#costs of the american prison system

[fatehbaz]

Today, as you read this [...], there are almost 2 million people locked away in one of the more than 5,000 prisons or jails that dot the American landscape. While they are behind bars, these incarcerated people can be found standing in line at their prison’s commissary waiting to buy some extra food or cleaning supplies that are often marked up to prices higher than what one would pay outside of those prison walls. [...] If they want to call a friend or family member, they need to pay for that as well. And almost everyone who works at a job while incarcerated, often for less than a dollar an hour, will find that the prison has taken a portion of their salary to pay for their cost of incarceration. [...] These policymakers and government officials also know that this captive population has no choice but to foot the bill [...] and that if they can’t be made to pay, their families can. In fact, a 2015 report led by the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Forward Together, and Research Action Design found that in 63 percent of cases, family members on the outside were primarily responsible for court-related costs [...].

Rutgers sociology professor Brittany Friedman has written extensively on what is called “pay-to-stay” fees in American correctional institutions. In her 2020 article titled, “Unveiling the Necrocapitalist Dimensions of the Shadow Carceral State: On Pay-to-Stay to Recoup the Cost of Incarceration,” Friedman divides these fees into two categories: (1) room and board and (2) service-specific costs. Fees for room and board -- yes, literally for a thin mattress or even a plastic “boat” bed in a hallway, a toilet that may not flush, and scant, awful tasting food -- are typically charged at a “per diem rate for the length of incarceration.” It is not uncommon for these fees to reach $20 to $80 a day for the entire period of incarceration. The second category, what Friedman refers to as “service-specific costs,” includes fees for basic charges such as copays or other costs for seeing a doctor or nurse, programming fees, email and telephone calls, and commissary items. 

In 2014, the Brennan Center for Justice documented that at least 43 states authorize charging incarcerated people for the cost of their own imprisonment, and at least 35 states authorize charging them for some medical expenses. More recent research from the Prison Policy Institute found that 40 states and the federal prison system charge incarcerated people medical copays. 

It’s also critical to understand how little incarcerated people are paid for their labor in addition to the significant cut of their paltry hourly wages that corrections agencies take from their earnings. Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of incarcerated people work behind bars. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, those who work regular jobs in prisons such as maintaining the grounds, working in the kitchen, and painting the walls of the facilities earn on average between $0.14 and $0.63 an hour. [...] Arkansas and Texas don’t pay incarcerated workers at all, while Alabama only pays incarcerated workers employed by the state’s correctional industry. [...]

For example, if someone sends an incarcerated person in Florida $20 online, they will end up paying $24.95. [...]

Dallas County charges incarcerated people a $10 medical care fee for each medical request they submit. In Texas prisons, those behind bars pay $13.55 per medical visit, despite the fact that Texas doesn’t pay incarcerated workers anything. Texas is one of a handful of states that doesn’t pay incarcerated people for their labor. 

In Kentucky’s McCracken County Jail in Paducah, it costs $0.40 a minute for a video call; this translates into $8.00 for each 20-minute video call. [...] For those who need to use email, JPay charges $2.35 for five emails for people in the Texas prison system ($0.47 an email). [...]

People in Florida prisons pay $1.70 for a packet of four extra-strength Tylenol and $4.02 for four tampons. And with inflation, commissary items are priced higher than ever. For example, according to the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting, incarcerated people in Kentucky experienced a 7.2 percent rise in already-high commissary prices in July 2022. Researchers noted that a 4.6-ounce tube of Crest toothpaste, which costs $1.38 at the local Walmart, is $3.77 at the prison commissary. [...]

In Gaston County, North Carolina, incarcerated individuals who participate in state work release may make more than the state’s $0.38 an hour maximum pay, but they pay the jail a daily rate based on their yearly income of at least $18 per day and up to $36 per day. In fact, Brennan Center research indicates that almost every state takes a portion of the salary that incarcerated workers earn to compensate the corrections agency [...].

These room and board fees are found throughout the nation’s jails and prisons. Michigan laws allow any county to seek reimbursement for expenses incurred in relation to a charge for which a person was sentenced to county jail time -- up to $60 a day. Winnebago County, Wisconsin, charges $26 a day to those staying in its county jail.

---

Text by: Lauren-Brooke Eisen. “America’s Dystopian Incarceration System of Pay to Stay Behind Bars.” Brennan Center for Justice. 19 April 2023. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[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

[ahaura]

excerpts from How the 🇻🇳 Vietnam War Explains Hamas' Strategy 🇵🇸 (extremely brief overview of the Vietnamese utilization of guerrilla warfare & how it relates to the Resistance's tactics)

Guerrilla warfare is usually when there's an asymmetry of power between one side and the other. Often fought between insurgents and a conventional army, and the conventional army loses if it does not win and the guerilla wins if he does not lose. In this type of warfare, the main objective of the guerrilla is to survive protracted fighting with the adversary, and avoid big decisive confrontation that play into the strength of a conventional army. The guerrilla keeps doing that until they overpower or wear down the enemy by consistently extracting a cost from them.

Most famously, the Vietcong used an extensive tunnel system that extended for tens of thousands of miles and served as their base to engage in effective guerrilla tactics. [...] For the Americans and South Vietnamese, it was like they were fighting ghosts, and the Vietcong was able to inflict heavy costs on them. In the face of this, U.S. deployed the longest and heaviest aerial bombardment in history by dropping over 7 million tons of explosives and killing over 3 million people. Their strategy was to cause so much death and destruction that people in the guerrillas would abandon their cause. But they never did. The U.S. government constantly lied to the American public about the war and justified it by framing this as a fight against "an immoral enemy." But as this became the world's first televised war, the horrific images from American massacres and the use of weapons like Agent Orange and napalm sparked outrage. This led to mass opposition to the war around the world and one of the largest protest movements in U.S. history. After 20 years of fighting, the Vietnamese were able to liberate and unify their country, and defeated the global superpower by maintaining the principles of guerrilla warfare: the conventional army couldn't win, and the guerrillas didn't lose. Does this sound familiar?

