Trying to follow

The Star Tribune had a very positive article in the paper:

“More than 3,000 trained prisoners are earning $1 an hour, and time shaved off their sentences, for helping fight California’s wildfires.”

The article was extremely positive, interviewing an inmate and how he’s benefited from the experience, as well as well as the department of corrections who point out that it’s “saving state taxpayers an estimated $80 million per year.”
What’s not discussed or addressed, is whether or not the very act of prison labor is ethical. I don’t know if I’ve written about this before, but John Perkins mentioned it a few times at CCDA and it renewed my passion to talk about it.

The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world with 1.6 million of our citizen’s in prison. It also so happens a disproportionate amount of those prisoners are minorities, you need only look at those exonerated to realize that prejudice and injustices in the system has placed many innocent people in prison as well.

Prison’s are becoming privatized and prisoners are being used to provide sweatshop labor to produce millions of dollars worth of goods for little to no benefit of their own. There is something wrong with that.
We’ve traded a system of blatant slavery for one that fits into our parameters of ‘justice’ and appears on the forefront as appropriate. It is not.

Sources:

• Prison Factories: Slave Labor for the New World Order?
• Prisoner Labor: A High-Growth Industry

Most of my what if? questions are concerning imagining the world differently, but not really thing we can take practical action on. There are already some organizations out there doing similar work, IJM, Not For Sale, and Perverted-Justice (from To Catch a Predator).

I was reading the book Freakonomics and it talks a lot about how the right incentives can help guide peoples actions. Shame is a powerful (negative) incentive, and I think can and should be used to help deter heinous crimes, like pedophilia. Ever since I first heard about the terrible sex trafficking that occurs worldwide I had a thought we should find ways to expose the businessmen fueling the business. A few years back I saw a Dateline special featuring IJM (International Justice Mission) and their work in the South Pacific bringing freedom to young girls forced into sex slavery and justice to the criminal brothel owners and others involved. In the feature, dateline used it’s investigative journalism to videotape a US businessman visiting brothels in Cambodia, and then they confronted him in the United States. (Here is the video below)

Dateline Special Report: Children for sale

Even before the To Catch a Predator shows started, I figured digital cameras and the internet could help expose and shame business men entering brothels, thereby draining the demand and thus keeping children in their homes, rather then being lured into sex slavery.

Here’s my idea. A photographer (paid or volunteer) takes high quality pictures of those entering known brothels. These pictures are then posted online. IDing the pictures would be difficult and time consuming, but wide spread advertising could help with that. If you effectively spread the word so that every concerned friend, wife or peer knew about the website, you would probably accomplish your goal. Say pictures were posted daily (maybe blog style), divided up by city or region. If you knew someone going on an overseas business trip, you could check the site for their photograph. I could explain more, but I think you get the basic idea.
The goal of the site wouldn’t be to have people arrested (IJM does great work on that front), rather it would be to use public shame to bring down the terrible industry. I think shame can be a powerful deterrent.

I’d love to see a group with resources like Not For Sale adopt this strategy. The fact that slavery, and particularly sex slavery, exist in our world today is disturbing and atrocious. It is something we all need to be involved in addressing and doing what we can to put an end to it.

“…it’s the ugliest, most preventable, man-made disaster on our global today.” -Gary Haugen

If you own a house, especially with a sub-prime mortgage, you’ve probably heard the recent news that Countrywide is going to refinance up to $16 billion of loans to help people avoid foreclosure. This is great news amidst the recent housing crisis because it means people will be able to stay in their homes and avoid foreclosure. Those who were taken advantage of by predatory lending, and those who simply made unwise decisions, during the housing boom will have a chance to fix things up and avoid possible horrible outcomes of those mistakes. And, yes, this should benefit the poor, as well as the majority of the middle class, who are facing current foreclosure.

