#Prisons

[queerunpleasantdanger]

Amber Kim's move to a men's prison for a consensual sexual encounter is a crime against humanity. It's a crime against humanity that our culture tries to render unmournable, but it is nonetheless a heinous crime, and a stain upon the legacy of all the officials who abet or tolerate it.

Even when cisgender women rape other cisgender women in prison, they are not transferred to men's prisons. One does not have to believe that consensual sex in prisons is acceptable to acknowledge that this transfer is a double standard. And yet this is the treatment transgender women can expect, apparently: a brutal double standard of violence, wherein our presence in any space is that of, at best, a conditional visitor. Yet when push comes to shove, we are more impoverished, more violated, and more mistreated by our patriarchal society.

The state of Washington must reverse it's decision. If it cannot be compelled to do so, then Kim's sentence must be commuted - even if we accept that prisons can perform justice, surely we all agree that justice is never forwarded by torture; that a day served of a sentence in the form of torturing a minority is not, in fact, a day closer to any kind of justice.

The use of either solitary confinement or sexual violence against a transgender woman as a means of control is so far beyond the pale that it must be opposed under all circumstances.

[mapsontheweb]

Prisons/Jails vs Colleges - More prisons or more colleges?

[politijohn]

Source

This should never have been a thing

[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]

I want to be handcuffed with legs and all of that. Could you? And what is the sweat box in the Hampton Historic Jail?

We use all sorts of restraints at the Hampton Jail including leg irons!

The sweat box is a metal box in the jail yard. It's interior heats up in the sunlight. And misbehaving convicts learn quickly that the sweat box sucks!

Questions about Role Play Restraints and Sweat Box

[thoughtportal]

who gets left behind

[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

[newsfromstolenland]

If your reaction to hearing calls to abolish the police and prisons is "but then who will protect people?", you're missing the point.

Cops and prisons exist to maintain white, colonial systems. They exist to keep power in the hands of the privileged.

They don't protect marginalized people, they persecute us. Maybe you're lucky enough to belong to one of the groups that police exist to protect (white people, the rich, etc.), but if you've been paying attention you should know that they only protect you because of your privilege.

So when you say "without police and prisons, who will protect people?", what you actually mean is "without police and prisons, who will protect privilege and the privileged while actively harming everyone else?"

When your instinct is to ask who will help people if not cops and prisons, you need to take a minute to reflect on why prisons and cops protect you in particular. And ask yourself if that protection is really worth the lives of the people of colour, disproportionately Black people, that police and prisons kill.

Because it shouldn't be worth it to you, and if it is then at least admit that you think your life is worth more than the lives of people of colour.

[mapsontheweb]

US incarceration rate compared to European rate. Despite making up only 5% of the world's population, the US is home to around 25% of all convicts worldwide.

by Professional-Air-368

[politijohn]

Source

Source

[itscolossal]

Through Monumental Installations of Soap and Stones, Jesse Krimes Interrogates the Prison System