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" States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets, and even toilet paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room and board. Most prisoners and the families that struggle to support them are chronically short of money. When they go broke—and being broke is a frequent occurrence in prison—prisoners must take out prison loans to pay for medications, legal and medical fees, and basic commissary items such as soap and deodorant. Debt peonage inside prison is as prevalent as it is outside prison. Prisoners are charged for visits to the infirmary and the dentist. Prisoners must pay the state for a fifteen-minute deathbed visit to an immediate family member, or for a fifteen-minute visit to a funeral home to view the deceased. New Jersey, like most other states, forces a prisoner to reimburse the system for overtime wages paid to the two guards who accompany him or her to the visit or viewing, plus mileage cost. The charge can be as high as $945.04 in New Jersey. It can take years to pay off a visit with a dying father or mother when you make less than $30 a month. "
― Chris Hedges , America: The Farewell Tour
166
" Slavery is legal in prisons under the Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which reads: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.”49 Prisoners are not covered under the Fair Labor Standards Act requiring workers to be paid the minimum wage. The highest hourly wage in prison rarely exceeds $2 and most prisoners earn less than a dollar an hour. In Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, and Texas most prisoners are not paid for their work. Once you enter prison you become, in essence, a slave of the state. "
― Chris Hedges , America: The Farewell Tour
167
" Corporate investors, who have poured billions into the business of mass incarceration, expect long-term returns. And they will get them. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences, deny paroles, determine immigrant detention laws, and impose minimum-sentence and Three-Strikes laws, which mandate life sentences after three felony convictions. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, earned $1.7 billion in revenues and collected $300 million in profits in 2013.50 CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day.51 Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services, provides food for six hundred correctional institutions across the United States.52 Goldman Sachs and other investors acquired it in 2007 for $8.3 billion.53 The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent ten-year period for lobbying to keep the prison business flush.54 The resource center In the Public Interest documented in its report “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations” that private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent.55 If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds. CCA in 2011 gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties, and so-called 527 groups (PACs and super PACs), the American Civil Liberties Union reported.56 The corporation also spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials plus undisclosed sums to lobby state officials.57 The GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest for-profit prison management companies, donated $250,000 to Donald Trump in 2017.58 The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent, the ACLU reported.59 Private prisons account for nearly all newly built prisons.60 And nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.61 "
― Chris Hedges , America: The Farewell Tour
174
" People often point to the London Metropolitan Police, who were formed in the 1820s by Sir Robert Peel,” Vitale said when we met. “They are held up as this liberal ideal of a dispassionate, politically neutral police with the support of the citizenry. But this really misreads the history. Peel is sent to manage the British occupation of Ireland. He’s confronted with a dilemma. Historically, peasant uprisings, rural outrages were dealt with by either the local militia or the British military. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, in the need for soldiers in other parts of the British Empire, he is having more and more difficulty managing these disorders. In addition, when he does call out the militia, they often open fire on the crowd and kill lots of people, creating martyrs and inflaming further unrest. He said, ‘I need a force that can manage these outrages without inflaming passions further.’ He developed the Peace Preservation Force, which was the first attempt to create a hybrid military-civilian force that can try to win over the population by embedding itself in the local communities, taking on some crime control functions, but its primary purpose was always to manage the occupation. He then exports that model to London as the industrial working classes are flooding the city, dealing with poverty, cycles of boom and bust in the economy, and that becomes their primary mission. “The creation of the very first state police force in the United States was the Pennsylvania State Police in 1905,” Vitale went on. “For the same reasons. It was modeled similarly on U.S. occupation forces in the Philippines. There was a back-and-forth with personnel and ideas. What happened was local police were unable to manage the coal strikes and iron strikes. . . . They needed a force that was more adherent to the interests of capital. . . . Interestingly, for these small-town police forces in a coal mining town there was sometimes sympathy. They wouldn’t open fire on the strikers. So, the state police force was created to be the strong arm for the law. Again, the direct connection between colonialism and the domestic management of workers. . . . It’s a two-way exchange. As we’re developing ideas throughout our own colonial undertakings, bringing those ideas home, and then refining them and shipping them back to our partners around the world who are often despotic regimes with close economic relationships to the United States. There’s a very sad history here of the U.S. exporting basically models of policing that morph into death squads and horrible human rights abuses.” The almost exclusive reliance on militarized police to deal with profound inequality and social problems is turning poor neighborhoods in cities such as Chicago into failed states. The “broken windows” policy, adopted by many cities, argues that disorder produces crime. It criminalizes minor infractions, upending decades of research showing that social dislocation leads to crime. It creates an environment where the poor are constantly harassed, fined, and arrested for nonsubstantive activities. "
― Chris Hedges , America: The Farewell Tour
175
" We once had within our capitalist democracy liberal institutions—the press, labor unions, political third parties, civic and church groups, public broadcasting, well-funded public universities, and a liberal wing of the Democratic Party—that were capable of responding to outside pressure from movements. They did so imperfectly. They provided only enough reforms to save the capitalist system from widespread unrest or, with the breakdown of capitalism in the 1930s, from revolution. They never adequately addressed white supremacy and institutional racism, or the cruelty that is endemic to capitalism. But they had the ability to mitigate some of the suffering that plagued working men and women. There was never enough social mobility, but there was some. "
― Chris Hedges , America: The Farewell Tour
179
" Those who manipulate the shadows that dominate our lives are the agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, tel- evision and movie producers, advertisers, video technicians, photogra- phers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers, and television news personalities who create the vast stage for illusion. They are the puppet masters. "
― Chris Hedges , Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle
