Look Into It - Prisons for American Veterans

The Prison Industrial Complex: The Economics of Incarceration in the USA. America leads to world in prison beds
– for every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars.

Share this vid with every vet you know - it might save a life!
(special jail for vets/PTSD meds)

Authorities in Muscogee County, Georgia say they’ve found a great way to let veterans of US wars share their experience with one another. It’ll just happen behind steel bars and under lock and key.

Officials from the Muscogee County Sheriff’s Office recently held a press conference to discuss once of the department’s newest endeavors and they believe that it is the first of its kind in the country. Tucked in a corner of the county jail in rural Georgia is a dormitory specifically reserved to house inmates that have fought for America.

“There ought to be a place in our city that provides a facility where veterans can stay for a period of time while being treated, physically and mentally,” Ret. Col. Roy Plummer said, reports the local Ledger-Enquirer. “Soldiers will find a way to link together

Never mind the Veterans Affairs bureaus and commonplace community centers that are constructed across the country. Authorities in Georgia have noticed an alarming number of US vets being convicted of crimes after returning home and are hoping that the best way to handle the influx of inmates is by grouping them together.

“They’ll find a way to revisit some of their experiences and share it,” added Plummer.

Unfortunately, those experiences are often traumatic ones — so traumatic, in fact, that an alarming number of veterans are developing mental disorders after returning to the States and, without proper treatment, ending up on the streets. Lacking adequate help, American war vets are often left to live on the streets, where entering a life of crime can be just one wrong turn away.

“They are coming home to a disproportionate rate of homelessness, of foreclosures and evictions. In 2010 a whopping 75,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in the United States were homeless; were sleeping on the streets,” Iraq war veteran Michael Prysner tells RT.

“When you come home, you’re foreclosed on, your job is gone, and then they want you to go to shelters. And shelters pretty much housing criminals, drug addicts, and a lot of us can’t tolerate that lifestyle,” adds homeless US army veteran Joe Mangione.

For those that can get by with soldiers-turned-junkies, however, the homeless shelter now has some competition with the Muscogee County jail. County Sheriff John Darr says that, for now, the dorm can only accommodate 16 veterans, but if a trend of vets-turned-convicts continues, other states might soon follow suit.

Raw Story reports that there are around 140,000 veterans detained at US federal and state prisons in 2004. Outside of the cell and on the streets, the latest numbers out of the White House estimate that US veterans on the street make up a chunk of around 900,000 of the country’s homeless.

Why Government Fears Veterans
The state fears those who know its true intentions

The Battle of Athens, Tennessee is not only a pristine example of a fight for freedom and democracy, but it also shows perhaps why the government is afraid of a fearless veteran.

Memorial Day Message to Veterans: Government Considers You the Enemy
Veterans are props to be rolled out on Memorial Day as homage
is paid to the state and its endless wars

Earlier today, Obama appeared at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery for a photo op. From The Washington Post:

Later he appeared at the cemetery’s Memorial Amphitheater to read from a script. “We’re in a pivotal moment. Our troops are coming home. By the end of this year, our war in Afghanistan will finally come to an end,” he recited.

“These Americans have done their duty. They ask nothing more than that our country does ours, for now and the decades to come,” Obama said.

But, as the VA scandal and countless other examples reveal, the government considers veterans as little more than third class citizens, props to be rolled out on Memorial Day as homage is ritually paid to the state and its endless wars.

The booboisie, as H. L. Mencken described the forever gullible and easily bamboozled American public, were practically knocking down the gates to get in to witness this annual worship of state violence:

When the government is not praising veterans for their “service” in foreign wars of conquest and other illegal activity driven primarily by the financial elite – see Smedley Butler, below – it spends a lot of time demonizing veterans as enemies of the state:

Cops in armored vehicle asked by residents
“Are you coming to take our guns away?”

