest are Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75%. Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each one. According to Russell Boraas, a private prison administrator in Virginia, "the secret to low operating costs is having a minimal number of guards for the maximum number of prisoners." The CCA has an ultra-modern prison in Lawrenceville, Virginia, where five guards on dayshift and two at night watch over 750 prisoners. In these prisons, inmates may get their sentences reduced for "good behavior," but for any infraction, they get 30 days added – which means more profits for CCA. According to a study of New Mexico prisons, it was found that CCA inmates lost "good behavior time" at a rate eight times higher than those in state prisons.
IMPORTING AND EXPORTING INMATES
Profits are so good that now there is a new business: importing inmates with long sentences, meaning the worst criminals. When a federal judge ruled that overcrowding in Texas prisons was cruel and unusual punishment, the CCA signed contracts with sheriffs in poor counties to build and run new jails and share the profits. According to a December 1998 Atlantic Monthly magazine article, this program was backed by investors from Merrill-Lynch, Shearson-Lehman, American Express and Allstate, and the operation was scattered all over rural Texas. That state’s governor, Ann Richards, followed the example of Mario Cuomo in New York and built so many state prisons that the market became flooded, cutting into private prison profits.
After a law signed by Clinton in 1996 – ending court supervision and decisions – caused overcrowding and violent, unsafe conditions in federal prisons, private prison corporations in Texas began to contact other states whose prisons were overcrowded, offering "rent-a-cell" services in the CCA prisons located in small towns in Texas. The commission for a rent-a-cell salesman is $2.50 to $5.50 per day per bed. The county gets $1.50 for each prisoner.
STATISTICS
Ninety-seven percent of 125,000 federal inmates have been convicted of non-violent crimes. It is believed that more than half of the 623,000 inmates in municipal or county jails are innocent of the crimes they are accused of. Of these, the majority are awaiting trial. Two-thirds of the one million state prisoners have committed non-violent offenses. Sixteen percent of the country’s 2 million prisoners suffer from mental illness.

http://www.patrickcrusade.org/prison...ry_in_USA.html

Quote:

In the 1980s I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago--all three volumes. I got a great education about state sponsored slavery. I would recommend everyone read this book. Our American Gulag isn't much different. The big difference however is that all the inmates in our Gulag were guaranteed a fair trial by the Constitution. There was no similar guarantee in the Soviet Union--just propaganda about fair trials. We seem to spew out the same propaganda while ignoring out constitution. Plus, we have turned the whole activity into a profit center for low-life capitalists.

Hatha

The problem with Fair Trials is no one gets one. The rules are heavily slanted in favor of the prosecution, because prosecutors and judges are above the law. Our court system is out of control exercised by the people. There used to be checks and balances to reign in overzealous prosecutors and judges, but the government has removed all these controls and the schools fail to teach the public about their rights and duties.

http://www.constitution.org/lrev/roots/runaway.htm

http://www.fija.org/docs/JG_on_the_grand_jury.pdf

http://fija.org/

This letter further illustrates our predicament.
Shocking Revelations from the Rosenberg Grand Jury Files

by Roger Roots
Recently by Roger Roots: Constitutional Dead Letters

The executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 have gotten a fresh look in the past two years. An association of historians and journalists have unearthed the long-secret grand jury transcripts from the Rosenberg case after years of litigation. Their findings have been released by trickles on a website and in a few short news articles in America’s daily papers.

Most living Americans probably don’t know much about the Rosenberg case. Perhaps all they know is that it was a case of a man and wife accused of spying or leaking some of America’s atomic secrets to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Most who know that much are probably aware that there has been controversy surrounding the case for decades. Since the 1950s, opinions about the Rosenberg executions have tracked closely with peoples’ political views. Those on the Left have long thought the Rosenberg prosecution represented bare-knuckled McCarthyesque hysteria, while those on the right have generally viewed the Rosenberg case to have been a soundly proven case of espionage.