However, predatory lending is nothing new. If you come from a low-income or minority race community, you’ve seen plenty of this before. Predatory lending plagues a great many urban communities. Banks are often few and far between, check cashing shops on every corner, and redlining have negatively impacted low-income communities for decades. Not only that, but forcing foreclosure is often a strategy used to gentrify urban areas and force home-owning poor families out of their own neighborhood. Unfortunately, the plight of the poor in our country has rarely caught the ear of our politicians, corporations or even churches.

This handout will benefit the poor somewhat, alongside the middle class it is aimed at helping out, but will these same sorts of handouts, government attention and concern continue to exist once this ‘housing crisis’ is over? Unless radical changes happen, the urban landscapes will still be full of predatory lenders and redlining practices.

A long time ago I had heard the comment thrown out that they look at illiteracy rates for third grades and build prison cells based on those numbers. It was an interesting correlation, but learning about the school system, and the struggle it is for kids to catch up, it isn’t surprising that they would look at those statistics. In school students spend up to third grade “Learning to Read” and after that they must “Read to Learn.” If your not on track and reading at third grade it is likely you will struggle for years to catch up, likely you will drop out, and likely you will get in trouble with the law.

I put up a series of quotes I found online a while back acknowledging this correlation and usage of reading rates to base prison cell projections on. That post has seen quite a few readers lately so I thought I would update things here with a video from one of my recent readers.
At about 4:30 into the video you have Dr. Russ Whitehurst, Director, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education saying essentially the correlation is obviously there and the ‘need for jails.’

Here are some other quotes from around the net on the same subject.

From Investing in Literacy

Indiana’s former governor has stated that determining the number of new prisons to build is based, in part, on the number of second graders not reading at second-grade level.

From Dialects, Teaching Reading and Literacy to Dialect Speakers: Educational CyberPlayGround™

In California they plan how many jail cells they will build in the future by how many children are not reading on grade level by third grade.

From Democracy and Equity: CES’s Tenth Common Principle

“Based on this year’s fourth-grade reading scores,” observes Paul Schwartz, a Coalition principal in residence at the U. S. Department of Education, “California is already planning the number of new prison cells it will need in the next century.”

From Evidence Based Education Science and Learning to Read

David Boulton: We were interviewing Lesley Morrow, the Past-President of the International Reading Association, and she made a statement which flabbergasted me. She said this was a fact: that there are some states that determine how many prison cells to build based on reading scores.

Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. Again, the predictability of reading for life success is so strong, that if you look at the proportion of middle schoolers who are not at the basic level, who are really behind in reading, it is a very strong predictor of problems with the law and the need for jails down the line.

Literacy for societies, literacy for states, literacy for individuals is a powerful determinate of success. The opposite of success is failure and clearly, being in jail is a sign of failure.

People who don’t read well have trouble earning a living. It becomes attractive to, in some cases the only alternative in terms of gaining funds, to violate the law and steal, to do things that get you in trouble. Few options in some cases other than to pursue that life. Of course reading opens doors.

From ReadFresno:

Several states, including California, use reading achievement levels of students in the third grade as a basis for projecting the number of future prison beds needed.

I’m looking into more statistic as well, so if you have any please let me know. I’ll update this post as we find more. This needs some serious consideration and reflection. Any thoughts?

I mentioned the Jena Six when they first appeared in the news and that post has had more hits this summer then any other. A lot of people are interested in what’s going on, and I felt the need to update you, by way mostly of quotes from other blogs and news outlets. First, if you know nothing about the Jena Six, this short news clip should catch you up.

Watch Part Two here.Here’s the most recent news, via While Seated:

Mychal Bell, the first of the Jena Six to face trial, was found guilty of aggravated second-degree battery and conspiracy to commit the same on June 28th. A comprehensive look at the case, the trial and the verdict was published on July 2nd at friendsofjustice. Plus, Democracy Now did a full story.

Jack and Jill Politics also gave a comprehensive look at the situation, including interviews with the parents of the victim in the case.

There are a lot of ways to get involved. The Daily Kos has a list of representatives to call and the link below has multiple Actions for you to partake in.