The Prison Industrial Complex Series - Part One - The Tip of The Iceberg

The U.S. Prison Industrial Complex Series

Part One: Just the Tip of the Iceberg

Before we venture - together - down into this shit pile

(and please if you're finding yourself offended by my language PLEASE remind yourself swear words should be the LEAST of your concerns - you are going to HAD BETTER be seriously offended by what is going on right under our noses) -

we all need to understand how the Prison system works, who the major players are, how they are funded and how much of our American population is directly affected on the whole.

Since the tip of this iceberg is still fucking enormous I've realized I'll have to chip away at the basic set up for fear of creating a intro post so long no one will read it! This post will be dedicated to the American population which is or has been directly affected by the prison system and the related costs so everyone can see the magnitude of what we are about to explore.

Let's Look at the Big Picture

source

It's been challenging to get accurate information because there are just so many sectors of the American Prison System - and the Judicial System has more fucking snake heads than Medusa! The way facts are "hidden" and statistics are diluted is by segregating populations, excluding age brackets, splitting up the beast into separate departments: public and private then state and federal, detention centers, jails, prisons, mental facilities, etc.

Please keep this in mind as you look over the stats below. Some of these are segregated populations with certain departments excluded.

Many nonprofit organizations work behind the scenes trying to compile these groups into one entire population so we can ALL see the big picture. I found https://www.prisonpolicy.org which does an amazing job of tallying up all the affected human beings. (Yes, hate it though you may, you MUST accept these numbers represent REAL INDIVIDUALS - people with families, humans birthed here just like you.)

I am sourcing all these images and the included stats - I DID not create these graphs but they are amazing and I've gratefully borrowed the information from PrisonPolicy.org

The American criminal justice system holds more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 901 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 76 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.

Every year, 641,000 people walk out of prison gates, but people go to jail over 11 million times each year. "[...the enormous churn in and out of our correctional facilities and the far larger universe of people whose lives are affected by the criminal justice system.]

The Government Released Statistics

These stats were taken directly from The Bureau of Justice press release from Feb 22, 2018. You can follow this link to their site to verify and review these stats plus a whole mess more.

And remember these are filtered statistics. Look back at the word choices again: "county and city jails", then regular "jails" in a different stat. What are they talking about? We can see from the graphs above there are many different types of facilities and never ONCE do they define whether they have included or excluded either state or federal populations or whether this is the public or private prison sector polled.

The jail incarceration rate fell from 237 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents at midyear 2012 to 229 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents at midyear 2016, a decline of 3.4 percent.

County and city jails held 740,700 inmates at midyear 2016. This was below the peak of 785,500 inmates in 2008, the year with the most jail inmates since 1982, when BJS began the Annual Survey of Jails data collection.

In 2016, jails reported 10.6 million admissions, continuing a steady decline since 2008, when there were 13.6 million admissions to local jails. On average, those admitted to jail in 2016 stayed 25 days. Admissions include all persons booked into a jail on a formal charge, repeat offenders booked on new charges, and persons sentenced to weekend programs and entering the facility for the first time.

Now before you get distracted by their word choices - all this "falling rates" and "decreasing population" talk STOP and just LOOK AT THOSE STAGGERING NUMBERS.

#1 229 inmates PER 100,000 U.S. residents at midyear 2016
#2 County and city jails held 740,700 inmates at midyear 2016
#3 In 2016, jails reported 10.6 million admissions, those admitted to jail in 2016 stayed 25 days.

Firstly let's grab this one stat = COST PER DAY to house an inmate: from the Federal Register

• The fee to cover the average cost of incarceration for Federal inmates in Fiscal Year 2015 was $31,977.65 ($87.61 per day). MORE THAN I MADE LAST YEAR - fucking seriously!!
• The average annual cost to confine an inmate in a Residential Re-entry Center for Fiscal Year 2015 was $26,082.90 ($71.46 per day).

State run facilities vary in cost per day and I will dive deeper into this in a later post but for the sake of this post and as on average the costs are not far off I will use that lower stat of $71 a day - give 'em the benefit of doubt here

• 70% (443,000 persons) of the prison population are NOT convicted = $38,541,000 (YES MILLION) a DAY
  then add in:
• average stay of 25 days - that is a staggering 963.5 MILLION or $1775 per person - a not even CONVICTED person

Now repeat after me:

What The Fuck?!