The recent grand jury revelations provide fodder for both positions. On the one hand, they shatter all doubts about whether Julius Rosenberg was a Communist spy. He was. His own sons, Michael and Robert Meeropol, who have long been champions of their parents’ exonerations, have partially recanted and resigned themselves to the reality that at least their father really was a committed Communist spy in common cause with the Soviet Union. It is now undeniable that Julius Rosenberg and Martin Sobell forwarded certain military information to the Soviets (although not the atomic secrets that allowed Russia to produce atomic bombs – those secrets were transmitted by high-ranking U.S. government officials, including the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury). On the other hand, the transcripts reveal that Ethel Rosenberg was almost certainly innocent of the crimes she was executed for committing. It appears that Ethel’s conviction was the result of perjured testimony by two government witnesses – her brother- and sister-in-law, David and Ruth Greenglass – who both testified at trial that Ethel Rosenberg had typed up notes regarding U.S. military systems provided by David Greenglass from the U.S. National Laboratory at Las Alamos. In her recently unearthed 1950 grand jury testimony, Ruth Greenglass admitted it was she (Greenglass) – and not Ethel Rosenberg – who transcribed the notes, and in handwritten form.

The differing versions of events described in the 1950 grand jury hearings (which were secret) and the 1951 trial proceedings cannot be reconciled. Ruth Greenglass changed her story between the grand jury hearings and the trial so as to falsely implicate Ethel Rosenberg. We know from several accounts that lawyers for the Justice Department coerced, threatened and coached the witnesses for days before the Rosenberg trial. The government’s star witness, Harry Gold, had been prepped by four hundred hours of coaching by prosecutors and FBI agents. The Feds apparently charged Ethel solely to coerce Julius into confessing – which he refused to do. Prosecutors then fabricated the story that Ethel had typed up some atomic secrets from notes provided by David Greenglass in order to bolster their otherwise shoddy case against her. The prosecutor said in closing arguments that Ethel "sat at that typewriter and struck the keys, blow by blow, against her country" – the words that are most remembered from the trial.

Lost in the discussion of the transcripts has been their astounding revelations regarding the grand jury process itself. How could it take 50 years to reveal these government lies? How could the government conceal for half a century evidence that material testimony in one of the most closely watched trials of the twentieth century was perjured? The grand jury revelations highlight the fact that the grand jury process in the United States – especially at the federal level – has been hijacked by the government.

Ironically, the recent release of the Rosenberg grand jury transcripts is a major break from contemporary practice. It is highly unusual for federal courts to order federal grand jury transcripts to be made public – especially after cases are closed. Federal courts have even punished a reporter for airing the names of witnesses who testified three decades earlier in Jim Garrison's grand jury investigation of President Kennedy's assassination.

The grand jury is an ancient common law institution whose original purpose was to protect people from the prosecutorial power of the government. Under the Fifth Amendment, the Constitution’s Framers intended that no criminal charges could ever be initiated by the government alone. A citizen panel of 23 people (more or less) was supposed to act as an obstacle to prosecutors and ensure that any prosecution be preapproved by common people. Yet today most commentators agree that the government can get any grand jury to "indict a ham sandwich." Federal "indictment rates" greater than 99 percent have been reported in some years. In 2001, federal grand juries declined to indict in only 21 cases nationwide. "These numbers suggest that, whatever the reason, the federal grand jury now exercises very little power as a shield between the government and its citizens."

The story of how this once-proud institution fell under the control of the very prosecutors it was supposed to control is a long and tragic one. During the nineteenth century, all three branches of government joined together to silence and deaden the institution. Over time, it became common for government prosecutors to be present in grand jury hearings (a practice strictly forbidden at the time of the Founding), and eventually prosecutors became managers of the proceedings. In 1946, all three branches approved the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, which purported to codify for the first time the common law rules that govern criminal procedure at the federal level. The rules pertaining to grand jury practice, however, were deliberately altered to evade the plain language of the Fifth Amendment ("No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury").

A presentment is an independent statement of a grand jury not necessarily approved by a prosecutor. For centuries before the enactment of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, grand juries would issue presentments exposing government misconduct or accusing people of crimes known to the grand jurors themselves. Occasionally, grand juries issued presentments that openly proclaimed a person’s innocence in defiance of the government’s allegations. The government rule-makers in 1946 deliberately and calculatingly eliminated the possibility of a federal grand juries issuing non-government-approved statements or conclusions of any kind. Since 1946, any publicized presentments by federal grand jurors have been prohibited as violations of grand jury "secrecy" rules. Indeed, grand jurors that release statements of any kind are now subject to possible five-year prison sentences.

