here's a first for this blog: stock tips. try CXW or CRN on the new york stock exchange. better yet, try both. then call the police--frequently--and report suspected criminal activity. statistically, your best bet is to report black men in their 20s and early 30s, with the key word being drugs. because the more criminals we incarcerate, the more money we can make.
CXW is the Corrections Corporation of America: http://www.correctionscorp.com/ as they explain under the heading "Why Do Business With CCA" (i'm pretty sure their intended audience here is potential stockholders, not potential inmates): "An estimated two million individuals are incarcerated in our county today and the inmate population growth continues to rise between 3 and 5 percent annually. More than 12 percent of all federally sentenced offenders and approximately 6 percent of state prisoners are currently managed by a privately-operated corrections management company - and those figures are growing." http://www.correctionscorp.com/whycca.html
CRN is Cornell Companies, Inc.: http://www.cornellcompanies.com their tag line is "People Changing People." precisely! they state that "As a publicly traded company, Cornell investors buy our stocks not just for the profit made on a facility, but also for the ability to "grow" that profit well into the future." http://www.cornellcompanies.com/page.cfm?ctid=22
the phenomenon of prison privatization was catalyzed by flooding federal and state-run prisons. allow me to quote the experts on this matter.
a 2001 monograph from the Department of Justice titled "Emerging Issues on Privatized Prisons" notes that "Prison overcrowding is one of the most burdensome problems plaguing our criminal justice system and a major catalyst for privatizing correctional facilities. Over the past decade the number of adult offenders under the jurisdiction and control of the United States justice system has doubled. ...Thus, the pressure of increased incarceration rates, combined with rising correctional costs, has enabled privatization of penal facilities to reemerge as an acceptable political and correctional system operational concept. ...This point of containing labor costs is the crux of the privatization movement. Prisons are extremely labor intensive, with approximately 65 to 70 percent of the costs of operating a prison going to staff salaries, fringe benefits, and overtime. Controlling these costs is more difficult to achieve with unionized government workers. Private firms typically use nonunion labor, allowing for the lowest benefit packages. Overall, private firms claim that they can save 10 to 20 percent in prison operations due largely to efficient handling of labor costs." http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1/bja/181249.txt
hot damn! here's the quick timeline: turn the war on poverty into the war on drugs, incarcerate vulnerable populations living in poverty at a rate that overcrowds existing prisons, turn to the private market to house the overflow AND avoid all those damn benefits government workers make. aaah, america...
trust me, more on this to come. next topic, the great education and skills that can be received while in prison!
a quiz for you... (really, please answer -- see that comments link below? if you don't want to give out your email address where it asks for it, just make up a fake one. and don't do any research, just make an educated guess): which state has the most private prison facilities?
sometimes, we should say thank you to our government. the united states is already engaged in so much hypocrisy that i, for one, appreciate the government's refreshing honesty in the following matters.
thank you for nominating john bolton for UN ambassador. he not just feels disdain for the work of the UN, but he says it, too! repeatedly! how refreshing! as he said during a senate committee meeting on april 11: "But there is no being out there called the United Nations. There's simply a group of member governments who if they have the political will every once in a while to protect international peace and security, they're able to do it. And I think it would be a real mistake to count on the United Nations as if it's some disembodied entity out there that can function on its own. When the United States leads, the United Nations will follow. When it suits our interest to do so, we will lead. When it does not suit our interest to do so, we will not." http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/international/jan-june05/senate_4-11.html
for more reading: here's a paper bolton wrote, titled The Creation, Fall, Rise, and Fall of the United Nations": http://www.cato.org/pubs/books/bolton-chapter.pdf. as he writes of the origins of the UN, "American drafters, however, also carefully circumscribed the reach of the UN, by limiting its role to cases that presented a threat to ‘‘international peace and security,’’ in the hope of avoiding giving the UN a global license for international social work."
crack. cocaine. and the conundrum of explaining away why the same drug is not in fact treated as the same drug...
i am working on a paper about teenage drug use, and i came across this government study, which i have noted below because it clearly states that crack and cocaine are one and the same, other than the sale price.