In an interview with Fox 59, a Morgan County, Indiana Police Sergeant admits that the increasing militarization of domestic police departments is partly to deal with returning veterans who are now seen as a homegrown terror threat.

Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department states, "When I first started we really didn't have the violence that we see today," adding, "The weaponry is totally different now that it was in the beginning of my career, plus, you have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build IEDs and to defeat law enforcement techniques."

In a chilling story entitled Armed for War: Pentagon surplus gives local police an edge, we learn how a Mine Resistant Vehicle (MRAP) which was once used during the occupation of Afghanistan will now be “patrolling the streets of central Indiana,” according to the report.

Sgt. Dan Downing of the Morgan County Sheriff’s Department states, “When I first started we really didn’t have the violence that we see today,” adding, “The weaponry is totally different now that it was in the beginning of my career, plus, you have a lot of people who are coming out of the military that have the ability and knowledge to build IEDs and to defeat law enforcement techniques.”

Downing goes on to relate how citizens approach the vehicle when it stops at gas stations to express their concerns that the militarization of police is about arming cops with the tools required for mass gun confiscation programs.

“We were actually approached when we’d stop to get fuel by people wanting to know why we needed this…what were we going to use it for? ‘Are you coming to take our guns away?’” said Downing. “To come and take away their firearms…that absolutely is not the reason why we go this vehicle. We got this vehicle because of the need and because of increased violence that we have been facing over the last few years….I’ll be the last person to come and take anybody’s guns.”

Indiana seems to be a major trial balloon for the militarization of law enforcement given that the Indiana National Guard has also just purchased two military UH-72 Lakota helicopters which will also be used by local police and the DHS for “homeland security missions”. Downing’s claim that armored tanks are necessary to deal with violent crime doesn’t jive with actual statistics which suggest that violent crime is in fact on the decrease.

Downing’s admission that the armored vehicles are partly about combating the threat posed by returning veterans correlates with similar rhetoric at the federal level.

An April 2009 DHS intelligence assessment listed returning vets as likely domestic terrorists. Just a month later, the New York Times reported on how Boy Scout Explorers were being trained by the DHS to kill “disgruntled Iraq war veterans” in terrorist drills.

It seems to have been completely forgotten by police departments, the media and Americans in general that having military-style tanks patrol the streets is symbolic of a collapsing banana republic or an authoritarian Communist state.

Perhaps the main reason why police officers are being trained that veterans are a major threat is because returning vets are in a perfect position to recognize that America is beginning to resemble an occupied country like Afghanistan.

Such warnings have come from people like former Marine Corps Colonel Peter Martino, who was stationed in Fallujah and trained Iraqi soldiers. Martino went before a New Hampshire city council meeting last year to assert that the Department of Homeland Security is working with law enforcement to build a “domestic army,” because the federal government is afraid of its own citizens.

Indeed, the city’s Police Chief justified the necessity for the acquisition of an armored ‘Bearcat’ vehicle by citing the “threat” posed by libertarians, sovereign citizen adherents, and Occupy activists in the region.

Navy Vet Labeled a “Terrorist” For Posting Images of DHS Vehicles in Missouri

A Navy veteran was labeled a “terrorist” and fired from his job as a Houseman at the Drury Plaza Hotel in Chesterfield, Missouri after he posted a video of dozens of Homeland Security vehicles and asked if they were linked to impending civil unrest in Ferguson.

he chain of events began when 28-year-old Mark Paffrath saw dozens of DHS vehicles in the parking garage of the hotel on Thursday evening. He took photos and video footage of the vehicles before uploading them to Facebook alongside the words, “I wonder if it has anything to do with Ferguson” along with the hashtags #Ferguson and #NoJusticeNoPeace. Drury Plaza Hotel in Chesterfield is located 25 miles southwest of Ferguson.

The following day, Paffrath was ordered to remove the photos by his boss Jeff Baker, the General Manager of the hotel. Paffrath complied with the demand and immediately removed the images, but the next day he was called in to a meeting with Jim Bohnert, Director of Security for Drury Hotels Company, LLC.