The longer Israel fights, the bigger impact it will have on its economy, given the size of its army in proportion to the country's population. That is a high cost to live with over a long period of time. Secondly, Israel's unrelenting bombardment of Gaza to establish deterrence by retribution and to have people turn on Hamas has caused mass death, destruction, and glaring war crimes, and is failing to crush people's appetite for liberation. And because of social media, these images have been broadcasted all over the world in a way that Israeli propaganda can no longer contain, sparking mass protests, solidarity, and pressure globally, which is starting to have an impact on domestic politics in the U.S. and the rest of the West. Within this context, and after weeks of bombardment and a ground invasion, Israel has yet to achieve its military objectives or release prisoners held by Hamas through force. This is why they accepted a temporary ceasefire deal now even though it was on the table weeks ago. Because remember: in guerrilla warfare, the conventional army loses if it does not win, and the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. And at this point, Israel is not winning and Hamas has not lost.

[canary-prince]

Ways For US-Americans To Help If You're Abstaining From Voting

Can't vote on moral grounds, but still raring to do something? Stuck in America and unsure of how to meaningfully serve your community? Here are some ideas that I, a social worker serving house-bound citizens, can share out of personal experience. Feel free to add other ideas or links. We are not powerless.

Volunteer (these are just examples/sources of info)

Planned Parenthood needs volunteers for nearly every non-medical department

See if your state has a volunteer stewardship program, where you can help weed out invasive plant species and defend your natural ecosystem

If you have medical skills, become a street medic

Contribute to the preservation of Queer History

Put your labor towards the upkeep or repair of properties in Indigenous communities

Adult literacy is not great right now, and we're harder to lie to if we're literate; volunteer to help your neighbors who were failed by the school system

Resources to help the unhoused constantly need volunteer counselors, cooks, and someone to sort donations

The sick and elderly are very under-served, particularly if they're broke, so reach out to a local hospice to see what skills they need

Give (if you can't physically volunteer but have money to spare)

Donate to an abortion fund; this one is for Native peoples specifically

Donate to a book gifting program or book mobile; this link is for Dolly Parton's Imagination Library

Donate to preserve the histories of communities of color; this fund is specifically for preserving African American historical sites

Donate to protect the natural environment

Donate to help free those caged in prisons; this link is for the Innocence Project, which aims to challenge wrongful convictions

The arts are for everyone, but wealth gaps interfere; this fund is for art initiatives that contribute to community building, including increasing accessibility

Learn (resources that many communities have but aren't widely educated on)

Community Action Agencies: these are non-profits and private companies that act in service of their communities' human rights and quality of life. Many have utility funds, run food banks, manage emergency shelters, provide education and job skills opportunities, and participate in social activism.

Area Agencies on Aging: Non-profits that serve elders (and non-elderly disabled citizens) in a designated service area. They primarily offer services to prolong independent living (free or low cost in home care, meals on wheels, home safety modifications, and Medicare guidance) or help with transition into assisted living.

Habitat For Humanity: They aren't just in disaster zones or on foreign soil; they have local US chapters that provide critical repairs to families in need. They repair roofs, address barriers to access, and perform electric and plumbing work.

Durable Medical Equipment Loan Closets: Communal sources of vital medical equipment including wheelchairs, walkers, canes, hospital beds, shower chairs, and more. May be able to provide incontinence supplies or diabetes supplies. Rarely but sometimes provide oxygen.

Non Emergency Medical Transportation/Alternatives to Mass Transit: Transportation for elderly, disabled, cognitively impaired, and low income citizens to help them reach medical providers, dental care, physical therapy, and eye exam appointments. Can also provide transit to shopping centers, the grocery store, religious events, cultural events, and polling stations. Offer door to door services for the housebound. IF YOU HAVE MEDICAID, YOU SHOULD NOT EVER BE PAYING FOR THIS. MEDICAID IS OBLIGATED TO MAKE SURE YOU REACH ANY AND ALL MEDICAL APPOINTMENTS.

Legal Aid Clinics: Sources of pro-bono or sliding scale legal advice and representation.

[ngdrb]

Positives about Joe Biden and Negatives about Donald Trump

Positives about Joe Biden

Over the years, Joe Biden has demonstrated an evolution on key issues. Notably, on criminal justice, he has moved far from his much-criticized "tough-on-crime" position of the 1990s. His proposed policies aim to reduce incarceration, address disparities in the justice system, and rehabilitate released prisoners .

Accomplishments: Throughout his extensive political career, Joe Biden has dedicated himself to serving the American people. As a U.S. Senator and Vice President alongside Barack Obama, he has been involved in various initiatives and policies aimed at fighting for Americans .

Leadership and Resilience: Despite facing challenges and uncertainties, President Biden has demonstrated resilience and leadership. His administration has achieved significant milestones, such as the passage of the infrastructure bill, which had been a longstanding goal for previous administrations.

Public Perception: Joe Biden's favorability ratings have been relatively positive, with a net favorability rating of +9 points in recent high-quality live interview polls. His favorability rating is above his unfavorable rating in almost all polls, reflecting a generally positive public perception .

Health and Vigor: Despite facing health challenges, including testing positive for COVID-19, President Biden has shown vigor and determination in fulfilling his duties as the head of state.

Likability and Personal Conduct: According to a Pew Research Center study, voters are more likely to view Joe Biden as warm and likeable compared to Donald Trump. A larger percentage of voters give Biden warm ratings, with about one-in-three voters expressing intensely positive feelings about him .

Accomplishments: President Biden has outperformed Trump on various fronts, including inequality, green spending, and crime. His third year in office was marked by an economy that remained resilient despite challenges like inflation and surging borrowing costs.

Personal Qualities: Despite a decline in public impressions of Biden's personal qualities, he is still perceived as able to manage government effectively. Additionally, a significant percentage of voters believe that Biden cares about the needs of ordinary people.