Do not forget jail stays cause people to lose their jobs, children, their credibility - even if you are never convicted but were merely arrested, these things happen. I have seen it many times with my own eyes. Now IF you are convicted there is ZERO hope for you afterwards but that topic I will cover all by itself later on.

Right there I wanted to showcase the amount of absolutely unnecessary money we spend imprisoning and punishing innocent Americans - let alone adding in the millions who are convicted and serving long term or life sentences.

Speaking of costs and money:

The PRIVATE Prison Industrial Complex

I will be dedicating an entire post to break down this conundrum. There are literally prisons that are operated solely as businesses. Don't see anything wrong with that? Well take your head outta your ass for a second and think about this - Private Prisons:

• work like hotels - they need those beds full
• have SHAREHOLDERS who's financial well being RIDES on these facilities success
• can pick and choose which inmates they take - therefore controlling their "production costs", "maintenance fees" and what-not as to make as much profit off each human resident as possible
• 3 top CORPS (MTC, GEO and CCA) rake in roughly $5 Billion (yes with a B) a YEAR

We've allowed the corporations to turn punishment into a business...who benefits from this? A BUSINESS wants their CUSTOMERS to RETURN...they NEED the customer to come back - and bring their friends with them!
And who is the CUSTOMER? The inmate.
These corporations are not the government - they DO NOT "care about us" -or the American people at all... not to say the government does either but some still live comfortably in their safety matrix so I figured I'd throw that in there.

Who ARE We Imprisoning?

Back to the Big Picture Model from PrisonPolicy.org :

This article also point out a very important part of determining how the stats above are categorized:

All of the offense data presented comes with an important set of caveats. A person in prison for multiple offenses is reported only for the most serious offense so, for example, there are people in prison for “violent” offenses who might have also been convicted of a drug offense. Further, almost all convictions are the result of plea bargains, where people plead guilty to a lesser offense, perhaps of a different category or one that they may not have actually committed.

Now look back at those drug offenders - that means most likely those non-violent drug offenders were in not involved in a larger crime - they are simply humans with a bad addiction. I will be touching on this travesty at a later date. The point is the system messes around with who did what and how, they charge people with crimes in the way that best suits their prerogative and trade conviction pleas like they work for Wall Street. Any one who would beg to differ - I personally know well over 20 individuals who's cases and charges were tampered with or "traded" between lawyers with barely any notification made to the defendant.

Kids will be Kids ..?

there are almost 7,000 youth behind bars for “technical violations” of the requirements of their probation, rather than for a new offense.

600 youth are behind bars for “status” offenses, which are “behaviors that are not law violations for adults, such as running away, truancy, and incorrigibility.”

REPEAT AFTER ME... WHAT in THE FUCK??

Children and teens make bad choices all the time - it is in their brain chemistry to do so! Their brains literally are NOT developed fully and they cannot use reasoning to properly assess future outcomes and consequences. This is scientifically proven and has been common knowledge for decades.

Yet we still continue to imprison, punish and permanently scar our youth for doing exactly what their brains and hormones are driving them to do. This is utter bullshit. Do you know how hard it is to break out of an institutionalized mind frame in your teens or early 20's ? The life style has been ingrained into their behavior and now there is no turning back - yet we continue to marginalize these young adults and blame them for being shaped by a broken system.

A Starter Video for those interested

• Now this show is from 2012. The statistics used are from about 2008 - 2012 - which as I've read on the Bureau of Justice's website was some of the worst years and the percentages have been "declining" but it's still an interesting show with a lot of great information

I will be continuing on with my Series and exploring many aspects and topics related to the Prison Industrial Complex, next up will be "Welcome to the Matchine | Introductions are in order.

I hope this series will spark conversations here on Steemit and spread out into our own lives. Share these facts with people so they realize how huge this problem is for all Americans whether you're just a tax payer or simply a caring human being.

If you're interested in this topic please check out my first blog in this series: A warm up to my prison industrial series