#prison conditions

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Less jail violence will cost money," The Province (Vancouver). November 28, 1983. Page 12. ---- The seven-hour prisoner rampage in Oakalla regional jail should help us to accept two ideas. First, violence in prisons is inevitable. Second, keeping it to a minimum will cost money.

By definition, prisons are violent places. Inmates are contained by force. Many of them are violent people. As well, prisoners are becoming more demanding as their rights are more clearly defined.

Canada, if not a hanging country, is certainly a jailing one. Our prisons, like those in the U.S. and Britain, are bulging. And this poses major problems for government.

Justice Minister Mark MacGuigan suggests judges should hand out tougher sentences to violent criminals but use fines, restitution and community work for non-violent criminals - the vast majority.

Solicitor-General Robert Kaplan is thinking of creating a "correctional community" at an abandoned mining village site at Tasu on Moresby Island, 200 km off B.C.'s northern coast. In plain English: a penal colony to exile criminals and their families to.

The public clamors for more jail sentences, for drunken drivers for example, which would strain the system just as much as any crime wave.

(Some heavy sentences have already been imposed recently. For example, the 60-day sentence of Vaughn Mondou, 34, for stealing a $3.65 roll of garlic sausage. He hanged himself in Oakalla last April.)

Prisoner welfare is not a great political cause at the best of times. B.C. Attorney General Brian Smith said last Wednesday's uprising was apparently the result of conditions at Oakalla, but he made no apology for them. Oakalla is 71 years old and its replacement has had varying degrees of priority for many years.

Yet prisoners, to quote Tommy Smith in Michael Jackson's recent book Prisoners in Isolation, "are not separated from society prisoners are on the bottom of the social ladder, but nevertheless are on that ladder."

In other words, they are still human beings. If we believe that jailing is the way to deal with lawbreakers, we have to be prepared to pay for humane institutions. Oakalla is not one of them.

[nando161mando]

capitalism is a disease

[firstoccupier]

Inside CECOT: El Salvador's Controversial Mega-Prison (Trigger Warning)

El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) is a mega-prison that has attracted global attention. Opened in February 2023, it can hold up to 40,000 inmates. This facility is part of President Nayib Bukele’s crackdown on gang violence. Bukele’s government built CECOT to combat the country’s rising crime rates, especially from gangs like MS-13. Inside the walls of the Centro de…

[mexicanistnet]

Experts highlight the growth of female incarceration and its devastating impact on mothers and their children living in prisons. Women, often sole caregivers driven to crime by poverty, face inadequate prison conditions for themselves and their kids.

[hellpuppetswithfleshymembers]

Fuck’s sake. It’s all just getting worse.

[damnmydooah]

"black hole of human rights" wtf

[archaalen]

https://apnews.com/article/minnesota-stillwater-prison-lockdown-ece94ba0028ad02f4721361170728c81

Minnesota prison on lockdown after about 100 inmates 'refuse' to return to cells amid a heat wave

[trans-axolotl]

nothing makes me more insane than the phrase "selling your body" btw. like was i not also selling my body at every other job i've had where i had to be on my feet all day, lifting boxes, working in a warehouse, etc. why is it that sex work is uniquely labeled as "selling your body" while every other job is sorted into another category, no matter how much that job might have a physical impact on your body. lmao.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"5 'outsiders' picked for jail tribunal," Vancouver Sun. April 11, 1980. Page 3. --- By ROBERT SARTI Five "outsiders" have been selected as the first citizen participants in the administration of justice inside the walls of the Oakalla regional correctional centre in Burnaby.

The five will serve in a volunteer capacity on the Oakalla remand unit's "warden's court" the tribunal that judges prisoners accused of infractions of prison rules.

The volunteers include a retired teacher, a restaurant owner, a youth worker and a lawyer. Under the experimental setup. they are the first members of the public to sit on a warden's court in a B.C. provincial institution.

