Last week, I highlighted a good review of a new book called Texas Tough. Here is some audio from an event where the book’s author spoke about his key arguments. Listen here.

From JustSeeds Artists' Collective

For those who are interested in a more academic study about the issue of prison labor, I highly recommend a book called “Prison Labor in the United States: An Economic Analysis” by Asatar Bair. It offers a well-researched and lucid argument that prison labor is an extension of the system of slavery.

Finally if you are interested in learning more about the types of products that are currently made by prisoners in the U.S., visit the following post.

I am a big fan of the Boondocks. I say that fully aware of the fact that some of what Aaron MacGruder produces as a satirist can be offensive. In this particular episode where Huey visits a prison, there are some offensive things said that I do not personally subscribe to. With that caveat, however, I like this short clip where Huey defines the Prison Industrial Complex.

Here is a transcription of the definition of the PIC that Huey offered in the episode:

The prison industrial complex is a system situated at the intersection of government and private interests. It uses prisons as a solution to social, political and economic problems. It includes human rights violations, the death penalty, slave labor, policing, courts, the media, political prisoners and the elimination of dissent.”

Lydia Crumbley - JustSeeds Portfolio Project

Public Secrets is an interactive website with sound clips and textual narratives from female inmates in California State Prisons. It addresses the problem of secrecy among the growing number of prisons. Daniel narrates the opening sequence. The site goes into the personal accounts of the women in the facility and it exposes ideas of “the existence of the Prison Industrial Complex, its pervasive network of monopolies, its human rights abuses.” Daniel suggests that “the growth of the prison industrial complex and the unimpeded violation of human rights within it are irrefutable testimony to the power of the public secret.”

Narrators express, first hand, the abuses they have experienced. Many of these stories have been kept under wraps because of an imposed media ban on all facilities within the California Department of Corrections. One account includes a woman who was sentenced to 5 years in prison for the same crime committed by a male, by the same judge, who received a lesser sentence. This hypertext site is an example of the growing bridge that links the new world of the digital media with the world of grassroots organizing. The site also highlights the plights of women in prison which is often overlooked. Attention must be paid.

I first learned about photographer Steve Liss’s work through seeing the following slideshow produced by the Children’s Defense Fund for its Cradle to Prison Pipeline Campaign.

The photos were so impactful that they led me to investigate who had taken the pictures. Many of these photographs are also contained within a book that Steve has written called No Place for Children: Voices from Juvenile Detention.

I’ll give you three chances to guess how much it costs to incarcerate ONE youth in Illinois…  What were your guesses?  Well it costs $78,000 to keep a young person in jail for a year in Illinois.  If you gasped, you are not alone.  This is particularly stupid because we KNOW that incarceration does NOT work.  It just serves to make youth into better criminals.

On the other hand, three to six months of multisystem therapy costs only between $6,800 and $10,000 per youth.  Tuition at the University of Illinois would cost under $10,000.  For all of the “conservatives” who would like to decrease the budget deficits at the state and local levels, they should be loudly advocating for decarceration and a focus on community-based alternatives.  That would be the appropriate “conservative response.”  Yet no one has ever accused the right of being consistent in their arguments.

States spent about $5.7 billion in 2007 to imprison 64,558 youth committed to residential facilities.  The per diem costs of locking up on young person in a juvenile facility ranges from $24 in Wyoming to $726 in Connecticut, but the American Correctional Association estimates that, on average, it costs states $240.99 per day — around $88,000 a year — for every youth in a juvenile facility.  If you are interested in more such facts, the Justice Policy Institute published a good report last year called the costs of confinement.  The report makes the point that states needlessly spend billions of dollars a year incarcerating nonviolent youth.  These young people could to be safely supported in the community instead.

Just Seeds Portfolio Project

I spent a little time in May doing some very preliminary investigation about prisoner family visits in the research literature. Data suggests that more than half of all prisoners do not receive in-person visits from family members (Mumola, 2000). There are a variety of explanations for why families may not visit, including distance of the prison, financial burdens, problems with the prison bureaucracy, and strained or severed relationships with the prisoner (Hairston, 2003).