Bohnert, who previously worked for the Secret Service, told Paffrath that his actions had jeopardized a $150,000 dollar contract the hotel had with the DHS and that the Navy veteran had committed an action of terrorism by posting the photos.

“You’re a terrorist and you have dishonorably served your country by posting the photos and video,” Bohnert told Paffrath, adding that if Paffrath re-posted the photos and video he will, “have the federal government knocking on your door and you will be incarcerated.”

Paffrath subsequently re-posted the photographs on Facebook before commenting, “so apparently, I’m a terrorist lol.”

Argus Streaming News’ Christopher Gagne said he drove through the parking garage and that around 100 Homeland Security vehicles were still situated there. Gagne attempted to get a comment from a hotel manager on the incident but none was forthcoming.

According to a report published today, as many as 80 Homeland Security agents may be in place to protect federal buildings in St. Louis.

As we have documented, police departments and National Guard units from across the country are making preparations for domestic disorder in the aftermath of the Grand Jury verdict in the shooting death of Michael Brown, a decision likely to be announced this week.

DHS Has Now Acquired Enough Bullets
To Wage 30 Year War!!

Leaked Documents Reveal Marine Corps ‘Urban Training Center’ Based on U.S. Town

Whistleblower says facility with Baptist church, farmhouses used to train foreign and domestic groups

Newly leaked Marine Corps’ documents detail yet another military urban training center that more closely resembles a small U.S. town than a foreign combat zone.

The document, entitled “Military Operations on Urban Terrain Collective Training Facility,” reveals the specifics of a mock 30-acre town located on Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

Originally built in 1990, new additions to the facility, including a Baptist church, a police station and several farmhouses, have transformed the layout of the once “international” town.

According to the military whistleblower who provided the documents to Infowars, U.S. Marines at the facility have been tasked with training soldiers, law enforcement agencies and Homeland Security in skills such as fighting in wooded areas, urban patrolling, forcible entry and night fighting techniques. The facility is also being used to cross train foreign troops from the United Nations and NATO. The whistleblower noted that the vast majority of Marines were opposed to the shift in training and specifically had issues with DHS agents.

An aerial photograph of the training center reveals the location of several new structures including a water treatment facility, railroad tracks and the aforementioned farmhouses and police station. Although the map makes no mention of the Baptist church, several accompanying photographs show the church’s location.

A seperate aerial photo shows several of the town’s other features including a bank, soccer field, a bridge capable of accommodating an “M-1 tank” and a high school. According to a 1989 press release that mentioned the facility’s original structures, the high school’s gymnasium “can be used as a holding area for ‘evacuees’ or as a detention center for prisoners of war.”

The facility’s continuous upgrades perfectly illustrate the establishment’s public shift towards targeting conservative Americans deemed “extremist.”

Just last February, the U.S. Army unveiled a similar 300-acre urban training center in Virginia, complete with a Baptist church and underground subway system nearly identical to one in Washington DC. After months of being stonewalled, Infowars’ reporters David Knight and Staff Sergeant Joe Biggs traveled to the facility this week and uncovered several other suspicious structures.

While attempting to locate military personnel for an interview, both Knight and Biggs were detained by police and escorted to the base’s headquarters. Alex Jones contacted Fort AP Hill’s public information officer, Bob McElroy, to learn the fate of his reporters and to inform McElroy of the facility’s nefarious background.

The growing emergence of military training centers that resemble small American towns is unsurprising given the U.S. military leadership’s vocal opposition to conservatives, libertarians and those who identify with the Tea Party.

Just last October, Army troops at Mississippi’s Camp Shelby blew the whistle after being told that the American Family Association, a well-known Christian ministry, was a domestic hate group in line with Neo-Nazis and the Ku Klux Klan. Support of traditional family values was deemed hateful according to the presentation.