Appointment of independent arbiters from outside the institution was a key demand of prisoners in the remand unit who staged a sit-down strike and cell smash-up earlier this year. The prisoners complained that the court, which up to now has consisted only of an Oakalla supervisor and a guard, was biased against them and wouldn't allow them to present evidence in their own defence.

Infractions over which the court has jurisdiction include disobeying orders and possession of contraband, such as drugs and weapons.

The court can reprimand a prisoner, order "loss of privileges" such as recreation time, or pass a sentence of up to 30 days of solitary confinement.

The remand unit houses only prisoners awaiting trial or sentencing.

Kay Elliott, head of the Oakalla Citizens' Advisory Committee, which is appointed by the B.C. Corrections Branch, said Thursday the five new members will sit on the court on a rotating basis, and will have a full vote. The court will consist of three members two from prison staff and one independent arbiter.

Asked what would happen if they found themselves dissatisfied with the quality of justice inside the walls, Elliott said "the outsiders expect no interference from either side, administration or inmates we'll just have to play it by ear."

She said the committee was asked six weeks ago by Oakalla warden Henry Bjarnson to come up with a list of names for the post.

Elliott said the five new members were chosen by the committee on the basis of their "interest, background and availability."

"We were looking for individuals who who were fair-minded, compassionate and with an interest in corrections," she said.

"They also had to be available mornings, when the court sits, and have had some experience in community work or on boards or committees."

Elliott declined to identify the new members, pending the official start of the re-structured court as soon as Oakalla officials can make the arrangements.

She said the CAC consulted both the administration and the prisoners' commit tee on restructuring the court.

"We are going to insist on due process in the court," she said. "Prisoners will be able to call witnesses in their own defence."

She said Bjarnson had expressed hope that the "pilot project" could eventually be extended to other units of the prison.

"We'll take this just as far as he wants it to go," she said.

A member of the prisoners' committee said in an interview that hard feelings about the warden's court were a major source of tension in the remand unit, where

prisoners who are unable to make bail must often wait for months in an air of uncertainty.

"All we want is that the law be applied on the inside the way it is on the outside," he said. "An independent presence on the court can help assure that."

Ted Harrison, Vancouver regional director of corrections, said today that the attorney-general's department is now completing the paperwork necessary to formally designate Oakalla as a suitable location for the experiment. Meanwhile, he said, Bjarnson is briefing the CAC nominees.

[opencommunion]

please read & share on all platforms. Palestinian resistance groups have asked us to pay close attention to the plight of imprisoned Palestinians, as the occupation believes that since all eyes are on Gaza they can abuse and assassinate prisoners out of sight

Statement issued by the Office of Martyrs, Prisoners, and the Wounded of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, via RNN Prisoners:

“Horrific testimonies about the crimes committed by the occupation and prison administration against prisoners and detainees in its jails.

The information and data we receive from inside zionist prisons about the systematic crimes committed by the occupation's prison administration against prisoners, since October 7th, are terrifying. There is a systematic decision to assassinate the prisoners through punitive measures carried out by the prison service, and evidence of this is the martyrdom of several prisoners.

The magnitude of crimes, both collective and individual assaults on prisoners—which occur during the raids on sections and cells and which are continuously escalating—is alarming, in addition to the adoption of a starvation policy against them, as the prisoners only have tuna, corn, and sometimes inedible eggs as food.

The aggression against the prisoners began on October 7th. The prisoners face ongoing aggression, with continuous punitive operations and retaliatory measures affecting them and their families.

The Office of Martyrs, Prisoners, and the Wounded for the PFLP is closely following the issues of prisoners and detainees, which is challenging. We consider the silence of human rights, humanitarian, and international institutions unjustifiable. They must fulfill their humanitarian duty and what their conscience dictates, obliging the occupation to respect international laws and conventions established for this purpose. We hold them fully responsible for their lives.