In summary: Joe Biden's presidency has been considered highly positive due to several key factors. His administration managed to implement significant legislation aimed at economic recovery, infrastructure development, and climate change mitigation. Biden also re-established international alliances and restored a sense of stability and decorum to the presidency. His efforts in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic, including successful vaccination campaigns, were pivotal in saving lives and reviving the economy.

Negatives about Donald Trump

Donald Trump's presidency has been marked by various controversies and criticisms, as evidenced by a range of factors and public opinion.

Worker Safety and Health: The Trump administration has been criticized for disregarding negative impacts on worker safety and health, such as proposing rules that could endanger young workers and patients.

Handling of Race Relations: Trump received negative marks for his handling of race relations, with a majority of adults expressing concerns about his approach and the divisions along racial, ethnic, and partisan lines.

COVID-19 Response: Trump's legacy has been defined by the controversial handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with widespread criticism of his administration's response to the crisis.

Controversial Statements and Actions: Throughout his political career, Trump has been associated with a series of controversial statements and actions, including derogatory remarks about immigrants and divisive rhetoric.

Erosion of Democratic Institutions: Trump has been criticized for questioning the legitimacy of democratic institutions, including the free press, federal judiciary, and the electoral process, leading to concerns about the erosion of democratic norms.

Tax and Financial Practices: Trump's financial practices, including tax-related issues and potential conflicts of interest, have been the subject of scrutiny and criticism.

Policy Priorities: Critics argue that Trump's policy priorities have favored corporations and the wealthiest few at the expense of other segments of the population.

Public Perception: Public opinion reflects stronger negative views on the potential downsides of a Trump presidency, with concerns about his personality traits, views on immigration, and the economy.

In summary, Donald Trump's presidency has been marked by a range of controversies and criticisms, including concerns about worker safety, race relations, the COVID-19 response, controversial statements, erosion of democratic institutions, financial practices, policy priorities, and public perception. These factors have contributed to a complex and divisive public perception of his presidency.

[reasonsforhope]

The California governor, Gavin Newsom, has announced a plan to transform the state’s oldest prison into a center for rehabilitation, education and training, modeled after Norwegian incarceration systems, which are much less restrictive than US facilities.

Newsom told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that his goal was “ending San Quentin [prison] as we know it” and working to “completely reimagine what prison means”. San Quentin, located on a peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area and established in 1852, houses nearly 4,000 people, including hundreds on its infamous death row, the largest in the US, which is on track to be dismantled.

The Democratic governor said that by 2025, he plans to transition the massive penitentiary into a final stop of incarceration before individuals are released, with a focus on job training for trades, including plumbers, electricians or truck drivers, the LA Times reported. His recently released budget proposal includes $20m to start the effort.

“The ‘California Model’ the governor is implementing at San Quentin will incorporate programs and best practices from countries like Norway, which has one of the lowest recidivism rates in the world – where approximately three in four formerly incarcerated people don’t return to a life of crime,” the governor’s office said in a statement on Thursday. The prison will be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Pictured: Instructor Douglas Arnwine hands back papers with comments to his students at San Quentin state prison in April 2022.

The transformation Newsom has described would, at least for San Quentin, mark a fundamental shift from the extremely punitive American system. The US has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world...

Although California is considered a leader in criminal justice reform, the state’s prison system continues to be overcrowded, with thousands of elderly people languishing behind bars and Black residents disproportionately imprisoned for decades due to harsh sentencing laws adopted in the 1990s.

Scandinavian models of incarceration that have garnered increasing attention from some US lawmakers are less focused on punishment and are meant to give imprisoned people support and a sense of normal life behind bars so that they are prepared to reintegrate into society. That can mean access to personal computers, televisions and showers, consistent classes and programming, fresh food, more freedom of movement and stronger connections with the outside world.

“Do you want them coming back with humanity and some normalcy, or do you want them coming back more bitter and more beaten down?” Newsom told the LA Times.

An overhaul of San Quentin would be a huge undertaking, and there are significant unanswered questions about what the transition would mean for its current residents as well as the tens of thousands of others located across the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR). San Quentin has a long and recent history of scandals involving abuse, overcrowding, guard misconduct and medical neglect. It is also a prison that has significantly more programming than some of the remote and rural CDCR prisons, with a renowned podcast produced by incarcerated San Quentin journalists.

The governor’s office noted research showing that every $1 spent on rehabilitation saves more than $4 on costs of re-incarceration; that people who enroll in education programs behind bars are 43% less likely to return to prison; and that crime survivor groups say victims prefer sentences that include programming designed to prevent recidivism...

Assemblymember Mia Bonta noted that California spends $14.5bn on prisons each year – $106,000 a person – but traditionally puts only about 3.4% toward rehabilitation: “It’s time for a significant paradigm shift.”

One of the reporters in attendance was Steve Brooks, an incarcerated journalist and editor of the San Quentin News paper, who asked the governor how the Scandinavian model would be adopted in a prison where residents remain concerned about overcrowding and the living conditions. Brooks also said people were concerned that those convicted of violent offenses would be excluded from programs under a new system. Newsom responded, “I’m not looking to cherry pick certain offenses. I’m for people who are committed, not passively interested, in changing themselves.”

-via The Guardian, 3/17/23

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Voters in three states approved ballot measures that will change their state constitutions to prohibit slavery and involuntary servitude as punishment for crime, while those in a fourth state rejected the move. The measures approved Tuesday curtail the use of prison labor in Alabama, Tennessee and Vermont. In Oregon, “yes” was leading its anti-slavery ballot initiative, but the vote remained too early to call Wednesday morning.

In Louisiana, a former slave-holding state, voters rejected a ballot question known as Amendment 7 that asked whether they supported a constitutional amendment to prohibit the use of involuntary servitude in the criminal justice system.

