Saturday, June 25, 2011
Friday, June 24, 2011
Matt Stoller: Who Wants Keep the War on Drugs Going AND Put You in Debtor’s Prison? � naked capitalism
More than a third of all states allow debtors “who can’t or won’t pay their debts” to be jailed. In 2010, according to the Wall Street Journal, judges have issued 5,000 such warrants. What is behind the increased pressure to incarcerate people with debts? Is it a desire to force debt payment? Or is it part of a new structure where incarceration is becoming increasingly the default tool to address any and all social problems?
Consider a different example that has nothing to do with debts. Earlier this year, a Pennsylvania judge was convicted of racketeering, of taking bribes from parties of interest in his cases. It was a fairly routine case of bribery, with one significant exception. The party making the payoffs was a builder and operator of youth prisons, and the judge was rewarding him by sending lots of kids to his prisons.
Welcome to the for-profit prison industry. It’s an industry that wants people in jail, because jail is their product. And they have shareholder expectations to meet.
Privatized prisons are marketed to international investors as “social infrastructure”, and they are part of a wave of privatization washing over the globe. Multi-billion dollar prison companies are upgraded by analysts with antiseptic words like “prospects for global prison growth”, and these companies have built a revolving door and patronage machine characteristic of any government contractor. Only, in this case, the business they are in is putting people into steel cages (or “filling beds” as they put it), and they don’t care how, why, or whether the people in those beds should be there. They don’t care if you’re in prison for smoking pot, stealing cars, or being in debt. They just want people in jail.
Here’s the 2010 10k of the Corrections Corporation of America (PDF), the largest operator of private prisons in the country. It’s a pretty simple business model – more prisoners, more money. Or, as the company writes, “Historically, we have been successful in substantially filling our inventory of available beds and the beds that we have constructed. Filling these available beds would provide substantial growth in revenues, cash flow, and earnings per share.”
CCA offers an assessment of risks to the company, which include ending the war on drugs or curbing the incarceration of undocumented immigrants.
The rest of the article here
Thursday, June 23, 2011
Paul Stamets interview
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Halloween Comes Early
this year, what with the VP Debate tonight and all...
So Caroline welcomes back her favorite Medicine Man, Paul Stamets, human agent from the fungi realm, fellow animist, to remind us that all of nature is willing to cooperate with us delinquent humans to solve the crises we have created.
www.fungi.com
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Jerome Kagan - The Father of Temperament
Why can two children born into the same household be like two different peas in a pod? Harvard's Jerome Kagan trailblazed the controversial science of temperament to investigate why. In a career that spans more than half a century, now he's going into battle for our minds, with a compelling retrospective, An Argument for Mind. To some an iconoclast - one of the biggest names in psychology of our time joins Natasha Mitchell, in this re-airing of a popular interview.
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Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Monday, June 20, 2011
The Johann Hari podcast - Episode 21
Posted here mainly because the main site has no download link nor separate page for the episode itself ... ;-) ...