Federal lockdown in KY

The other day I woke to find the entire prison on lock-down status. They fed us bologna and cheese three times a day. They strip-searched us, no showers, recreation, commissary or calls. They shook our cells down, took little knick-knacks, and left our cells ransacked. And they talked all this greasy-tough-guy yang in the process. This lasted for over seven days. This collective punishment stemmed from a fight that occurred with a few people. This type of collective punishment in the prison system is the norm and it never fails to amaze me. How they don't realize that they actually make the overall problem worse when they go into their collective-punishment mode.

Let's keep it real: starving, mistreating, pushing the prisoner for something s/he was not involved in is not only unjustified and counter-productive, it is also harmful and can lead to volatile situations.

Repression will always breed resistance. The real problem that creates violence in all prisons is over-crowding. Racist officers, lack of education and communication, foul conditions and many other similar things are symptomatic of malaise in a prison. Instead of ameliorating those problems, over-crowding is making them worse. Administrations cover for and defend racist officers, and when fights do break out, they go on a collective-punishment spree and leave the causes of the violence intact.

o I laid on my bunk, confined to my cell, stomach rumbling, eating a wish sandwich (that's two slices of bread with I wish something was in it), and I ponder some more of the correlations between prisons and society. I note that these folks always take a tough and even obsessively brutal stance on everything. I look abroad. In Vietnam, they murdered entire villages. Men, women and children, hoping that tough stance would make the Vietnamese submit. Today in Iraq it's the same concept: beat them into submission. It never works.

What [the imperialists] are actually doing is creating more enemies and even turning allies into enemies. That's stupid. When are they going to learn that it just doesn't work? I look at the war on drugs and get-tough-on-crime policies. We have now added another million prisoner to the system with no end in sight. The majority going to prisons are non-violent offenders who have committed economic crimes.

But poverty, unemployment and a lack of education aren't the only problems. There's an underlying problem of capitalist greed for profit at the expense of warehousing human beings. To the capitalist, these humans are worth more in prison than in the streets where they are doing nothing. In prison they generate $40,000/year per head. It costs more to keep a person in prison than it does to get them a university education. Noticeably, in California only one university has been built, compared to 23 prisons, since 1980. California alone has more prisoners than Japan, England, Singapore, France, Germany and the Netherlands combined! I agree with those who say these capitalists just don't want to remedy the problem. Too much money is involved.

-- a Federal prisoner in Kentucky, 17 June, 2005