The initiatives won’t force immediate changes in the states’ prisons, but they may invite legal challenges over the practice of coercing prisoners to work under threat of sanctions or loss of privileges if they refuse the work.

The results were celebrated among anti-slavery advocates, including those pushing to further amend the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits enslavement and involuntary servitude except as a form of criminal punishment. More than 150 years after enslaved Africans and their descendants were released from bondage through ratification of the 13th Amendment, the slavery exception continues to permit the exploitation of low-cost labor by incarcerated individuals.

“Voters in Oregon and other states have come together across party lines to say that this stain must be removed from state constitutions,” Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley, a Democrat, told The Associated Press.

“Now, it is time for all Americans to come together and say that it must be struck from the U.S. Constitution. There should be no exceptions to a ban on slavery,” he said.

Coinciding with the creation of the Juneteenth federal holiday last year, Merkley and Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Georgia, reintroduced legislation to revise the 13th Amendment to end the slavery exception. If it wins approval in Congress, the constitutional amendment must be ratified by three-fourths of U.S. states.

After Tuesday’s vote, more than a dozen states still have constitutions that include language permitting slavery and involuntary servitude for prisoners. Several other states have no constitutional language for or against the use of forced prison labor.

Voters in Colorado became the first to approve removal of slavery exception language from the state constitution in 2018, followed by Nebraska and Utah two years later.

The movement to end or regulate the use of prison labor has existed for decades, since the time when former Confederate states sought ways to maintain the use of chattel slavery after the Civil War. Southern states used racist laws, referred to as “Black codes,” to criminalize, imprison and re-enslave Black Americans over benign behavior.

Today, prison labor is a multibillion-dollar practice. By comparison, workers can make pennies on the dollar. And prisoners who refuse to work can be denied privileges such as phone calls and visits with family, as well as face solitary confinement, all punishments that are eerily similar to those used during antebellum slavery.

“The 13th Amendment didn’t actually abolish slavery — what it did was make it invisible,” Bianca Tylek, an anti-slavery advocate and the executive director of the criminal justice advocacy group Worth Rises, told the AP in an interview ahead of Election Day.

She said passage of the ballot initiatives, especially in red states like Alabama, “is a great signal for what’s possible at the federal level.”

“There is a big opportunity here, in this moment,” Tylek said.

[loving-n0t-heyting]

Alright, some context before I ask theis, because I don't want to misrepresent myself even by implication:

I am extremely economically right-wing. I am also pro-incarceration for quite a few crimes. I am generally not on the "democracy" side of the democracy to non-democracy scale. I think it would be okay if prisons were run hereditarily, if the position of Warden were generally given to the second or third son of a local Earl.

THAT BEING SAID:

There's no contradiction between prisons being a net cost to the taxpayer, and the demand for prisons being heavily driven by people who profit from them, that sort of thing happens all the time! The USA is rife with crony capitalism. It's not at all uncommon for something that is overall unprofitable to be promoted because it benefits a small group of wealthy and influential figures who can lean on politicians and media companies. Look at the defence industry. Look at protectionist tariffs. Look at corn syrup.

It's absolutely possible that if nobody were profiting from, for example, prison phone calls, or those prison dramas on American television like "OZ" or "Orange Is The New Black" (which make huge amounts of money, and are perceived as "realistic" or "gritty" because prisons exist) that there would be less incarceration.

Advertising, mass media, and campaign donations are not minor influences.

BTW, what's this about natural gas in Gaza?

there is absolutely a lot of crony capitalism going on in the us prison system, and this certainly creates some vested interest in engorging the prison population. but, like i said, it just cannot plausibly do all the heavy explanatory lifting ppl claim for it wrt the extent of us mass incarceration

its surprisingly hard to find much aggregated info on campaign finance and advertising in local judicial elections, but it kinda defies belief that they are the object of a vast industrial conspiracy to promote mass incarceration and that this more or less explains entirely why the us has so many of its ppl locked up. if it were so, one would to begin with expect the conspiracy to regularly promote judges to office with a consistent pro-imprisonment bent, rather than for sentencing severity to cycle with elections. indeed, it would be a hell of a lot more efficient to make sure these judgeships were all appointed, so the System could install them directly without the mediation of routine popularity contests. this doesnt look like the machinations of a crony capitalist cabal hand in hand with the state, it looks like individual mostly local elected bureaucrats pandering to a base that wants revenge all on its own

i probably am risking giving the impression i think judicial elections are the be all and end all of the crisis of mass incarceration in the united states. obviously thats not the case; states like cali with only limited electoral accountability for judges are hardly all bastions of freedom, and ofc this ignores legislative interventions like mandatory minimums and truth-in-sentencing laws. but it is useful as a way to point out the limitations of "just follow the money!"s explanatory power

"israel/us are bombing gaza for natural gas" was a silly theory being propagated on social media among some leftists

[nogetron]

John Henry, a freed slave who, like a lot of black men of the time, could only find work in steel driving for the American railway system. Building the railroads was not only an arduous task but also a dangerous one, as workers dying from the conditions was a regular occurrence. Despite this John built the railroad with incredible ease, with one strike he could drive in a steel pike that would take ten men to drive in. Not only was John incredibly powerful, but he was also extremely kind, always doing his best to help others. Because of his qualities he quickly became well known by the railway workers, with them singing of his many deeds. One day while the workers were digging through a mountain, an inventor visited. The inventor paid no mind to the workers, ignoring them on his way to the foreman. He told the foreman that he had a steam powered drill that could replace the workers entirely. The foreman always willing to cut costs and expenses eagerly accepted, suddenly John appeared interrupting the two. In order to save the livelihoods of his coworkers John challenged the inventor to a competition, a race to see who could dig to the other side of the mountain first, John vs the steam drill. The inventor cockily agreed, however as the race began he saw that John cleaved straight through the rock, not only matching the drill but surpassing its speed. John shook the earth as his hammer thundered. The drill couldn’t keep up ultimately shaking itself to pieces, with John surpassing human limits and making his way through the entire mountain, lifting his hammer above his head in victory. But due to the stress put on his body John sadly died. The sound of thunder is attributed to the striking of his hammers.

