:: rawblogXport ::

:: Wednesday, July 07, 2004 ::

Freedom Tower: irony writ large The London News Review
Since 1980 the U.S. prison and jail population has quadrupled in size to more than 2 million. In the process, prisons have embedded themselves into the nation's economic and social fabric. A powerful lobby has grown up around the prison system that will fight hard to protect the status quo... Major companies such as Wackenhut Corrections Corp. and Corrections Corp. of America employ sophisticated lobbyists to protect and expand their market share.

This is the horror vision of Robocop made real. The very fabric of America society is woven with barbed wire...

In the past two decades, hundreds of "prison towns" have multiplied -- places that are dependent on prisons for their economic vitality. Take Fremont County, Colo., where the No. 1 employer is the Colorado Department of Corrections, with nine prisons, and No. 2 is the Federal Bureau of Prisons with four.

And the racial make-up of the US prison population is staggering. This from The Black Commentator:

With only five percent of the world’s people, the U.S. accounts for 25 percent of the planet’s prisoners – fully half of them Black. One out of eight prisoners on Earth is African American. That’s race politics with a vengeance.

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