#Prisons

[politijohn]

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Historic wildfires blaze through LA months after the Democratically-run city cut fire service funds.

News headlines rhetorically ask us to consider what happens when CA inmates - working as firefighters for roughly $6 per day - cannot contain unprecedented fires.

Billionaires drain the already water-starved state of its supply as hydrants dry up when needed most.

This system has to go.

[cuties-in-codices]

the beheading of john the baptist

from a book of hours illuminated by the maître françois, paris (?), c. 1470-80

source: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Liturg. 41, fol. 201v

[reality-detective]

INSANE. Correctional officer in California resigns over the transgender policies that allows men (oftentimes convicted of sexual crimes) into women's prisons 🤔

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Greedflation, but for prisoners

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:

https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/

Like every aspect of the prison contracting system, prison commissaries – the stores where prisoners are able to buy food, sundries, toiletries and other items – are dominated by private equity funds that have bought out all the smaller players. Private equity deals always involve gigantic amounts of debt (typically, the first thing PE companies do after acquiring a company is to borrow heavily against it and then pay themselves a hefty dividend).

The need to service this debt drives PE companies to cut quality, squeeze suppliers, and raise prices. That's why PE loves to buy up the kinds of businesses you must spend your money at: dialysis clinics, long-term care facilities, funeral homes, and prison services.

Prisoners, after all, are a literal captive market. Unlike capitalist ventures, which involve the risk that a customer will take their business elsewhere, prison commissary providers have the most airtight of monopolies over prisoners' shopping.

Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Six states ban paying prisoners anything. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

So there's a double cruelty to prison commissary price-gouging. Prisoners earn far less than any other kind of worker, and they pay vastly inflated prices for the necessities of life. There's also a triple cruelty: prisoners' families – deprived of an incarcerated breadwinner's earnings – are called upon to make up the difference for jacked up commissary prices out of their own strained finances.

So what does prison profiteering look like, in dollars and sense? Here's the first-of-its-kind database tracking the costs of food, hygiene items and religious items in 46 states:

https://theappeal.org/commissary-database/

Prisoners rely heavily on commissaries for food. Prisons serve spoiled, inedible food, and often there isn't enough to go around – prisoners who rely on the food provided by their institutions literally starve. This is worst in prisons where private equity funds have taken over the cafeteria, which is inevitable accompanied by swingeing cuts to food quality and portions:

https://theappeal.org/prison-food-virginia-fluvanna-correctional-center/

So you have one private equity fund starving prisoners, and another that's gouging them on food. Or sometimes it's the same company. Keefe Group, owned by HIG Capital, provides commissaries to prisons whose cafeterias are managed by other HIG Capital portfolio companies like Trinity Services Group. HIG also owns the prison health-care company Wellpath – so if they give you food poisoning, they get paid twice.

Wellpath delivers "grossly inadequate healthcare":

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

And Trinity serves "meager portions of inedible food":

https://theappeal.org/clayton-county-jail-sheriff-election/

When prison commissaries gouge on food, no part of the inventory is spared, even the cheapest items. In Florida, a packet of ramen costs $1.06, 300% more inside the prison than it does at the Target down the street:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24444312-fl_doc_combined_commissary_lists#document/p6/a2444049

America's prisoners aren't just hungry, they're also hot. The climate emergency is sending temperatures in America's largely un-air-conditioned prisons soaring to dangerous levels. Commissaries capitalize on this, too: an 8" fan costs $40 in Delaware's Sussex Correctional Institution. In Georgia, that fan goes for $32 (but prisoners are not paid for their labor in Georgia pens). And in scorching Texas, the commissary raised the price of water by 50% last summer:

https://www.tpr.org/criminal-justice/2023-07-20/texas-charges-prisoners-50-more-for-water-for-as-heat-wave-continues

Toiletries are also sold at prices that would make an airport gift-shop blush. Need denture adhesive? That's $12.28 in an Idaho pen, triple the retail price. 15% of America's prisoners are over 55. The Keefe Group – sister company to the "grossly inadequate" healthcare company Wellpath – operates that commissary. In Oregon, the commissary charges a 200% markup on hearing-aid batteries. Vermont charges a 500% markup on reading glasses. Imagine spending decades in prison: toothless, blind, and deaf.