Originally thought to have only been folklore, John Henry was a real steel driver. He was imprisoned for burglary at age 19, sentenced to 10 years in prison. But the prison leased him out to the railway company, essentially reselling him back into slavery. John Henry is an incredibly important African American icon, becoming a symbol of overcoming adversity and the working classes spirit.

[darkmaga-retard]

Doug Casey's Take [ep.#346]

Matt Smith

 and 

Doug Casey

Sep 04, 2024

In today’s episode:

This day in history: The Edsel & the “Crocodile Hunter”

Jailbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the conditions of its prison system.

Brazil's political climate and regional disparities, including potential fragmentation into smaller nations.

Economic pressures in the United States, particularly regarding housing costs and financial stability for young families.

Immigration and its perceived effects on American society and cultural integration.

Argentina gets a new currency

Concerns about the political landscape in the U.S. and the impact of new voters from immigrant communities on elections.

Reflection on government control, censorship, and the state of free speech in contemporary society.

[ivygorgon]

👮 Orange is the New Red, White, and Blue: Prison Reform NOW!

AN OPEN LETTER to THE PRESIDENT & U.S. CONGRESS; STATE GOVERNORS & LEGISLATURES

1 so far! Help us get to 5 signers!

I am writing to urge immediate action towards transforming our corrections system from one focused on punishment and control, to a model centered on human dignity and rehabilitation. The current punitive approach perpetuates cycles of incarceration, abuse, and societal disintegration, ultimately failing to rehabilitate individuals and reintegrate them into our communities.

Recent analyses of European prison systems, such as Norway's Halden Prison, demonstrate the effectiveness of a human dignity approach. At Halden, private rooms, communal living spaces, vocational training, and family contact are prioritized, resulting in lower rates of violence and recidivism. This approach not only fosters humane treatment but also proves to be cost-effective in the long term.

We must shift away from a system that dehumanizes individuals and perpetuates a cycle of incarceration and abuse. Instead, we must embrace a model that prioritizes rehabilitation, second chances, and societal reintegration. Comprehensive prison reform that centers on human dignity is not only morally imperative but also a crucial step towards creating a more just and equitable society.

It is time to end modern slave labor within the for-profit prison industrial complex and invest in rehabilitation-focused treatment. We have a responsibility to nurture emotionally intelligent individuals and provide real opportunities for those who have been failed by the system.

I urge you to support and advocate for legislation that embodies the principles of human dignity and rehabilitation. Let us work together to ensure that every individual receives a genuine second chance and the opportunity to rebuild their lives.

Justice for the American people! Together we can say NO to Modern Slave Labor in the USA! Let's make their second chance count! Thank you for your attention to this critical issue.

Source:

📱 Text SIGN PNWJIS to 50409

🤯 Liked it? Text FOLLOW IVYPETITIONS to 50409

[scretladyspider]

I hate America. I hate being American. “Oh you’re so free you have so much” my government regularly uses my tax dollars to fund wars — and as I write this, a genocide — without my consent. America has been at war 2/3 of my life, killing people for America’s own political power. I have no say in if my tax dollars go towards basic infrastructure and things like free healthcare or bombing innocent people who just happened to be born near something the American government wants. They constantly expand the military instead of providing healthcare and education and food to their citizens, creating such poverty that many who join the military (any branch) do so just to pay for college to try to get a better life. My government is using my tax dollars not to help the citizens of Gaza, but to supply the IDF with weapons for an ongoing massacre for a tiny strip of land that’s important in a book that was written over two thousand years ago and which no one can really agree on the meaning of anyway. Those who are deployed either don’t come back or are abandoned by the government they fought for when they do, no matter if they went because they agree with what they were ordered to do or because they were that desperate and manipulated for a better life that they were at the end of their rope. Around 130,000 - 200,000 veterans are homeless. There are no safety nets, not unless you’re rich. My government has funded murder of millions in the name of a few people getting a little bit richer and continues to do so. If you become homeless, you didn’t work hard enough, even though most jobs barely pay enough to survive. If you don’t have a savings account, or generous family, or if you lose your job, you will also be homeless. Nearly every state has “at will” employment, meaning you can be fired at any time and not given reason. Simultaneously race, gender, religion, and disability are supposedly protected under equal opportunity employment. Many in my government want to erase queer and especially trans people from existence and are trying to make it happen. If you get fired due to some type of discrimination, you need money to hire help to take your employer to court. Judges are elected but often run unopposed, but when they are opposed this can drastically effect how they rule a court case. The prison system is modern day slavery and for profit prisons are legal, and common, and just, a thing that actually exists. Medical care is decided by insurance companies, not patients and doctors. This is determined by the cost and risk factor, not what’s best for the patient. Politicians are still advocating for Israel, no matter what they do, but also doing nothing to fight rising antisemitism in the USA. Politicians decide whose vote counts where. Its “majority rule” in democracy— except for the presidency, which os decided by “electors” who are not chosen by the people and who, depending on the state, don’t have to use their electoral votes for the state’s popular vote. Police are so overpowered they often get away with murder and even laugh about it. Children are regularly massacred in schools and teachers somehow can’t understand why they don’t want to do their homework or are acting out in class. People who want gun control are treated as being just as extreme as the people who can’t recognize that their defense of their “hobby” has killed countless people and will kill again and safety from gun violence shouldn’t be a matter of luck. My government is ignoring an ongoing pandemic which has killed and disabled millions of people already. Corporations decide my rights on their own interests by how much money they give what politicians. Studies have been done, and what the people want isn’t likely to pass because money is what matters most. My government is backing the current president of Israel, who has defended the choice to bomb hospitals. I am not proud to be an American. Why would I be? This is broken.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

California to smash prison e-profiteers

On Weds (May 10), I’m in Vancouver for a keynote at the Open Source Summit and a book event for Red Team Blues at Heritage Hall and Thu (May 11), I’m in Calgary for Wordfest.