The Office highlights the measures that the prison administration continues to impose on prisoners. The prison administration cuts off electricity to the prisoners' cells and rooms, deliberately cuts off their water supply, enforces a starvation policy, has withdrawn food supplies from prisoner sections, reduced meals to two times a day, closed the canteen, and deprived prisoners of other basic necessities.

Furthermore, heavily armed suppression forces raid all prisoners' sections and rooms, maltreat them, physically assault them, and use police dogs. They have escalated policies of depriving prisoners of medical treatment, forbidding visits from families and lawyers, and denying them treatment in hospitals, especially for sick prisoners. The prison administration also reduced the space available to a prisoner inside a cell, where the number of prisoners in one cell reached more than ten, and many prisoners were transferred to solitary cells. Solitary confinement was imposed on prisoners and some sections were isolated from others.

We note that the prison administration has removed available television sets and electrical appliances, destroyed all of the prisoners' belongings, confiscated their clothes, leaving only one change of clothing for each prisoner. They have also confiscated radios, blankets, and shoes from them, prevented them from bathing and going to the courtyard, closed the sinks used for washing, and carried out collective transfer operations, including moving prisoners from one section to another and from one prison to another.

We, in the Office of Martyrs, Prisoners, and the Wounded of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, want to reassure our people that the General Secretary of the Popular Front, the comrade, leader, and prisoner Ahmed Saadat, and his comrades are well. They are at the heart of the battle with the prison administration, and they will achieve a great victory over the jailer and will soon gain their freedom. We are closely following all the developments inside the prisons, as well as the ongoing communications and negotiations for a prisoner exchange process being carried out by the Palestinian resistance to empty the prisons and release all the prisoners.

Freedom to our heroic prisoners.

Glory and eternity to the martyrs.

Speedy recovery to the wounded.

Victory is the ally of our people, and the occupation will inevitably come to an end.”

[thelawfulchaotic]

Welcome to Part 4 of How Does Court Work Anyway???

Previous parts (1: Investigations and why police are bad at them, 2: Bond, pretrial probation, and counsel at first appearance, and 3: preliminary hearings, the fuck is a grand jury, and trials) all available.

Welcome to Sentencing: who is a nolle prosecui, this math isn’t mathing, jail vs. prison, and The Stank.

And yes, I take questions, for the curious and for authors/etc. hit me up.

—

Here are some good ways a case can end.

If a jury (or a judge) finds you "not guilty" or "dismisses" the charge, you are free to go.

Here is a somewhat good way a case can end.

You are also free to go if the prosecution makes a motion for nolle prosecui that is granted. A nolle prosecui is the prosecutor saying, I want to drop the charges. Technically, a prosecutor has to have "good cause" for this motion; this is because a charge that has been NP'd can be brought back (with the defendant rearrested, going through the whole bond process again).

Prosecutors have, in fact, used this to get around deadlines for speedy trial. If they can't get their witnesses here for the trial date that's 4 ½ months in, they might just NP the case instead of risking losing it to a speedy trial deadline. Then, a few months later, when they have their witnesses, they bring it to another Grand Jury, indictment issued, defendant arrested – lo and behold, it's gonna be another four months waiting in jail before trial.

In some jurisdictions, prosecutors can get only a certain amount of tries before the case is dismissed "with prejudice." This means that it cannot be brought back. In my jurisdiction, there is no magic number. If the prosecutor can justify it ("it's not my fault, Your Honor, that the witness went on the run to North Carolina") then maybe they can bring it back over and over again. Doesn't stop them from asking each time to hold the defendant without bond, because they know how much of a strategic advantage it is for them.

How about if the jury, or the judge at a bench trial, found you guilty?

Now you go to a sentencing hearing. At a bench trial, in front of a judge, it might just happen right then: the judge knows the facts, now she takes a look at the criminal history of the defendant and the sentencing guidelines and makes a choice.

Wait, rewind. What are sentencing guidelines?

–

Let's have a little history lesson.

