As a prisoner, I'm starved for information. I need to know what's really going on.
Here in Colorado the prison system is swallowing up more and more good people. Our Governor Owens continues to push for more and more incarceration. He's built a prison-industrial complex, with his cronies from Texas putting up more prisons and running the Correctional Industries here. We get $0.60/day while some fat cat in Texas receives all our production profit. We give the state 20 percent of our pay, so we're actually making $0.48. The envelope, paper and stamp for this letter is costing a day's pay.
I spent 12 years in the U.S. Army trying to improve our country, and it's all been wasted by Bush, Inc. Neither Democrats nor Republicans care about "the little guy," they are both so deep in bed with moneyed interests. Since 1960 neither party has had the public interest at heart.
-- a Colorado prisoner, 12 December, 2005
MIM responds: It's been a hell of a lot longer than 45 years that the Amerikan government has been screwing over "the little guy." That would be the little guys, girls, men and wimmin in Asia, Africa and the Americas, not to mention the Black Nation in the legally-segregated (and before that slave) South, the First Nations whose land this country was built on, the Chinese laborers who built the modern Amerikan West, and the Japanese and Japanese-descended people who served time in concentration camps before Amerika ever talked about giving Arabs and their descendents the same treatment post-9/11. Should we go on?
It's always sad to give years of one's life and face physical danger or hardship for a cause that turns out to be corrupt. But it's always best to accept the facts quickly and move on to the task of exposing and undoing this unjust system. Seeing the nature of the beast up close in the prison system is a good vantage point for understanding the scope of imperialism.