Solution to immigration - Prison Labor

US farmers using prison labor

With tightening restrictions on migrant workers, some farmers are turning to the incarcerated.

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The U.S. prison industrial complex is truly a topic on which I could write about in a long and protracted rant. Since there is someone who have already done a great job explaining it, I will defer to Catherine Austin Fitts' very detailed and damming Aristocacry of Prison Profits.

One of the most amazing knowns of American history, it just keep repeating itself. Its social anomalies are suppressed, reframed, and revised but never changes.

Any time that any class of Americans want to see what their future is going to be, they only have to look at what’s going on in the minority communities.

As recent as 2000, I believe that Americans would have acted more forcefully during Florida's voting fiasco if it didn't originally have a black face. All the Rethugs in Florida had to do was say that they were purging felons from the voter rolls and everybody was conspicuously silent. It was reported that entire polling precincts ballots were missing and there was not outcry, but when it was announced that seniors in south Florida had voted for Buchannan there were spasms of righteous indignations around the country.

The irony in all of this is, if the individual rights of everyone IS the American dream that everyone claims that they are fight for, we wouldn't be here today fighting for our liberties with this WH.

Again, in 2004, in Ohio. Which voting precicnts had long waiting lines? Sometime, minority voters in Ohio waited as long a nine hours to vote.

Rethugs also use prison populations to enhance their districts, it is called "phantom constituents". As they move the prisoners to rural areas Federal dollars follows them. So, if you are wondering why there is a reduction of money in urban areas, follow the cash crops of prison inmates.

Now that Rethugs have exhausted their use of immigrants to drive down wages and bust unions as they pushed the unemployed minority populations into prisons to use for cheap labor (as low as .25 hr). Towns and states across America rely almost exclusively on their use of their prison trustee populations' profitable punishment to maintain roads, service their infrastructures, and operate fire services.

Private capital, coalitions, and lobbyists has become enmeshed in the punishment industry. How is it that black inmates are skilled enough to make computer components, build limousines and furniture and lingerie for Victoria's Secret but can not find employment when they are released?

Now, after wrecking the U.S. economy driving down wages with galloping costs of basic necessities the Rethugs want to force immigrants out of America. Not only is there a problem in the housing marketing, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia in its April 2007 report acknowledges that Americans are losing ground although “they are playing by the rules”. Recent reports also reveals that Education Attainment is not longer the proverbial pathway to success. Individuals with bachelor degrees are in soup lines too. And, they are competing for jobs that requires only a high school degree.

Follow Feds' immigration raids, and you will see that for the first time in years inside of those same communities blacks are suddenly finding employment.

Have you started connecting the dots yet? The U.S. war on poverty and drugs are money making machines for PRIVATE investors and not the alleged targets of these programs.

Does any of this remotely sound familiar? Wake up America before we become a Prison Planet!

This has been in the pipeline for quite some years. Prisons are serious BIG BIDNESS. Look what I just found in my cyberkeller!

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0233/solomon.php

The Gatekeeper: Watch on the INS
by Alisa Solomon
Detainees Equal Dollars
The Rise in Immigrant Incarcerations drives a prison boom
August 14 - 20, 2002

t was a shaky spring for the correctional workers of Hastings, Nebraska (pop. 24,064), as the stagnation in the nation's prison population and the increasingly high costs of incarceration jostled the sleepy town, some two hours' drive from Lincoln. On April 9, the 84 employees of the Hastings Correctional Center were told that the 186-bed facility would be closing at the end of June. State funds were scraping bottom, and the $2.5 million annual price tag for the prison was too big a burden to carry. "We really didn't know what we would do," says Jim Morgan, who had been working at HCC for 15 years and lives to this day in the house where he was born. "There aren't a lot of job opportunities out here, and most of us have homes and kids and couldn't even think about moving somewhere else." For two months, the workers scrambled, filling out applications at nearby meatpacking and cardboard-container plants and anticipating long hours in the unemployment office.

Then salvation came from, of all places, the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Days after HCC closed as a state prison in June, it reopened as an INS detention center.

"It's a win-win," says Morgan. The INS is desperate for more beds for its ever expanding detainee population. And the state of Nebraska, collecting $65 per detainee per day from the INS, rakes in more than $1 million a year over and above the cost of running the place.

County jailers have long known that housing INS detainees pumps easy income into the coffers. Nearly 900 facilities around the country provide beds for the INS, and in interviews over the years, several county sheriffs and wardens have described such detainees as a "cash crop."

Passaic County Jail in New Jersey learned the lucrative lesson after 9-11, as INS transfers boosted its detainee population from 40 to 386 by December 18. The INS paid $77 per day per detainee, compared to New Jersey reimbursements of $62 for state prisoners; some $3 million in INS payments poured into Passaic last year.

Now, in places like Hastings all around the country, prisons are seeking to cut such deals on a larger scale. At the end of July the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported a decline in the state prison population, reversing a decade-long trend that produced a prison-building boom across America. The only incarcerated populations sustaining reliable growth now are INS detainees and federal prisoners, many of them noncitizens. Those with an interest in keeping multitudes behind bars—whether public employees working in the prisons that expanded in the '90s, or for-profit companies that have seen their stock prices plunge in the last couple of years—are coming to regard immigrants as their redeemers.

Like agriculture, restaurants, hotels, and other realms of American business, the prison-industrial complex now also looks to illegal immigrants as the most promising means of keeping them afloat. The danger, anti-prison activists say, is that the pressure to fill empty cells will add even more fuel to the demand to round up immigrants.

MUCH more at link above...