Monitoring the Future: 2004 Overview of Key Findings "For many drugs the differences in use by socioeconomic class are very small, and the trends have been highly parallel. One very interesting difference occurred for cocaine, which was positively associated with socioeconomic level in the early 1980s. That association had nearly disappeared by 1986, however, with the advent of crack, which offered cocaine at a lower price." (p. 41, http://www.monitoringthefuture.org/new.html)
so crack is cocaine at a lower price. but the effects of being charged with crack or cocaine vary widely. and the demograhics of who uses crack or cocaine vary widely. the following information is from a 1995 Report to Congress (Report on Cocaine and Federal Sentencing Policy), from the web site of the United States Sentencing Commission:
"At the heart of the debate surrounding cocaine sentencing lies the 100-to-1 quantity ratio between powder and crack cocaine. This quantity ratio leads to a penalty ratio for offenders involved with equivalent amounts of either form of crack cocaine. Depending on the exact quantity, the mandatory minimum penalties and sentencing guidelines prescribe prison terms for crack defendants that generally range from three to almost eight times longer than for defendants with equivalent amounts of powder cocaine." ...
"Among defendants convicted of simple possession, 58 percent of powder defendants were White, 26.7 percent were Black, and 15 percent were Hispanic. Among crack defendants, 10.3 percent were White, 84.5 percent were Black, and 5.2 percent were Hispanic." http://www.ussc.gov/crack/CHAP7.HTM
so it's ten years after the above report to congress. and the 100:1 ratio remains. why? don't even try to answer that without taking race and socioeconomics into the equation.
in january of this year, a bill (H.R. 48) was introduced by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD): "Powder-Crack Cocaine Penalty Equalization Act of 2005 - Amends the Controlled Substances Act and the Controlled Substances Import and Export Act to eliminate the disparity in sentencing between crack and powder cocaine, with regard to trafficking, possession, importation, and exportation of such substances, by changing the applicable amounts for powder cocaine to those currently applicable to crack cocaine." http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h109-48
awhile back i said that i was going to post some of the things i've learned in the past couple of years that really marked changing points in my worldview. here's another:
rosa parks. what do you remember of her? humor me and take a minute to pull together your image of her, as she has been presented to you in school or from wherever. my own recollection was of an african american woman who was tired and didn't want to give up her bus seat to a white man. so she didn't. i would have classified her decision to remain seated as an unintended catalyst to the civil rights era. but then i learned...
many of the leaders of the kensington welfare rights union have attended training sessions and held conferences at the highlander center in tennessee (http://www.highlandercenter.org/). rosa parks also worked with and learned from social activists at the highlander center. as part of a growing movement for civil rights, various leaders decided that rosa had the right image to catalyze the movement further. the timing was right because the work of so many activists made it right. rosa wasn't just a woman trying to get home on the bus. she was an activist. and she "won" the opportunity to be a media image, carefully crafted by fellow civil rights activists.
i just came across this article, by paul loeb, which pretty much says everything i would want to say about rosa parks and the de-contextualization of her decision to "just stay seated": http://www.soulofacitizen.org/newimp/impexcerptparks.htm here's an excerpt:
"The conventional portrayal suggests that social activists come out of nowhere, to suddenly take dramatic stands. It implies that we act with the greatest impact when we act alone, at least initially. And that change occurs instantly, as opposed to building on a series of often-invisible actions. The myth of Parks as lone activist reinforces a notion that anyone who takes a committed public stand, or at least an effective one, has to be a larger-than-life figure--someone with more time, energy, courage, vision, or knowledge than any normal person could ever possess. This belief pervades our society, in part because the media tends not to represent historical change as the work of ordinary human beings, which it almost always is.