Then there's the religious items. Bibles and Christmas cards are surprisingly reasonable, but a Qaran will run you $26 in Vermont, where a Bible is a mere $4.55. Kufi caps – which cost $3 or less in the free world – go for $12 in Indiana prisons. A Virginia prisoner needs to work for 8 hours to earn enough to buy a commissary Ramadan card (you can buy a Christmas card after three hours' labor).

Prison price-gougers are finally facing a comeuppance. California's new BASIC Act caps prison commissary markups at 35% (California commissaries used to charge 63-200% markups):

https://theappeal.org/price-gouging-in-california-prisons-newsom-signature/

Last year, Nevada banned any markup on hygiene items:

https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/82nd2023/Bill/10425/Overview

And prison tech monopolist Securus has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to the activism of Worth Rises and its coalition partners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Prisons show us how businesses would treat us if they could get away with it.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

[deepwaterwritingprompts]

Deep Water Prompt #3256

The gallery is a prison, each inmate rendered in oil, unstitched from the fabric of our world and bound to the canvas. They scowl, sneer and cry, frozen in intricate gilded frames. 

[mus1g4]

The moment of transition from defendant in a court of law to convict doing time!

[fidjiefidjie]

"Toulouse : entre Danse Country et soins du visage, les prisonniers mieux lotis que les surveillants." 📰

Le Figaro

Gif Giphy

[politijohn]

Source

This should never have been a thing

[thoughtportal]

who gets left behind

[loneberry]

From The Aesthetics of Resistance by Peter Weiss

Translated by Joel Scott (I wept listening to Joel read this letter from an imprisoned antifascist awaiting execution by the Gestapo.)

*

We spoke about seeing in dreams. Asked ourselves how, out of complete darkness, colors of such vibrancy could emerge. They are produced by our knowledge about light. Knowledge sees. There is no light stimulus, just the memory of it. We ascertained that dreams contain those most primal of images, sharp and precise in every detail. Which are then over-laid by an astounding range of reflections, intuitively arranged, drawn from different fields of experience; they accumulate, or rather, they float, bob around in the various emotional centers, seek each other out like sperm to the ovum, lead to perpetual fertilization, every sensing cell seems to be receptive, causing new forms to appear through the constant flux of impulses, no semblance ever emerges, it cannot emerge because of the flow, but related elements gather in particular regions, depending on the strength of the pull, the extent to which the impulse pervades the underlying pattern. And sometimes, the original image then rises to the surface, at which point, like a flash, everything that had been deposited on top of it is washed away. If, though, in the dream, we feel a desire to revisit something that had been so close to us just a moment ago, be it a person, a place, there is always something in the way, such a desire can only come from half-sleep, for only in waking do we want to repeat, rethink, nothing can be seen again in a dream; only when ambiguity regains the upper hand can the feeling of expectation emerge, and this expectation, drenched in the chemistry that is produced by each encounter, forms combinations, situations that edge closer to what the longing of the sleeper had been aiming at. In my nights—which for long periods turned into a stormy, electrically charged twilight, and in which a vestige of waking consciousness was always expecting to give way to a full, abrupt awakening—I often focused my desire on being placed in front of her again, like on that morning of renunciation, confessing that none of my principles held up, that I too had lied to myself, though in a way that was opposite to the self-deception we would have committed had we sought salvation in the mere act of succumbing to one another amid the all-encompassing destruction. When I spoke about the absolute earlier, I was referring to an almost ecstatic elevation, namely the realization of the finitude of life, a finitude that is amplified when it is confronted by another life. You guys were right when you said I was a zealot, because on that Sunday morning, the thirtieth of August—I’m only realizing this now—I had something saint-like about me, I would have gladly sacrificed myself, for Harro, for Libertas, for all the others, I saw my stance as the consequence of all my decisions, I didn’t want to diverge from the line that I had traced out, step by step. I viewed each of my actions as a manifestation of my will, and I didn’t want them to be rewarded with even the smallest concession. Sitting on the floor of this dungeon, though, all I was left with were thoughts that had previously seemed filthy to me. I saw her, that childlike woman, dirty, covered in muck, and it was only her demise that I was truly able to love. Imagining her like that, in the depths of her misery and her defeat, I came close to the layers of dream, but she wouldn’t appear to me.

