Need to waste 30 min?

[ezekiel]

I just watched this BBC documentary on american prisons. Quite good and quite surprising...

Kudos to those lawyers, dunno if I could handle it. ::unsure

[Nullifier]

You're surprised? ::blink I'm not. The whole system is corrupt, why would you think the prisons are any different? They're part of the long term plan. Did you know that spending on the correctional system has gone up drastically under this administration, about double, and that they're building a buttload of new prisons all around the country? ::brick

[edit]I love my country and the people in it, but sometimes I'm embarassed to be an American, and this is one of them. ::sad [/edit]

[SkyLion]

I didn't watch the doc (didn't have 30 min.) but I can tell you that the prison industry is one of the fastest growing in America. I think over 1/2 of the inmates are there for non-violent crimes (mostly drug pssession).

,,

You can actually buy stock in the prison industry and inmates provide the corporate contractors who run the prisons with plenty of cheap labor (since us taxpayers foot the bill for all the inmates living costs).

,,

I also reccommend a book entitled "No More Prisons" by William Upski Wimsatt.

[ezekiel]

Prisons are unfortunately a necessity, that's not the problem, it's what goes on in them. A well funded correctional program can be a good thing but the US seems focused more on punishment than rehabilitation contrarily to Canadian prisons. I remember people getting upset in Quebec 'cause they were feeding the inmates Filet Mignon at christmas, that's a far cry from what this report was showing.

I'm kinda curious at how rampant brutality is in US prisons now. The journalist went in at least three states and at least one anonymous prison doctor mentioned bad cases of guard brutality happening about three times a week in his prison...I don't know, I knew prison brutality was happening, just not that much and to that extent...Oh, and the Youth Corrections facility? Wtf?! That thing looks like a maximum security prison, how do they expect to reintroduce them in society after putting them through there?!

Anyway, this documentary was made after the iraq prisoner pictures and videos came out (Btw, were they all shown in the US on the major networks? Somehow I doubt it...)

Frank Carlson was one of the lawyers who fought a compensation battle on behalf of the victims. I asked him about his reaction when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke last year and U.S. politicians rushed to express their astonishment and disgust that such abuses could happen at the hands of American guards.

‘I thought: “What hypocrisy,” Carlson told me. ‘Because they know we do it here every day.’

Many of the tapes we’ve collected are several years old. That’s because they only surface when determined lawyers prise them out of reluctant state prison departments during protracted lawsuits.

Who said lawyers were evil? ::wink

Since we finished filming for the programme in January, I’ve stayed in contact with various prisoners’ rights groups and the families of many of the victims. Every single day come more e-mails full of fresh horror stories. In the past weeks, two more prisoners have died, in Alabama and Ohio. One man was pepper sprayed, the other tasered.

See the thing is you need a bucketload of pepper spray to kill someone (they showed gawdawful burnmark pictures from some lawyer's files; 2nd degree burns all over the body.) Same with tasers...Anyway, no wonder China laughs at the US for fingering them for human rights abuse...