Once we enshrine our heroes on pedestals, it becomes hard for mere mortals to measure up in our eyes. However individuals speak out, we’re tempted to dismiss their motives, knowledge, and tactics as insufficiently grand or heroic. We fault them for not being in command of every fact and figure, or being able to answer every question put to them. We fault ourselves as well, for not knowing every detail, or for harboring uncertainties and doubts. We find it hard to imagine that ordinary human beings with ordinary flaws might make a critical difference in worthy social causes."
remember that jim carrey movie, Liar Liar? as i recall, jim carrey plays a well-paid lawyer and father who lies to his kid about something, following which, in some mysterious manner, he wakes up with an inability to lie. so as the jim-character starts about his day, he's not sure what quite is going on because he can't help the non-lies that are coming out of his mouth. on his way to work--watch me get to my point here--a presumably homeless character asks Can you spare some change? to which the jim-character replies (and don't quote me on this, just work with me here on the essence), quite gleefully, Plenty of it! and walks on to work without giving a cent. what a great scene to sit down and think about.
i am asked for spare change on a regular basis--sometimes i give money, and sometimes i don't. every time i don't, i'm never sure what to say, because i feel a desire to be accurate in my response, but i'm not sure what an "accurate" response is...
got winter salt on your car? spring mud? live in philly? $10 can get your car sparkling clean, even towel dried, on the 1900 block of cecil b. moore. i got my car washed there today, and i learned a lot there today, and on both accounts, i am recommending you, too, go there, for automotive cleanliness and societal insight.
in the 19121 zip code, where this car wash (aka local men and women with a permit to use a vacant lot to clean cars with a bucket, soap, and rags) is located: $15,888 is the median household income 44.6% of those 16 and older are a part of the labor force 1.8% of the residents are white, and 96% are african american 38.9% of families are living below the poverty level (and when the government says someone is living in poverty, they mean it. the poverty level for a family of 3 is $15,670; the average family size in 19121 is 3.47).
just to be clear on where i'm coming from: $43,629 is the median household income 65.3% of those 16 and older are a part of the labor force 88.9% of the residents are white, and 6.6% are black 4.3% of families live below the poverty level (the average family size is 2.99).
so what, are the people in my zip code, mere minutes away from 19121, that much more industrious? god-fearing? deserving? clean and sober? white? law abiding? educated? lucky? just throwing out some of the various reasons offered by various people (whether or not their opinion should hold the slightest amount of weight) as to why one person has, while another has not...
allow me to put two and two together to help solve a problem...
recent studies have estimated that approximately 39% of the homeless population in the united states are children, and that 52% of families who request emergency shelter are denied. http://www.nationalhomeless.org/numbers.html
recent study of InStyle magazine alerted me to the existence of La Petite Maison, a company that makes playhouses for children. and i quote: "Not to be overlooked are the basic amenities any home must have: water and indoor/outdoor lighting" (http://www.lapetitemaison.com/p6.html). an article on luxuryfinder.com speaks to the phenomenon of playhouses. the article opens by noting that the hilfigers have a $900,000 playhouse. i have a hilfiger shirt. it's nice. but i digress. so this article goes on to note that "The trend [of luxurious children's playhomes] is catching on so quickly that even families without children are commissioning builders for miniature versions of their homes" (http://www.lapetitemaison.com/news_lf1.html). and there you have it! i mean, could it be any easier, any more obvious? put our homeless children into childless playhomes!
now, lest that childless couple become, well, with child, and if that child doesn't want to share his or her playhome, there's always plan B for our evicted kids. the doghouse. not just any doghouse, of course. "Well-placed windows allow significantly more light and views than the standard doghouse" (http://www.lapetitemaison.com/d_ext2.html). the French Chateau doghouse features "a copper roof, bay window, and hardwood floors" (http://www.lapetitemaison.com/d_int1.html). i mean, what more could a kid--or a dog--need?
in all seriousness, we live in a nation where homelessness is permitted, where homelessness is created. if a person cannot afford a home, you might think we would at least offer shelter. i remember asking a friend who works at a shelter what she does when she has to tell a homeless mother and children that their shelter is full. that all of the shelters are full. i was already anticipating what she might say--something like, here's a list of local churches where you can go. or, i guess you can double-up in room 3. her answer: "i cry."
why do we allow homelessness, and poverty in general, in the face of incredible wealth and resources? why are some people without homes when others have luxury playhomes, and beach homes, and lake homes, and ski homes, and dog homes? our wealth exists because our poverty exists...
