What comes to mind when you think of prisoners, inmates, offenders, or any other appellation that has been affixed to incarcerated persons? Do you think murderers, rapists, robbers, and folk who are just generally violent? If so, you are not even half-right. Barely one-third of the people who fill the nations prisons live up to (or down to) that billing. The other two-thirds, roughly 1.5 million souls, are nonviolent property and drug offenders (1), most of whom are mentally ill or drug addicted; many of whom are mentally ill and drug addicted.
I have yet another query for the reader. Recall those 1.5 million souls—those petty thieves, burglars, joyriders, reefer smokers—do you think that they should be boiled alive, rectally sodomized, deprived of life saving health care, or starved to the point of emaciation? Heck, for that matter, what about the rapists, robbers, killers, and car-jackers, should they be subject to those crimes and indignities in a society that calls itself civilized even though they may have perpetrated the very same crimes upon others? As it turns out, both groups are imperiled and subjected to the aforementioned brutalities. These inhumanities happen with some measure of regularity in state and federally operated penal facilities, however the despicable acts are mainstays in private prisons. The Justice Department has finally said no more… well kinda. Let me explain.
The most acrimonious medicine for the would-be-writer to swallow is the second rewrite, absolutely. The pen-person believes she or he had it correct from the beginning, and the first rewrite was but mere capitulation to the fragile ego of those who claim to know better, thus, to be told to do it again….Yes, I am still talking about private prisons; placate me, please. At any rate, I was in the midst of choking down the aforementioned bitter linctus, beginning my second rewrite, when I thought that my literary world had come crashing down upon me. On the front page of USA TODAY was an article entitled, “Justice to end use of private prisons” (2). I was crestfallen at first because I had been working on my first book initially entitled, “New Slaves, Same ‘Ol Economy: Incarceration, the Twenty-first Century Plantation” for several years. The headline, quite explicitly, suggested that half my book had just gone down the tubes since the Feds were certainly going to use the barbarities that I had written about as reasons for discontinuing the present practice of using private prisons. But then I read the article—is that not the advice of the old adage, peruse the pages cover be damned (well, I guess what they say is don’t judge a book by its cover).
In the article, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, enumerated several reasons for deciding to take such action, 1) Private prisons do not cut costs substantially. I agree. Although these facilities were promoted as cost-cutters, in some instances they cost the taxpayers more money. 2) Private prisons do not offer inmates adequate programming. Amen. 3) The prison population has declined. Well…yeah, but only ever so slightly. We are still but 5% of the world’s population yet we host 25% of the world’s incarcerated (3). She also said, 4) Private prisons have a higher rate of inmate assaults on staff. To say that I was taken aback by this final reason would be an understatement, my mind was screaming ‘what the…#@$%!’ While it is definitely true that inmates assault staff—remember that we are dealing with a group that has some mentally ill people in it—however, those manners of assaults are dwarfed by the number of staff-on-inmate attacks (4).
It strikes me as duplicitous, that even when sort of, kind of, almost doing the right thing, the voiceless remain the object of condemnation and censure by the powerful. They do not bother with informing the public of the ‘goings on’ lest they take a chance on letting truth get in the way. On the other hand, perhaps they worry that they may sully the reputation of those 1%ers who have made billions of dollars off this appalling public policy and business. Among said one percenters is the likes of that perennial humanitarian—tongue in cheek—Dick Cheney (5).
The reprehensible conduct of private prison employees and their administrators is the primary reason that Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). Male staff members, not other inmates, perpetrate the majority of prison rapes whether the victim is female or male (6). The Deputy AG failed to mention this fact even though it was her office that spearheaded the investigations into these offenses, and in addition, the Justice Department was charged with enforcing PREA. And that ain’t the half of it.
Unfortunately, I do not have to break a sweat or even roll up my sleeves to tell you more of what she failed to mention. These abuses take place so often that just reciting the ones that I know off the top of my head should enrage you. Let us check my hypothesis.
The DAG said not a single word about the two guards, Kevin Hessler and Alexander Diaz, who urinated and defecated in inmate’s food and drink (7). Why didn’t the DAG mention Jeffery Buller, an inmate who was denied his medicine for hereditary angioedema—he died from asphyxiation (7)? I read not one word of her citing the transgressions taking place at the Moss Criminal Justice Center where inmates were being charged $8 for an aspirin, (7). There was no reference to Autumn Miller who was refused a Pap smear and pregnancy test when she noticed that something was different with her body. She subsequently gave birth to a baby in the toilet; the baby lived for but four days, (7)—where was that ‘right to life’ crowd then, probably somewhere supporting the death penalty. There was not a single remark about the chaplain at Otter Creek Correctional Center who sexually abused several women, nor Eugene Pendleton a sexually deviant correctional supervisor employed at another facility—even though he had served more than two decades for murder—who raped several female inmates (7). Neither Estelle Richardson—who was beat to death—nor the nine other prisoners who died under mysterious circumstances at the Metro Detention Center received a passing word from the DAG. There is much more of this story to be told to the public, and I can only hope that my book proves to be one of those documents that changes the course of history by exposing these horrors.
I also hope that you, the readers of this article, inundate the in-boxes and phones of the Justice department with requests to cease and desist all business with private prisons. At present, the government does not plan to leave this sordid business wholesale, but rather they simply plan to have their numbers down to 14,200 federal inmates being housed in private prisons by the coming spring. Further, the Feds have only suggested to states that contract with private prisons that they should discontinue doing so. History has always been the preeminent teacher, but it seems as if those four days at Attica in the late summer of 71’ taught us nothing.
Works Cited
1. Loury, Glenn C. Race, Incarceration, and American values. Boston : MIT Press, 2008.
2. Johnson, Kevin. Justice to end use of private prisons. USA TODAY. Weekend, 2016.
3. Pelaez, Vicky. The prison industry in the United States: big business or a new form of slavery? [Online] March 10, 2008. [Cited: April 9, 2015.] http://www.infowars.com.
4. King, Shaun. Record 346 Inmates Die, Dozens of Guards fired in Florida Prisons. m.dailykos. [Online] January 14, 2015. m.dailykos.com.
5. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow. New York : The New Press, 2010.
6. Peters, Justin. Guard-on-Prisoner Sexual Misconduct Happens Far Too Often. Why Can’t We Stop It? A Blog About Murder, Theft, And Other Wickedness. s.l. : Peters, Justin, September 26, 2013.
7. writer, staff. The Dirty Thirty: Nothing to celebrate about 30 years of Corrections of America. grassrootsleadership.org.