It’s a double-whammy that defines 21st century American life: a corporation gets caught doing something terrible, exploitative or even murderous, and a government agency steps in — only to discover that there’s nothing it can do, because Reagan/Trump/Clinton/Bush I/Bush II deregulated that industry and stripped the agency of enforcement powers.

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/2023/05/08/captive-audience/#good-at-their-jobs

Man, that feels awful. The idea that extremists gutted our democratically accountable institutions so that there’s nothing they can do, no matter how egregious a corporation’s conduct is so demoralizing. Makes me feel like giving up.

But the law is a complex and mysterious thing. Regulators aren’t actually helpless. There are authorities, powers and systems that the corporate wreckers passed over, failed to notice, or failed to neuter. Take Section 5 of the FTC Act, which gives the Commission broad powers to prevent “unfair and deceptive” practices. Since the 1970s, the FTC just acted like this didn’t exist, even though it was right there all along, between Section 4 and Section 6.

Then, under the directorship of FTC chair Lina Khan, Section 5 was rediscovered and mobilized, first to end the practice of noncompete “agreements” for workers nationwide:

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/antitrust-enforcers-to-ban-indentured

A new breed of supremely competent, progressive regulators are dusting off those old lawbooks and figuring out what powers they have, and they’re using those powers to Get Stuff Done. It’s like that old joke:

Office manager: $75 to kick the photocopier?

Repair person: No, it’s $5 to kick the photocopier, $70 to know where to kick it.

There’s a whole generation of expert photocopier-kickers in public life, and they’ve got their boots on:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

This is the upside of technocracy — where you have people who are appointed to do good things, and who want to do good things, and who figure out how to do good things. There are dormant powers everywhere in law. Remember when Southwest Air stranded a million passengers over Christmas week and Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg responded by talking sternly about doing better, but without opening any enforcement actions against SWA?

At the time, Buttigieg’s defenders said that was all he could do: “Pete isn’t the boss of Southwest’s IT department, you know!” He’s not — but he is in possession of identical powers to the FTC to regulate “unfair and deceptive” practices, thanks to USC40 Section 41712(a), which copy-pastes the language from Article 5 of the FTC Act into the DOT’s legislative basis:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The failures of SWA were a long time coming, and were driven by the company’s shifting of costs from shareholders to employees and fliers. SWA schedules many flights for which they have no aircraft or crew, and when the time to fly those jets comes, the company simply cancels the emptiest flights. This is great for SWA’s shareholders, who don’t have to pay for fuel and crew for half-empty planes — but it’s terrible for crew and fliers.

What’s more, selling tickets for planes that don’t exist is plainly unfair and deceptive. A good photocopier-kicker in charge of the DOT would have arrived with a “first 100 days” plan that included opening hearings into this practice, as a prelude to directly regulating this conduct out of existence, averting the worst aviation scheduling crisis in US history. That’s what Buttigieg’s critics wanted from him: a competent assessment of his powers, followed by the vigorous use of those powers to protect the American people.

One domain that’s been in sore need of a photocopier-kicker for years is prison tech. America (“the land of the free”) incarcerates more people than any nation in the history of the world — more than the USSR, more than China, more than Apartheid-era South Africa.

For corporate prison profiteers, those prisoners are a literal captive audience, easy pickings for gouging on telephone calls, books, music, and food. For years, companies like Securus have been behind an incredibly imaginative array of sadistic tactics that strip prisoners of the contact, education and nutrition that governments normally provide to incarcerated people, and then sells those prisoners and their families poor substitutes for those necessities at markups that cost many multiples of the equivalent services in the free world.

Think of prisons that reduce the amount of food served to sub-starvation levels, then sell food at high markups in the prison commissary. For prisoners whose families can afford commissary fees, this is merely extortion. But for prisoners who don’t have anyone to top up their commissary accounts, it’s literal starvation.

This is the shape of every prison profiteer’s grift: take something vital away and then sell it back at a massive markup, dooming the prisoners who can’t afford it. The most obvious way to gouge prisoners is by charging huge markups for phone calls. Prisoners who can afford to pay many dollars per minute can stay in touch with their families, while the rest rot in isolation.

In 2015, the FCC tried to halt this practice, passing an order capping the price of calls, but in 2017, the DC District Court struck down the order, ruling that the FCC couldn’t regulate in-state call tariffs, which are the majority of prison calls:

https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/0/C62A026B396DD4C78525813E004F3BC5/%24file/15-1461-1679364.pdf

This was a bonanza for prison profiteers. Companies like Jpay (now a division of Securus) cranked up the price of prisoners’ calls. At the same time, dark-money lobbying campaigns urged prisons to get rid of their in-person visitation programs in the name of “safety”:

https://www.mic.com/articles/142779/the-end-of-prison-visitation

Not just visitation: prisons shuttered their libraries and banned shipments of letters, cards and books — again, in the same of “safety.” Jpay an its competitors stepped in with “free tablets” — cheap, badly made Chinese tablets. Instead of checking out books from the prison library or having them mailed to you by a friend or family member, prisoners had to buy DRM-locked ebooks at many multiples of the outside world price (these same prices were slapped on public domain books ganked from Project Gutenberg):

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/07/24/no-cost-contract/

Instead of getting letters and cards from your family members and friends, you had to pay to look at scans of them, buying “virtual stamps” that had to accompany every page (they even charged by the “page” for text messages):

https://www.wired.com/story/jpay-securus-prison-email-charging-millions/

Enshittification is my name for service-decay, where companies that have some kind of lock-in make things worse and worse for their customers, secure in the knowledge that they’ll keep paying because the lock-in keeps them from leaving. When your customers are literally locked in (that is, behind bars), the enshittification comes fast and furious.