It was always other things that appeared, delirious formations; how much effort is expended in dreaming, how much is squandered, gigantic cities and landscapes are reproduced, sometimes of a spectral beauty, sometimes with a primordial horror, yes, the world of excrement, of innards, of acrid stenches, of tubes coursing with blood, of twitching nerves, I was replete with this world, I lay in the slime, in the slop, but I didn’t recognize the face whose mouth was breathing on me. And why was such a cosmos born, flickering, glugging, why did blossoms shoot out of it, why did it succumb to its own enchantment, outdo itself with discoveries, with dazzling delusions, to what purpose, if everything just evaporates a second later; but, you might ask, is writing not the same, do not the things you unleash pull you into a vortex, in which you’re more likely to lose yourself than to find the clarity you purport to seek. Had we not already posed such questions back then. Had we not decided that creativity never asks after meaning, that it simply follows its course, can do nothing else; that it has no ultimate endpoint. Perhaps it’s true that many events in our dreams, these echoes of prenatal movements, originate in the drive to return to the womb; as embryos, we couldn’t imagine anything of the reality in which we would one day find ourselves, and once we have experienced it, we are equally unable to conceive of death beyond our reality, and thus, in the face of death, we return to the state of the living being in the womb, we knew nothing, and nothing will we know again.

[quixoticanarchy]

"A prison is a city that weighs heavily on the place where it is. The thousands of people who live and work there make environmental and infrastructural demands on the surrounding area that are not offset by the prison's integration into the locality's economic, social, or cultural life. A prison is a political weight that, in a lightly populated jurisdiction, can reconfigure legislative representation by plumping up a district's size because prisoners (who cannot vote) are counted where they are held, and it can tip the electoral balance as well because relatively well-paid prison staff can and do support or oppose local candidates even though they do not live in the district. A prison is also heavy in part because it is a 'dead city,' built and staffed for the singularly unproductive purpose of keeping civilly dead women and men in cages for part or all of their lives."

-- from "Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning," Ruth Wilson Gilmore

[reality-detective]

Spotted off the coast of North Carolina... A while ago. I heard several barges were converted into prisons because Gitmo didn't have the room to hold all of them even though Trump expanded Gitmo while he was in office. This 👆 is the first photo I've seen of one and if memory serves me correctly Camp Blaz which is also a US military base will have them to, I have said many times military tribunals have begun years ago.

I know there are many who don't be-LIE-ve me so I want you to clear your head and think about this. 👇

Do you think that all the truth coming out would be happening if the bigwigs of the deep state weren't already removed? I'm telling you we're in a mop-up situation and there are a lot of minions that will go down. How many people you ask? 1% of the Earth's population of 8.5 billion, do the math. 🤔

[mostlysignssomeportents]

One of America’s most corporate-crime-friendly bankruptcy judges forced to recuse himself

Today (Oct 16) I'm in Minneapolis, keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. Thursday (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Friday (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

"I’ll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one." The now-famous quip from Robert Reich cuts to the bone of corporate personhood. Corporations are people with speech rights. They are heat-shields that absorb liability on behalf of their owners and managers.

But the membrane separating corporations from people is selectively permeable. A corporation is separate from its owners, who are not liable for its deeds – but it can also be "closely held," and so inseparable from those owners that their religious beliefs can excuse their companies from obeying laws they don't like:

https://clsbluesky.law.columbia.edu/2014/10/13/hobby-lobby-and-closely-held-corporations/

Corporations – not their owners – are liable for their misdeeds (that's the "limited liability" in "limited liablity corporation"). But owners of a murderous company can hold their victims' families hostage and secure bankruptcies for their companies that wipe out their owners' culpability – without any requirement for the owners to surrender their billions to the people they killed and maimed:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

Corporations are, in other words, a kind of Schroedinger's Cat for impunity: when it helps the ruling class, corporations are inseparable from their owners; when that would hinder the rich and powerful, corporations are wholly distinct entities. They exist in a state of convenient superposition that collapses only when a plutocrat opens the box and decides what is inside it. Heads they win, tails we lose.

