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Welcome, Nato, to Chicago's police state | Bernard Harcourt. With Nato delegates arriving Saturday night, the City of Chicago has been turned into a police state. Courtesy of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who several months ago began implementing new draconian anti-protest measures, Chicago has gone on security lockdown. Starting early Friday night, 18 May 2012, the Chicago Police Department began shutting down – prohibiting cars, bikes, and pedestrians – miles and miles of highways and roads in the heart of Chicago to create a security perimeter around downtown and McCormick Place (where the Nato summit is being held). Eight-foot tall, anti-scale security fencing went up all over that perimeter and downtown, including Grant Park; and the Chicago police – as well as myriad other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI and the US secret service – were out in force on riot-geared horses, bikes, and patrols – batons at the ready. So, welcome, Nato, to the Chicago police state 2012.

A few further points are worth mentioning. Prison Rape and the Government by David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow. Sexual Victimization Reported by Adult Correctional Authorities, 2007–2008 by Allen J. Beck and Paul Guerino National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape: Notice of Proposed Rulemaking by the United States Department of Justice Initial Regulatory Impact Analysis for Notice of Proposed Rulemaking: Proposed National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape Under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) Sexual Victimization in Prisons and Jails Reported by Inmates, 2008–09 by Allen J.

Back in 1998, Jan Lastocy was serving time for attempted embezzlement in a Michigan prison. Jan wanted to tell someone, but the warden had made it clear that she would always believe an officer’s word over an inmate’s, and didn’t like “troublemakers.” These are a few of the reasons why prisoners fear reporting rape. How many people are really victimized every year? The department divides sexual abuse in detention into four categories. He missed that deadline. Punishment and Profits: Immigration Detention - Fault Lines. The end of the for-profit prison era? Early this year, the United Methodist Church Board of Pension and Health Benefits voted to withdraw nearly $1 million in stocks from two private prison companies, the GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

The decision by the largest faith-based pension fund in the United States came in response to concerns expressed last May by the church’s immigration task force and a group of national activists. “Our board simply felt that it did not want to profit from the business of incarcerating others,” said Colette Nies, managing director of communications for the board. “Our concern was not with how the companies manage or operate their business, but with the service that the companies offer,” Nies added. “We believe that profiting from incarceration is contrary to church values.” It was an important success for a slew of activists across the country who are pushing investors and institutions to divest from the private prison industry.

Profit Windfall Does Profit Drive Policy? Contract Requires Prisons 90% Filled. Private Prison Companies Want You Locked Up — Justice Policy Institute. Press Release Published: June 22, 2011 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEJune 22, 2011Contacts:Zerline Hughes – 202.558.7974 x308 / zhughes@justicepolicy.orgJason Fenster – 202.558.7974 x306 / jfenster@justicepolicy.org Private Prison Companies Want You Locked UpNew report highlights political strategies of companies working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences WASHINGTON, D.C. — Over the past 15 years, the number of people held in all prisons in the United States has increased by 49.6 percent, while private prison populations have increased by 353.7 percent, according to recent federal statistics.

Meanwhile, in 2010 alone, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies, had combined revenues of $2.9 billion. According to a report released today by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI), not only have private prison companies benefitted from this increased incarceration, but they have helped fuel it. The GEO Group Inc. CCA. Arizona prison businesses are big political contributors. By Bob Ortega - Sept. 4, 2011 12:00 AM The Arizona Republic Corrections Corp. of America, the country's largest private-prison operator, says it thrives by offering better service at a lower cost than state-run prisons. It's an argument echoed by the three smaller rivals bidding on a 5,000-bed private-prison contract with the state of Arizona. But when it comes to other ways of winning business, such as employing platoons of lobbyists, doling out campaign contributions and working through political connections, CCA stands head and shoulders above its competitors, in Arizona and across the country.