That same month, Fort Hood soldiers receiving a pre-deployment briefing were told that Christians, anti-abortion activists and Tea Party supporters were a major terror threat to the country. Soldiers were warned that anyone supporting such groups could face discipline under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

Only months before in August 2013, conservative watchdog Judicial Watch obtained a Department of Defense training manual that listed supporters of “individual liberties” and “states’ rights” as likely “extremists” from “hate groups.”

A 2012 article in Forbes reviewed a report from the Small Wars Journal, where a retired U.S. Army Colonel and military historian explained “how the U.S. Military would crush a Tea Party rebellion.”

A leaked US Army Military Police training manual from 2012 entitled “Civil Disturbance Operations” brazenly outlined how the military would be used to confiscate firearms and kill Americans domestically during civil unrest. The manual also detailed how prisoners would be sent to temporary internment camps and “re-educated” to appreciate “U.S. policies” in accordance with U.S. Army FM 3-19.40 Internment/Resettlement Operations.

In April 2010, military soldiers in Kentucky trained to take on the Tea Party in a scenario surrounding protests against government health care.

Despite the growing number of training centers, the military has also begun increasing its presence in public with urban warfare drills. In 2012, Miami residents were shocked after military helicopters began firing blank machine gun rounds over the downtown area.

The nationwide program known as National Level Exercises 2009 (NLE 09) brought thousands of US and foreign troops onto American streets to train in martial law type scenarios. Each year, public information officials with the military, FEMA and Homeland Security refuse to divulge information surrounding the massive program.

In 2013, around two dozen soldiers practiced taking over the town of Gillett, Wisconsin in order to “conduct assessments” and meet with “local key leaders.” According to military officials, the operation enabled soldiers to “sharpen their skills” in advising the police chief on how to enhance the capabilities of local law enforcement.

In 2006, Infowars reported on the “clergy response team” FEMA program, which trains Pastors and other religious representatives to teach their congregations to “obey the government” during martial law by submitting to gun confiscation and forced relocation.

Homeland Security, who reportedly train in the mock town as well, have also frequently labeled countless mainline Americans as domestic terrorists. A 2012 study funded by the department deemed Americans who are “suspicious of centralized federal authority” and “reverent of individual liberty” to be “extreme right-wing” terrorists.

Similarly, police are also being trained to view supporters of limited government as dangerous. The 2009 MIAC report, a training manual leaked to Infowars from an anonymous Missouri police officer, lists Ron Paul supporters, libertarians, and members of the Constitution party as potential domestic extremists.

Police in Michigan trained to shoot and kill a “disgruntled military veteran” at the state’s Federal Correctional Institution last April as part of a multi-agency hostage drill. The scenario ended with the veteran being killed by militarized police in an armored military vehicle.

According to several people including former Navy SEAL Ben Smith, the Obama administration has asked top military brass if they would support orders to disarm and even fire upon U.S. citizens. Given the fact that the majority of military personnel align themselves with a conservative viewpoint, the apparent purge and demonization campaign is likely to intensify.

Alex speaks to a whistleblower nurse who worked in iraq and saw troops being given psych "suicide" drugs.
She also tells alex what kind of behavior the troops were displaying while on these drugs.

America leads to world in prison beds – for every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars.

For anyone paying attention, there is no shortage of issues that fundamentally challenge the underpinning moral infrastructure of American society and the values it claims to uphold. Under the conceptual illusion of liberty, few things are more sobering than the amount of Americans who will spend the rest of their lives in an isolated correctional facility – ostensibly, being corrected. The United States of America has long held the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing any other nation. For every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars. Presently, the prison population in America consists of more than six million people, a number exceeding the amount of prisoners held in the gulags of the former Soviet Union at any point in its history.