Key to corporate impunity is the rigged bankruptcy system. "Debts that can't be paid, won't be paid," so every successful civilization has some system for discharging debt, or it risks collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/bankruptcy-protects-fake-people-brutalizes-real-ones/

When you or I declare bankruptcy, we have to give up virtually everything and endure years (or a lifetime) of punitive retaliation based on our stained credit records, and even then, our student debts continue to haunt us, as do lawless scumbag debt-collectors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/12/do-not-pay/#fair-debt-collection-practices-act

When a giant corporation declares bankruptcy, by contrast, it emerges shorn of its union pension obligations and liabilities owed to workers and customers it abused or killed, and continues merrily on its way, re-offending at will. Big companies have mastered the Texas Two-Step, whereby a company creates a subsidiary that inherits all its liabilities, but not its assets. The liability-burdened company is declared bankrupt, and the company's sins are shriven at the bang of a judge's gavel:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

Three US judges oversee the majority of large corporate bankruptcies, and they are so reliable in their deference to this scheme that an entire industry of high-priced lawyers exists solely to game the system to ensure that their clients end up before one of these judges. When the Sacklers were seeking to abscond with their billions in opioid blood-money and stiff their victims' families, they set their sights on Judge Robert Drain in the Southern District of New York:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/23/a-bankrupt-process/#sacklers

To get in front of Drain, the Sacklers opened an office in White Plains, NY, then waited 192 days to file bankruptcy papers there (it takes six months to establish jurisdiction). Their papers including invisible metadata that identified the case as destined for Judge Drain's court, in a bid to trick the court's Case Management/Electronic Case Files system to assign the case to him.

The case was even pre-captioned "RDD" ("Robert D Drain"), to nudge clerks into getting their case into a friendly forum.

If the Sacklers hadn't opted for Judge Drain, they might have set their sights on the Houston courthouse presided over by Judge David Jones, the second of of the three most corporate-friendly large bankruptcy judges. Judge Jones is a Texas judge – as in "Texas Two-Step" – and he has a long history of allowing corporate murderers and thieves to escape with their fortunes intact and their victims penniless:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

But David Jones's reign of error is now in limbo. It turns out that he was secretly romantically involved with Elizabeth Freeman, a leading Texas corporate bankruptcy lawyer who argues Texas Two-Step cases in front of her boyfriend, Judge David Jones.

Judge Jones doesn't deny that he and Freeman are romantically involved, but said that he didn't think this fact warranted disclosure – let alone recusal – because they aren't married and "he didn't benefit economically from her legal work." He said that he'd only have to disclose if the two owned communal property, but the deed for their house lists them as co-owners:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24032507-general-warranty-deed

(Jones claims they don't live together – rather, he owns the house and pays the utility bills but lets Freeman live there.)

Even if they didn't own communal property, judges should not hear cases where one of the parties is represented by their long term romantic partner. I mean, that is a weird sentence to have to type, but I stand by it.

The case that led to the revelation and Jones's stepping away from his cases while the Fifth Circuit investigates is a ghastly – but typical – corporate murder trial. Corizon is a prison healthcare provider that killed prisoners with neglect, in the most cruel and awful ways imaginable. Their families sued, so Corizon budded off two new companies: YesCare got all the contracts and other assets, while Tehum Care Services got all the liabilities:

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/prominent-bankruptcy-judge-david-jones-033801325.html

Then, Tehum paid Freeman to tell her boyfriend, Judge Jones, to let it declare bankruptcy, leaving $173m for YesCare and allocating $37m for the victims suing Tehum. Corizon owes more than $1.2b, "including tens of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices and hundreds of malpractice suits filed by prisoners and their families who have alleged negligent care":

https://www.kccllc.net/tehum/document/2390086230522000000000041

Under the deal, if Corizon murdered your family member, you would get $5,000 in compensation. Corizon gets to continue operating, using that $173m to prolong its yearslong murder spree.

The revelation that Jones and Freeman are lovers has derailed this deal. Jones is under investigation and has recused himself from his cases. The US Trustee – who represents creditors in bankruptcy cases – has intervened to block the deal, calling Tehum "a barren estate, one that was stripped of all of its valuable assets as a result of the combination and divisional mergers that occurred prior to the bankruptcy filing."

This is the third high-profile sleazy corporate bankruptcy that had victory snatched from the jaws of defeat this year: there was Johnson and Johnson's attempt to escape from liability from tricking women into powder their vulvas with asbestos (no, really), the Sacklers' attempt to abscond with billions after kicking off the opioid epidemic that's killed 800,000+ Americans and counting, and now this one.

This one might be the most consequential, though – it has the potential to eliminate one third of the major crime-enabling bankruptcy judges serving today.

One down.

Two to go.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/16/texas-two-step/#david-jones

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!