Read prisons cost report It isn't easy to disentangle the complicated political and financial connections between a company and the public officials whose policy decisions can help or harm its business. But critics accuse CCA of using its financial might and political connections to influence decision makers and muscle its way to multimillion-dollar deals behind closed doors. Political footprint. The Top Five Special Interest Groups Lobbying To Keep Marijuana Illegal. Last year, over 850,000 people in America were arrested for marijuana-related crimes. Despite public opinion, the medical community, and human rights experts all moving in favor of relaxing marijuana prohibition laws, little has changed in terms of policy.

There have been many great books and articles detailing the history of the drug war. Part of America’s fixation with keeping the leafy green plant illegal is rooted in cultural and political clashes from the past. However, we at Republic Report think it’s worth showing that there are entrenched interest groups that are spending large sums of money to keep our broken drug laws on the books: 1.) RELATED: Why Can’t You Smoke Pot? To receive stories and investigations about political corruption, sign up for our daily digest here. Share and Enjoy Filed under: Lobbying. Incarceration, Inc. The cost of America’s police state. At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, Calif. American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere.

There should have been no surprise. Those flash grenades exploding in Oakland and the sound cannons on New York’s streets simply opened small windows onto a national policing landscape long in the process of militarization — a bleak domestic no man’s land marked by tanks and drones, robot bomb detectors, grenade launchers, tasers, and most of all, interlinked video surveillance cameras and information databases growing quietly on unobtrusive server farms everywhere. The ubiquitous fantasy of “homeland security,” pushed hard by the federal government in the wake of 9/11, has been widely embraced by the public. But why drone on? A Snapshot of Your Security-Industrial Complex. Today, in downtown Oakland, @marymad took a picture of this beast, which was used to intimidate crowds of May Day marchers: Gavin Aronsen of Mother Jones got this shot of it from inside Awaken cafe (“”Oooooooh,” everyone at Awaken Cafe exclaimed as this Alameda County tank-looking thing rolled by,” he tweeted): Naturally, you are asking yourself, how is it that a cash-strapped city like Oakland can afford a monster like this?

Well, luckily, Dave Gilson of Mother Jones has your answers, flagging and tweeting a request from the Alameda Sheriff’s Department to bypass the competitive bid process and purchase this beauty — from Xe, better known as Blackwater — for the bargain basement price of only $323,000. Lest you think this is an unfair price, our dear Sheriff Ahern helpfully describes the pressing need which requires its purchase: When you put it that way, well, of course they should skip over the competitive bid process and just hand the money straight to Blackwater. Like this:

For-Profit incarceration

Americans get a Shabak Education. Irvine, CA - It was a term that has stuck with me since a Palestinian friend in the Ajami neighbourhood of Jaffa first used it in response to one of my more naive questions. "Why don't you all do more to protest against the on-going expropriation of land and discrimination against local residents by the Israeli government?

" I asked him on a typically sunny summer day, as we stood in front of yet another luxury housing development being constructed on formerly Palestinian land. "Because we've all received a good Shabak education," he answered. The education in question, was dispensed by the Shabak, or Shin Bet, Israel's state security services, to keep the country's Palestinian population from protesting too vigorously against the policies that have kept them second class citizens despite the official political equality granted to them by the Israeli state. Inevitable blowback Not in the form of terrorism, which was and remains a very possibility. Ugly scenes It's not pretty. Warfare in the American Homeland: Policing and Prison in a Penal Democracy. Duke University Press, internationally recognized as a prominent publisher of books and journals, publishes approximately 120 books annually and over 40 journals, as well as offering five electronic collections.

A not-for-profit scholarly publisher, Duke University Press is best known for publishing in the humanities and social sciences. Sign up for Subject Matters email updates to receive discounts, new book announcements, and more. Join our list. Read excerpts from our new books on Scribd. Our Spring 2014 catalog is now available online. An interactive pdf can be accessed here. How to Fund an American Police State. This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com. Click here to catch Timothy MacBain’s latest Tomcast audio interview in which Salisbury discusses post-9/11 police “mission creep” in this country, or download it to your iPod here. At the height of the Occupy Wall Street evictions, it seemed as though some diminutive version of “shock and awe” had stumbled from Baghdad, Iraq, to Oakland, California.