While miserable statistics illustrate some measure of the ongoing ethical calamity occurring in the detainment centers inside the land of the free, only a partial picture of the broader situation is painted. While the country faces an unprecedented economic and financial crisis, business is booming in other fields – namely, the private prison industry. Like any other business, these institutions are run for the purpose of turning a profit. State and federal prisons are contracted out to private companies who are paid a fixed amount to house each prisoner per day. Their profits result from spending the minimum amount of state or federal funds on each inmate, only to pocket the remaining capital. For the corrections conglomerates of America, prosperity depends on housing the maximum numbers of inmates for the longest potential time – as inexpensively as possible.

By allowing a profit-driven capitalist-enterprise model to operate over institutions that should rightfully be focused on rehabilitation, America has enthusiastically embraced a prison industrial complex. Under the promise of maintaining correctional facilities at a lower cost due to market competition, state and federal governments contract privately run companies to manage and staff prisons, even allowing the groups to design and construct facilities. The private prison industry is primarily led by two morally deficient entities, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation). These companies amassed a combined revenue of over $2.9 billion in 2010, not without situating themselves in the center of political influence.

The number of people imprisoned under state and federal custody increased 772% percent between 1970 and 2009, largely due to the incredible influence private corporations wield against the American legal system. Because judicial leniency and sentencing reductions threaten the very business models of these private corporations, millions have been spent lobbying state officials and political candidates in an effort to influence harsher “zero tolerance” legislation and mandatory sentencing for many non-violent offenses. Political action committees assembled by private correctional corporations have lobbied over 3.3 million dollars to the political establishment since 2001. An annual report released by the CCA in 2010 reiterates the importance of influencing legislation:

Considering today’s private prison population is over 17 times larger than the figure two decades earlier, the malleability of the judicial system under corporate influence is clear. The Corrections Corporation of America is the first and largest private prison company in the US, cofounded in 1983 by Tom Beasley, former Chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. The CCA entered the market and overtly exploited Beasley’s political connections in an attempt to exert control over the entire prison system of Tennessee. Today, the company operates over sixty-five facilities and owns contracts with the US Marshal Service, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Bureau of Prisons. The GEO Group operates 118 detention centers throughout the United States, South Africa, UK, Australia and elsewhere. Under its original name, the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation was synonymous for the sadistic abuse of prisoners in its facilities, resulting in the termination of several contracts in 1999.

Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this obstinate moral predicament presents itself in the private contracting of prisoners and their role in assembling vast quantities of military and commercial equipment. While the United States plunges itself into each new manufactured conflict under a wide range of fraudulent pretenses, it is interesting to note that all military helmets, ammunition belts, bulletproof vests, ID tags, uniforms, tents, bags and other equipment used by military occupation forces are produced by inmates in federal prisons across the US. Giant multinational conglomerates and weapons manufacturers such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon Corporation employ federal prison labor to cheaply assemble weapons components, only to sell them to the Pentagon at premium prices. At the lowest, Prisoners earn 17 cents an hour to assemble high-tech electronic components for guided missile systems needed to produce Patriot Advanced Capability 3 missiles and anti-tank projectiles.

In the past, political mouthpieces of the United States have criticized countries such as China and North Korea for their role in exploiting prisoner labor to create commodity products such as women’s bras and artificial flowers for export. Evidently, outsourcing the construction of the military equipment responsible for innumerable civilian causalities to the prisons of America warrants no such criticism from the military industrial establishment. In utter derision toward the integrity of the common worker, prison inmates are exposed to toxic spent ammunition, depleted uranium dust and other chemicals when contracted to clean and reassemble tanks and military vehicles returned from combat. Prison laborers receive no union protection, benefits or health and safety protection when made to work in electronic recycling factories where inmates are regularly exposed to lead, cadmium, mercury and arsenic.

