Prison Industrial Complex
Punishment and Profits: Immigration Detention
Fault Lines investigates the business of immigrant detention in the US.
“Immigration is a key issue in the US presidential election, with the Republican candidates trying to demonstrate their tough stance on undocumented immigrants.
But under the Obama administration, the detention and deportation of immigrants has reached an all-time high.
Every day, the US government detains more than 33,000 non-citizens at the cost of $5.5mn a day. That is a lot of money for the powerful private prison industry, which spends millions of dollars on lobbying and now operates nearly half of the country’s immigration detention centres.
Fault Lines travels to Texas and Florida to investigate the business of immigrant detention in the US and to find out how a handful of companies have managed to shape US immigration laws.”
http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/faultlines/2012/04/201241081117980874.html
Forced Out: A Unity Forum at the Crossroads of Deportation & Incarceration
Forced Out: A Unity Forum at the Crossroads of Deportation & Incarceration
Thursday April 5, 2012, 9:00AM – 4:00 PM
University of Illinois at Chicago
Workshop on intersections of detention, criminalization, and the LGBTQ experience will take place from 11:50-1:00 PM during the wrokshop session.
full schedule
This city-wide forum provides a starting place for a conversation among individuals and families impacted by “mass detention.” It also gives students, activists and allies a chance to make connections across issues that are often seen as separate and even competing. By educating people about the shared logic of the prison and immigration systems, Forced Out will increase the links among affected groups and help to create a more unified voice for policy change across all communities.
One of the workshops will focus on the experiences of LGBTQ people in detention and incarceration systems. Workshops will take place from 11:50 AM to 1:00 PM. The “Resisting Criminalization of Sexuality and Gender” workshop will take place in Room 605. It is a collaboration between the Transformative Justice Law Project, the Immigrant Youth Justice League, and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.
Removing the Bars- Criminal Justice Conference
Removing the Bars: TAKE ACTION Kick Off Keynote Featuring Angela Y. Davis
Friday, March 23, 2012 – 7:00pm – 9:00pm
Columbia University, Morningside Campus, Alfred Lerner Hall, Roone Arledge Auditorium
This event will serve as the kick-off for the 2012 Removing the Bars conference on criminal justice and will feature a presentation from Angela Y. Davis, an American black activist, philosopher, feminist scholar and author. Prisoner rights has been one of Angela Davis’s major commitments and she is the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working to abolish the prison-industrial complex. A spoken word performance and closing ceremony depicting the varieties of ways people have been impacted by the criminal justice s! ystem will follow the presentation. Continue reading
California colleges take back seat to California prisons
California colleges take back seat to California prisons
San Francisco State University President Robert Corrigan, who is retiring this year, and Provost Sue Rosser noted today in Washington that California is spending nearly as much money on prisons ($8.7 billion, or 9.45 percent of its budget), as it does on all of higher education ($9.3 billion, or 10.1 percent of its budget).
Corrigan said the numbers are actually more stark. Total operational budgets for all 23 campuses of the state universities and for all nine UC campuses is $4.6 billion, less than half what the state spends on prisons. Continue reading
Occupy movement challenges prison-industrial complex
Occupy movement challenges prison-industrial complex
By Betsey Piette | Workers World | March 4, 2012
Demonstrators chanted, “Tear down Jailhouses! Build up School Houses!” outside Heery International Inc.’s Philadelphia office as part of a national call from Occupy Oakland to Occupy for Prisoners on Feb. 20.
Heery, which profits from private prison construction, was paid $316 million in October to build a Graterford Prison extension to house 4,100 more inmates and a new death row facility.Organized by DecarceratePA and endorsed by Occupy Philadelphia, the protest targeted the disparity between increased funding for prison construction while Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett slashes funding for education and is pushing for more cuts. Continue reading
Occupy for Prisoners Comes Out Against Mass Incarceration
Occupy for Prisoners Comes Out Against Mass Incarceration
by: Yana Kunichoff | Truthout | February 22, 2012
Each time the 100-strong crowd assembled for the national Occupy for Prisoners day roared below the Metropolitan Correctional Center in downtown Chicago on Monday evening, the lights in a couple of windows would flicker on and off – prisoners up above, responding to the chants of “build schools, not prisons” and “we’re with you, brothers and sisters.”
“I can only imagine how excited they might have been to see that there are people in the free world that are concerned about them.” said Christan Bufford, an organizer for juvenile justice with the Southwest Youth Collaborative. “When you are in there [detention], you feel like you are the only person in the world.”
Bufford would know – he spent four months in the Illinois Youth Department of Corrected at the age of 16 after an aggravated gun charge and a probation violation. The statistics on mass incarceration for juveniles are bleak. For the more than 93,000 young people in the juvenile justice system in 2008, about 80 percent went on to have contact with the adult criminal justice system, found the MacArthur Foundation. Continue reading