Securus/Jpay and its competitors found all kinds of ways to make their services worse, like harvesting recordings of their calls to produce biometric voice-prints that could be used to track prisoners after they were released:

https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/prison-voice-prints-databases-securus/

Of course, once the prison phone-carriers started harvesting prisoners’ phone calls, it was inevitable that they would leak those calls, including intimate calls with family members and privileged calls with lawyers:

https://www.aaronswartzday.org/securedrop-prisoner-data/

Prison-tech companies know they can extract huge fortunes from their captive audience, so they are shameless about offering bribes (ahem, “profit-sharing”) to prison authorities and sheriffs’ offices to switch vendors. When that happens, prisoners inevitably suffer, as happened in 2018, when Florida state prisons changed tech providers and wiped out $11.8m worth of prisoners purchased media — every song prisoners had paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/captive-audience-how-floridas-prisons-and-drm-made-113m-worth-prisoners-music

As bad as these deals are for prisoners, they’re great for jailers, who are personally and institutionally enriched by prison-tech giants. This is textbook corruption, in which small groups of individuals are enriched while vast, diffuse costs are extracted from large groups of people. Naturally, the deals themselves are swathed in secrecy, and public records requests for their details are met with blank, illegal refusals:

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2018/may/25/laramie-county-prison-phones/

The “shitty technology adoption curve” predicts that technological harms that are first visited upon prisoners and other low-privilege people will gradually work its way up the privilege gradient:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

Securus powered up the Shitty Tech Adoption Curve. They don’t just spy on and exploit prisoners — they leveraged that surveillance empire into a line of product lines that touch us all. Securus transformed their prisoner telephone tracking business into an off-the-books, warrantless tracking tool that cops everywhere use to illegally track people:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/10/technology/cellphone-tracking-law-enforcement.html

In other words, our jails and prisons are incubators that breed digital pathogens that infect all of us eventually. It’s past time we got in the exterminators and flushed out those nests.

That’s where California’s new photocopier-kickers come in. Like many states, California has a Public Utility Commission (PUC), which regulates private companies that provide utilities, like telecoms. That means that the state of California can reach into every jail and prison in the state and grab the prison profiteers by the throats and toss ’em out the window.

Writing in The American Prospect, Kalena Thomhave does an excellent job on the technical ins-and-outs of calling on PUCs to regulate prison-tech, both in California and in other states where PUCs haven’t yet been neutered or eliminated by deregulation-crazed Republicans:

https://prospect.org/justice/2023-05-08-california-prison-phone-calls-free/

Thomhave describes how California’s county sheriffs have waxed fat on kickbacks from the prison-tech sector: “for example, the Yuba County Sheriff’s Office receives 25 percent of GTL/ViaPath’s gross revenue on video calls made from tablets.” Small wonder that sheriffs offices lobby against free calls from jail, claiming that prisoners’ phone tariffs are needed to fund their operations.

It’s true that the majority of this kickback money (51%) goes into “inmate welfare funds,” but these funds don’t have to go to inmates — they can and are diverted to “maintenance, salaries, travel, and equipment like security cameras.”

But limiting contact between prisoners and their families in order to pay for operating expenses is a foolish bargain. Isolation from friends and family is closely linked to recidivism. If we want prisoners to live productive lives after their serve their time, we should maximize their contact with the outside, not link it to their families’ ability to spend 50 times more per minute than anyone making a normal call.

The covid lockdowns were a boon to prison-tech profiteers, whose video-calling products were used to replace in-person visits. But when pandemic restrictions lifted, the in-person visits didn’t come back. Instead, jails continued to ban in-person visits and replace them with expensive video calls.

Even with new power, the FCC can’t directly regulate this activity, especially not in county jails. But PUCs can. Not every state has a PUC: ALEC, the right-wing legislation factory, has pushed laws that gut or eliminate PUCs across the country:

https://alec.org/model-policy/telecommunications-deregulation-policy-statement/

But California has a PUC, and it is gathering information now in advance of an order that could rein in these extractive businesses and halt the shitty tech adoption curve in its tracks:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M478/K075/478075894.PDF

That’s some top-notch photocopier-kicking, right there.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: A prison cell. Behind the bars is the bear from the California state flag. There is an old-fashioned telephone headset near his ear, such that he appears to be making a call.]

[tieflingkisser]

Forced Labor Continues in Colorado, Years After Vote to End Prison Slavery 

Coloradans voted in 2018 to amend their state constitution to ban forced labor in prison. Years later, incarcerated people are still being punished for refusing work assignments.

Throughout Abron Arrington’s decades-long incarceration in Colorado, he often found himself in solitary confinement—not because he was causing trouble, but simply because he refused to work. He didn’t see the point given he was paid 13 cents an hour and figured his time could be better spent learning physics. Before Arrington was incarcerated in 1989, he was studying to get his aircraft mechanic license. But within weeks of returning home from the U.S. Air Force, at 22 years old, he was arrested and ultimately sentenced to life in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. In 2019, he received clemency from Governor Jared Polis and was released after three decades behind bars. “I was actually 30 years a slave,” Arrington, who is Black, told a crowd of people gathered in one of Colorado’s oldest Black churches on Juneteenth, the federal holiday that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans. “So, this is deeply personal to me.”

[...]

In 2018, after years of community organizing, Colorado sparked a national movement when voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment A, a ballot measure that deleted half a sentence from the state constitution that allowed slavery and involuntary servitude “as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” Colorado was the first state to do so since the signing of the 13th Amendment. Since Colorado removed its language, Utah, Nebraska, Vermont, Oregon, Alabama, and Tennessee have followed suit with similar constitutional amendments. Organizers in around a dozen more states are now pushing to get similar ballot measures in front of voters during the 2024 elections. 

[...]