In addition to performing tasks that can result in detrimental illnesses, prison labor produces other military utilities such as night-vision goggles, body armor, radio and communication devices, components for battleship anti-aircraft guns, land mine sweepers and electro-optical equipment. While this abundant source of low-cost manpower fosters greater incentives for corporate stockholders to impose draconian legislation on the majority of Americans who commit nonviolent offenses, it’s hard to imagine such an innately colossal contradiction to the nation’s official rhetoric, i.e. American values. Furthermore, prison labor is employed not only in the assembly of complex components used in F-15 fighter jets and Cobra helicopters, it also supplies 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services, with similar statistics in regard to products such as paints, stoves, office furniture, headphones, and speakers.

It is some twisted irony that large sections of the workforce in America’s alleged free-market are shackled in chains. Weapons manufactured in the isolation of America’s prisons are the source of an exploitative cycle, which leaves allied NATO member countries indebted to a multibillion-dollar weapons industry at the behest of the U.S. State Department and the Pentagon. Complete with its own trade exhibitions, mail-order catalogs and investment houses on Wall Street, the eminence of the private prison industry solidifies the ongoing corrosion of American principles – principles that seem more abstract now, than the day they were written.

Predictably, the potential profit of the prison labor boom has encouraged the foundations of US corporate society to move their production forces into American prisons. Conglomerates such as IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Victoria’s Secret, and Target have all begun mounting production operations in US prisons. Many of these Fortune 500 conglomerates are corporate members of civil society groups such as the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED). These think tanks are critical toward influencing American foreign policy. Under the guise of democracy promotion, these civil societies fund opposition movements and train dissent groups in countries around the world in the interest of pro-US regime change. With naked insincerity, the same companies that outsource the production of their products to American prisons simultaneously sponsor civil societies that demanded the release of Myanmar’s Aung San Suu Kyi from house arrest – an overly political effort in the on-going attempts to install a compliant regime in that country.

The concept of privatizing prisons to reduce expenses comes at great cost to the inmates detained, who are subjected to living in increasingly squalid conditions in jail cells across America. In 2007, the Texas Youth Commission (TYC) was sent to a West Texas juvenile prison run by GEO Group for the purpose of monitoring its quality standards. The monitors sent by the TYC were subsequently fired for failing to report the sordid conditions they witnessed in the facility while they awarded the GEO Group with an overall compliance score of nearly 100%. Independent auditors later visited the facility and discovered that inmates were forced to urinate or defecate in small containers due to a lack of toilets in some of the cells. The independent commission also noted in their list of reported findings that the facility racially segregated prisoners and disciplined Hispanics for speaking Spanish by denying their access to layers and medical treatment. It was later discovered that the TYC monitors were employed by the GEO Group. Troublingly, the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility (WGYCF) operated by the GEO Group in Mississippi has been subject to a class-action lawsuit after reports that staff members were complicit in the beating and stabbing of a prisoner who consequently incurred permanent brain damage. The official compliant authored by the ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center also highlights cases where the administration turned a blind eye to brutal cases of rape and torture within the facility.

The first private prison models were introduced following the abolishment of slavery after the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865, which saw expansive prison farms replace slave plantations. Prisons of the day contracted groups of predominately African-American inmates to pick cotton and construct railroads principally in southern states such as Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. In 2012, there are more African-Americans engrossed in the criminal-justice system than any point during slavery. Throughout its history, the American prison system has shared little with the concept of rehabilitation. Like the post-Civil War prison farms, today’s system functions to purport required labor, largely on a racially specific basis. African-Americans consist of 40% of the prison population and are incarcerated seven times more often than whites, despite the fact that African-Americans make up only 12% of the national population. Once released, former inmates are barred from voting in elections, denied educational opportunities and are legally discriminated against in their efforts to find employment and housing. Few can deny the targeting of underprivileged urban communities of color in America’s failed War on Drugs. This phenomenon can largely be contributed to the stipulations of its anti-drug legislation, which commanded maximum sentencing for possession of minute amounts of rock cocaine, a substance that floods poor inner-city black communities.