American police forces had been “militarized,” many commentators worried, as though the firepower and callous tactics on display were anomalies, surprises bursting upon us from nowhere. About the Author Stephan Salisbury Stephan Salisbury is cultural writer for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Also by the Author Who is being killed by firearms, and in what numbers? There should have been no surprise. But why drone on? Farewell to Peaceful Private Life Can New York City ever be “secure”?

Against Law, For Order. It’s taken decades and millions of lives, but elite opinion is starting to move against mass incarceration. The New Yorker and the New York Review of Books ran detailed exposés on the scale and violence of the penal state. Conservative leaders like Grover Norquist have said that mass incarceration violates the principles of “fiscal responsibility, accountability, and limited government,” while GOP darlings like Mitch Daniels have tried to take the lead in state reform.

Soon the common wisdom will shift from “we need to get tough on crime” to “we jail too many people for too long for the wrong reasons.” The next question is what to do about it, and here the answers are harder. There are those that think that it’ll be fairly easy – follow European examples and decriminalize drugs, for instance. Some, like public policy professor Mark Kleiman, believe we can change punishment techniques to have both less crime and less incarceration. Neoconservative Neoliberalism A New Form of Governance.

Fears of a corporate police state - David Sirota. “Corporate Police State,” it’s a fraught — some might even say, overwrought — term. But in its purest, apolitical form, it simply describes the periodic commingling of state and corporate power to protect private interests. In the American psyche, any discussion of that phenomenon typically brings one of three images to mind. There’s the Old Corporate Police State — the sepia-toned America of decades long past, a place where state militias murder striking mine workers on behalf of Gilded Age barons and Congress empowers the government to forcibly ban work stoppages that defy corporate executives’ wishes. There’s the Fictional Future Corporate Police State — that smoldering bombed-out world depicted in “Robocop,” “Fortress” and every other dystopian flick in Hollywood’s post-apocalyptic catalog.

In just the last few years, the Corporate Police State has reared its head at every level of government. But the operative word is “yet.” Mass Incarceration and Criminal Justice in America. A prison is a trap for catching time. Good reporting appears often about the inner life of the American prison, but the catch is that American prison life is mostly undramatic—the reported stories fail to grab us, because, for the most part, nothing happens.

One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich is all you need to know about Ivan Denisovich, because the idea that anyone could live for a minute in such circumstances seems impossible; one day in the life of an American prison means much less, because the force of it is that one day typically stretches out for decades. It isn’t the horror of the time at hand but the unimaginable sameness of the time ahead that makes prisons unendurable for their inmates. The inmates on death row in Texas are called men in “timeless time,” because they alone aren’t serving time: they aren’t waiting out five years or a decade or a lifetime.

The basic reality of American prisons is not that of the lock and key but that of the lock and clock. The American Prison State - Daniel J. D'Amico. It is time to take prisons seriously. The United States incarcerates more people than any country in the world today and throughout history. The financial costs are tremendous and rising. One in every one hundred Americans is jailed within this so-called land of the free. Many have committed no violent crimes. Not a few are in for supposed political crimes. Some are wholly innocent of both yet languish in captivity. The prison is a unique technology of enforcement. Since the 1970s, the American system has been said to operate according to a retributive paradigm of criminal justice, wherein criminals are thought to deserve punishment. Originally, penitentiaries were designed and built with grander intentions: to induce penitence at the individual level and to make for a better community at the societal level.

In their first applications — the early United States and a few major British cities — penitentiaries were perceived as a success. Daniel J. Comment on the blog. References. Why are so many Americans in prison? - Inside Story Americas. Matt Stoller: Who Wants Keep the War on Drugs Going AND Put You in Debtor’s Prison? The "War on Drugs" The Illusion of Free Markets - Bernard E. Harcourt. CLASSRACEHYPERINCARCERATION-pub. Our penal system. Go to Trial - Crash the Justice System.

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Policing & prisons - curators... OPD’s “Less than Lethal” Lessons from Military Forces | Hyphenated-Republic. How the War on Terror Has Militarized the Police - Arthur Rizer & Joseph Hartman - National. The militarization of police forces...