By the time of the Rosenberg case, the grand jury process had been transformed into a rubber stamp for the government. Federal prosecutors now dispense all evidence, witnesses and testimony to grand jurors, who then retire to a deliberation room to vote on whether to issue indictments. Because the grand jurors are only given the government’s version of events and are generally unable to investigate matters on their own (like grand juries did from the Founding period through the end of the nineteenth century), they almost always vote according to the Justice Department’s wishes. In rare instances when grand juries refuse to indict, federal prosecutors simply present their same claims to a second (or third, fourth or fifth) grand jury until an indictment is issued. In such cases, prosecutors have been known to lie to the later grand juries by falsely telling them that the first grand jury wanted to indict but ran out of time, etc. There is never any punishment meted out for such lies.

And there is more. The Federal Rules strip grand jurors of their rightful control over the recordings of grand jury testimony, notes, and "any transcript prepared from those notes." Rule 6(e) places all grand jury transcripts in the hands of the U.S. Attorneys Office, giving an awesome power to the government never known under the common law. Even federal judges don’t have easy access to the transcripts. In recent decades, prosecutors have perfected the practices of granting immunity to selected witnesses, denying it to others, concealing inconvenient testimony or evidence from the public and generally leveraging facts and accusations into an overwhelming advantage over targeted defendants. Defense attorneys, not even aware of what is said in the transcripts, are usually unable to challenge them.

What’s more, the U.S. Supreme Court has assured that this machine of tyranny can virtually never be challenged. In two cases since the 1970s, the Court has held that grand jury improprieties are never appealable after conviction and can only be challenged in the most unusual circumstances via interlocutory appeal (an extremely rare and disfavored pretrial device). Of course, defense lawyers are systematically deprived of the means to make such challenges because the prosecutors keep all evidence of the improprieties in their own hands, and courts of appeals almost never grant hearings for interlocutory appeals in criminal cases even if by miracle some evidence of grand jury misconduct surfaces.

It is noteworthy that the very grand jury secrecy that now prevents grand jurors from revealing prosecutorial misconduct – the same secrecy that kept the Ruth Greenglass perjury in the Rosenberg case concealed from the public for 50 years – now operates as a mockery of the original intent behind grand jury privacy. Under the common law, grand jury secrecy was a protection for grand jurors from intimidation by the government. It is said to have first arisen in England in 1681 when the King demanded that a grand jury indict his rivals – the Earl of Shaftesbury and Steven Colledge – for treason. The grand jury won the right to hold its proceedings in secret – away from the watchful eyes of the Crown prosecutor. For two and a half centuries afterward, grand juries had the right to operate in secret – but to waive secrecy and issue public presentments when they concluded their investigations. Today, however, the Federal Rules place the prosecutor directly within the grand jury room and expose any grand jurors who expose governmental improprieties to possible five-year prison sentences.

If the Justice Department’s libraries of grand jury transcripts were ever thrown open to public scrutiny, they would speak of prosecutorial misconduct on a massive scale. We know this because those few cases such as the Rosenberg case in which grand jury proceedings have been unsealed have revealed a level of misconduct and abuse by prosecutors that can only be described as systematic and pervasive. One federal judge recently wrote that in twenty-three years of occasionally examining grand jury transcripts to resolve pretrial motions, he had never once seen a case where prosecutors gave grand juries accurate legal instructions.

For all its infamy and notoriety, the Rosenberg case is fairly typical of the systematic injustice that federal criminal law has degenerated into. As with so many other federal cases, the most guilty and loathsome characters (e.g., Ruth and David Greenglass) went unpunished or were given light sentences, while minor players – Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – were prosecuted to the max. The government’s most fearsome prosecutions were and are reserved for those who refused to ally themselves with the state. David Greenglass, who was caught red-handed and quickly became a government witness to save his own skin, watched as his own lies sent his innocent sister to the electric chair. And, of course, the federal prosecutors who suborned perjury in the same case were lauded as great heroes. One of them became a justice on the New York Supreme Court.

November 18, 2009

Dr. Roger Roots, J.D., Ph.D. [send him mail] is an assistant professor of Sociology and Criminal Justice at the New York Institute of Technology.

Copyright © 2009 by LewRockwell.com. Permission to reprint in whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit is given.