Unbeknown to the vast majority of Americans, the US government has been actively taking steps to modify the legal infrastructure of the country to allow for a dramatic expansion of the domestic prison system at the expense of civil rights. On December 31st, 2011, Barack Obama signed into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) H.R. 1540. Emulating the rouge military dictatorships the US Government has long condemned in its rhetoric, the NDAA introduces a vaguely worded legislation that allows for US citizens to be arbitrarily detained in military detention without due process – might they be predictably be deemed radical, conspiratorial or suspected of terrorism. In a climate of rising public discontent, the establishment media has steadfastly worked to blur the line between public activism and domestic extremism. In addition to the world’s largest network of prison facilities, over 800 located detainment camps exist in all regions of the United States with varying maximum capacities.

Facing economic stagnation, many Americans have been detained in responder camps as a consequence of publically demonstrating in accordance with the Occupy Wall Street movement launched in New York City. Under the guise of protecting Americans from a largely contrived and abstract threat of fundamentalist violence, citizens have been denied the right of peaceful assembly and placed in detainment apparatuses, managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Documents have been released by the American Civil Liberties Union detailing the Pentagon’s widespread monitoring of public demonstrations and the targeting of individual activists under threat of national security. Co-authored by Senator Joe Lieberman, the Enemy Expatriation Act (HR 3166) gives the US government the power to detain nationals and revoke their American citizenship under suspicion of behavior perceived as terrorism.

This legislation becomes increasingly more dangerous as citizens can be labeled domestic extremists based on their constitutionally protected activism or personal political leanings. In January 2006, a contract to construct detention facilities for the Department of Homeland Security worth a maximum of $385 million was awarded to KBR, a subsidiary of Haliburton. Following the signing of NDAA earlier in 2012, leaked documents reveal that KBR is now seeking to staff its detention centers and award contracts for services such as catering, temporary fencing and barricades, laundry and medical services, power generation, and refuse collection. It would be reasonable to assume that these facilities could be managed in partnership with private corporations such as the GEO Group or the CCA, as many federal and state penitentiaries privatize sections of their facilities to privately owned companies. Declassified US Army documents originally drafted in 1997 divulge the existence of inmate labor camps inside US military installations. It is all but unexpected that the relationship between the upper echelons of government and the private prison enterprise will grow increasingly more intimate in the current climate of prison industrial legislation.

The partnership between the United States government and its corporate associates spans various industries however, they all seek the common pursuit of profit irrespective of the moral and ethical consequence – the human consequence. The increasing influence of the Prison Industrial Complex towards official legislation and economic undertakings signifies a reprehensible threat to basic human rights. Perhaps the issuance of government legislation that leads offenders into detainment for the benefit of private shareholders is the purest embodiment of fascism, as cited in Mussolini’s vision of a Corporate State. Perhaps we all (this author included) fail to grasp the seriousness of these legislations and their implications on our lives.

Mumia Abu-Jamal has spent over three decades on death row in the throngs of the American prison system. Prior to his conviction in 1981 for the murder of a white police officer, Jamal was a political activist and President of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists. Critical evidence vindicating Jamal was withheld from the trial prior to the issuance of the death penalty. Forensic experts believe he was denied a fair trial. On December 7, 2011, the Philadelphia District Attorney announced that prosecutors would no longer seek the death penalty for Jamal. He remains imprisoned for life without parole and continues his work as a journalist from his jail cell in Pennsylvania.

Prison-Industrial Complex Buying Judges To Jail Kids
For Scratched Cars & Thrown Steaks

With well over 2 million people in jail - the U.S. has the world's biggest prison population. But some are seeing the inside of a cell because dodgy judges are getting payback from the private sector. RT's Gayane Chichakyan
reports on those dishing out justice for a fee.

PRISONS FOR AMERICAN VETERANS

DHS Has Now Acquired Enough Bullets To Wage 30 Year War!!

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DHS Has Now Acquired Enough Bullets
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