But in some ways, Colorado’s Amendment A only abolished prison slavery on paper. That’s because the Colorado Department of Corrections (CDOC) has continued to punish those who refuse to work. Since 2018, there have been at least 727 documented instances where an incarcerated person was disciplined for failing to work, according to a 9News investigation this past summer, with punishment ranging from changes in housing to loss of privileges and delayed parole.

[...]

Today, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion each year in goods and commodities, and over $9 billion in services for the maintenance of the very prisons that confine them—all while being paid pennies an hour or nothing at all, according to research conducted by the American Civil Liberties Union and the University of Chicago Law School’s Global Human Rights Clinic. Their labor enables mass incarceration by offsetting the cost of the country’s ballooning prison system, which has grown by 500 percent over the last 50 years.

[...]

In addition to off-setting costs for federal, state and local governments, approximately 4,100 companies in the U.S. have directly profited off of prison labor, a number that is likely an undercount—including large companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, Starbucks, IBM, Tyson Foods and Microsoft, according to a database created by the advocacy organization Worth Rises. “A lot of people are making a lot of money off the system,” said Arrington, who has worked for the reentry nonprofit, Second Chance Center, since his release. “It is no different than it was 200 years ago.” 

[kharmii]

https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5TR8nCgkVc/?igsh=ZW4yc210M2ltd2R0

To all the Marxists out there: This is real communism. Americans who have ZERO idea about socialism and communism have NO clue what that system means and how fucking bad it is. Seriously.

The video is talking about how an elderly couple got a letter from their local government demanding they sell their home so it can be used to house migrants. It was a mistake, as they were living in it at the time, and the government was forcing people to sell empty properties, but it's a common injustice everywhere. Here, they pull that squatters rights nonsense where if a property sits empty long enough in certain areas, people are allowed to move right in, just so long as they pay the taxes. More often than not, they just trash the place turning it into a drug house.

This is why regular working-class people are leaving the Democrat party in droves in the US. We try to move further away from leftist controlled areas to some place where life is easier for people who work and pay taxes. When politicians talk about 'refugees' and 'cultural enrichment' they mean that third world countries are emptying out their prisons and piling their trash on us. We are supposed to believe we have a civic duty to keep paying higher taxes and having our cost of living go up, while non-citizens fill up hotels and empty properties so they can get unlimited free housing, healthcare and food. They contribute nothing, and often when they do contribute the least bit, the next generation contributes nothing and causes even more problems. Donald Trump was right when he said, "They aren't sending us their best; they're sending us their problems".

[ngdrb]

Comparative Analysis: Joe Biden's Achievements and Donald Trump's Challenges Examined through a Political Lens

Positives about Joe Biden

Evolution on Key Issues: Over the years, Joe Biden has demonstrated an evolution on key issues. Notably, on criminal justice, he has moved far from his much-criticized "tough-on-crime" position of the 1990s. His proposed policies aim to reduce incarceration, address disparities in the justice system, and rehabilitate released prisoners .

Accomplishments: Throughout his extensive political career, Joe Biden has dedicated himself to serving the American people. As a U.S. Senator and Vice President alongside Barack Obama, he has been involved in various initiatives and policies aimed at fighting for Americans .

2. Leadership and Resilience: Despite facing challenges and uncertainties, President Biden has demonstrated resilience and leadership. His administration has achieved significant milestones, such as the passage of the infrastructure bill, which had been a longstanding goal for previous administrations.

3. Public Perception: Joe Biden's favorability ratings have been relatively positive, with a net favorability rating of +9 points in recent high-quality live interview polls. His favorability rating is above his unfavorable rating in almost all polls, reflecting a generally positive public perception .

4. Health and Vigor: Despite facing health challenges, including testing positive for COVID-19, President Biden has shown vigor and determination in fulfilling his duties as the head of state.

5. Likability and Personal Conduct: According to a Pew Research Center study, voters are more likely to view Joe Biden as warm and likeable compared to Donald Trump. A larger percentage of voters give Biden warm ratings, with about one-in-three voters expressing intensely positive feelings about him .

6. Accomplishments: President Biden has outperformed Trump on various fronts, including inequality, green spending, and crime. His third year in office was marked by an economy that remained resilient despite challenges like inflation and surging borrowing costs.

7. Personal Qualities: Despite a decline in public impressions of Biden's personal qualities, he is still perceived as able to manage government effectively. Additionally, a significant percentage of voters believe that Biden cares about the needs of ordinary people.

Negatives about Donald Trump

Donald Trump's presidency has been marked by various controversies and criticisms, as evidenced by a range of factors and public opinion.

Worker Safety and Health: The Trump administration has been criticized for disregarding negative impacts on worker safety and health, such as proposing rules that could endanger young workers and patients.

Handling of Race Relations: Trump received negative marks for his handling of race relations, with a majority of adults expressing concerns about his approach and the divisions along racial, ethnic, and partisan lines.

3. COVID-19 Response: Trump's legacy has been defined by the controversial handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, with widespread criticism of his administration's response to the crisis.

4. Controversial Statements and Actions: Throughout his political career, Trump has been associated with a series of controversial statements and actions, including derogatory remarks about immigrants and divisive rhetoric.

5. Erosion of Democratic Institutions: Trump has been criticized for questioning the legitimacy of democratic institutions, including the free press, federal judiciary, and the electoral process, leading to concerns about the erosion of democratic norms.

6. Tax and Financial Practices: Trump's financial practices, including tax-related issues and potential conflicts of interest, have been the subject of scrutiny and criticism.

7. Policy Priorities: Critics argue that Trump's policy priorities have favored corporations and the wealthiest few at the expense of other segments of the population.

8. Public Perception: Public opinion reflects stronger negative views on the potential downsides of a Trump presidency, with concerns about his personality traits, views on immigration, and the economy.

In summary, Donald Trump's presidency has been marked by a range of controversies and criticisms, including concerns about worker safety, race relations, the COVID-19 response, controversial statements, erosion of democratic institutions, financial practices, policy priorities, and public perception. These factors have contributed to a complex and divisive public perception of his presidency.