A recent study from the Office on Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP) summarizing findings from the Survey on Youth in Residential Placement (SYRP) offers the following important information about family contact for youth in custody:

• The vast majority of youth in custody across the U.S. (92%) said that since arriving at their facility, they had some contact with their families, either through phone calls or through visits.
• Nearly 9 in 10 spoke with their family on the telephone, and more than 2/3 had an in-person family visit.
• The percentage of youth in contact with their family members varied by facility type.  While most youth have spoken with their family on the phone, fewer youth in detention (80%) and camps (74%) have done so compared to those in other programs (93%).
• Fewer youth in corrections (61%) and camp programs (63%) report in-person visits with their families.
• Frequency of family contact also depends on the program.  Youth in corrections and camp programs are nearly twice as likely to have a low rate of family contact.  Thirty-nine percent of corrections and camp youth have family contact less than once a week, compared with 20 percent in other programs.
• One-third (33%) of youth who have no in-person visits indicate that this is due to time constraints (facility visiting hours are inconvenient) or distance (their family lives too far away).
• One-fifth of youth who have no phone calls or no visits say that their families have resource constraints (e.g. a phone call would be long distance, a visit would cost too much, or the family does not have transportation).
• About one in seven (14 percent) youth without contact claim that the lack of contact exists because their facility does not allow it.
• Relatively youth without contact say it is because they do not want to talk or visit with their family (7 percent) or because their family does not want to talk or visit with them (6 percent).
• The majority of all youth in custody (59%) say that it would take their families 1 hour or longer to travel to visit them. For more than one-fourth of youth (28 percent), their families would have to travel 3 hours or longer to see them.

Over the next year, I will undertake a small participatory research study to better understand the issue of family visits to Illinois youth prisons.   The research question is: “What are the demands for visiting a youth prisoner in Illinois?” or “What are the expenditures of time, money, and energy necessary to visit a youth prisoner in Illinois?”

Newsweek has been running a series on American Prisons that I have found surprisingly well-done considering the mainstream newsiness of that publication.  This week’s article is titled “Do Rural Prisons Benefit Locals?”  It focuses particularly on the case of rural New York state.  A key paragraph in the article suggests:

The phenomenon of moving tens of thousands of prisoners from cities to rural areas is replicated in other big states across the country, from Texas (which has America’s largest state prison population) to California. But that is not the only way that prisoners transfer resources from cities to small towns. When state legislative districts are redrawn every decade after the U.S. census, inmates are counted as residents of where they reside in prison even though they are mostly felons who cannot vote there. So the votes of residents in areas whose population is swelled by nonvoting prisoners gain outsize influence.

An organization called Prisoners of the Censusaddresses the unfairness of counting prisoners as residents in rural counties  where they are incarcerated while the poor urban communities from which they originate are actually defunded through the Census counting process.  http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/

There are several other articles in the Newsweek series so far covering the debate between cutting prisons or education, how private prisons are financially struggling during this recession, and why we should treat drug addicts in prison.  The series is worth reading particularly for those who are unfamiliar with this issue of prison expansion and mass incarceration.  The articles provide a good introduction to some of the issues that individuals and communities are dealing with at this time.

Photographer Chris Jordan found an incredible way to visually depict mass incarceration.  Below is an image from an amazing series of photos called Running by Numbers.  I encourage you to visit Chris Jordan’s website for even more terrific photographs.

Chris Jordan - Prison Uniforms 2007

Visit Chris Jordan’s website to see a holographic depiction of Prison Uniforms.

The BJS released its advanced counts of the numbers of prisoners in the U.S. at the end of 2009. At yearend 2009, state and federal correctional authorities had jurisdiction over 1,613,656 prisoners, an increase of 0.2% (3,897 prisoners) from year end 2008. This was the smallest annual increase in the current decade and continued the trend of slower growth observed in the prison population since 2006.

Prisoners under the jurisdiction of state or federal correctional authorities, by jurisdiction, December 31, 2000 and 2008, with advanced counts for 2009.

For the entire report, see Prisoners at Yearend 2009 — Advance Counts