Before the 1980s, my jurisdiction had a parole system. This is the system you're used to seeing in movies, especially older movies: prisoners are sentenced to an obscene amount of time, but after a certain number of years they can go before a parole board and make a case as to why they should be released. This is Shawshank Redemption shit.

Parole boards have flaws. They are vulnerable to being manipulated in many ways; inmates have no counsel at parole hearings; parole boards are racist (of course, isn't everything); there was no consistency in the sentences people were serving; etc.

Because of this, the state decided to reform to abolish parole. Instead, it became probation-centric, under a Truth in Sentencing system. The name is ironic, as you'll come to find out. Instead of parole boards reviewing after a certain period of time, the judge would sentence the person both to their total possible sentence and to the amount they would serve right away. The difference between the two was suspended time.

Okay, I know that sounds like a lot of nonsense. Here's how it works in practice.

Jane commits a grand larceny. Jane has a record. Jane takes a plea for one year of active jail time. The plea agreement says: Jane is sentenced to 3 years of jail time, with 2 years suspended on condition of 2 years of supervised probation. What happens is 2 of the 3 years are "suspended" – hanging over her head, as the judges like to say – so if she messes up on supervised probation, those years can be imposed. Jane serves 1 year and then she is released. She then has 2 years of supervised probation. If she adheres to their strict and arbitrary rules, she never has to serve those other 2 years.

In the former parole based system, Jane might be sentenced to 3 years with parole available after 1 year.

Wait, you say, so it doesn't fucking matter what they do in jail? If they get rehabilitated?

Of course it does. Though nobody is getting rehabilitated. Good behavior in jail – defined as failing to get any serious incidents or new charges – gives people a certain percentage of time off. (Working for steeply discounted wages in for-profit jails and prisons can also do this! You can slave labor part of your sentence away! Love the personal empowerment!) Before 2020ish, around here, that percentage was ~15% (not quite but close enough; the way they calculate it, you're actually sentenced to 115% of the sentence you serve, which makes it closer to 14%, but whatever) on a felony, and 50% on a misdemeanor. Yes, misdemeanor time is half off. Now, those percentages have changed; violent crimes are at ~15%, the rest at ~35%, misdemeanors still at 50%.

So, now, under Truth-In-Sentencing, Jane is sentenced to 3y/2y suspended. She serves 1y – no, wait, 1y is changed to 7 months and 27 days. She serves 7m – no, hang on, she's working for cheap mopping the hallway at a private jail, so that's another 30 days off. She serves 6 months, 27 days, and she's out. Mission accomplished! Sentencing is so much clearer now!

This is hoodwinking magic. Politicians still want to be able to say that they are tough on crime, but they also don't want to pay for people to be in prison. So with all these little tricks of bookkeeping, "we sentenced people to years in prison" is true but "these people served a little more than half that time" is also true. This is stupid. It's an excuse not to confront the overwhelming damage of the justice system by hiding it in the numbers.

But, on the other hand, my jurisdiction's prison numbers have dropped in the last year and we're one of the only states in America that did, so.

–

So what are guidelines, because you never said.

Sentencing guidelines are recommended sentences for crimes with similar defendants, based on what those defendants have been sentenced to or what they served under the parole system.

In other words, it's a statistical summary of what People Like This have to do for Crimes Like That: it's a perpetuation of our system as it is, codified. Judges are required to fall between the low end (the 25th percentile) and the high end (the 75th percentile) or they have to find a specific reason why they deviated.

If a judge wants to be less harsh, then they need to justify it to the legislature later on.

There is no other scientific basis for the guidelines in my state. They have recently added things like risk levels, recidivism potential, and the potential of dropping the low end of the guidelines 2 years if the defendant shows "acceptance of responsibility."

What happens in a sentencing hearing?

Leading up to the hearing, the probation/parole agency completes a presentence investigation, and they call it something like "presentence investigation report" or "social history" or "risk assessment." This covers basic history of the defendant (filled in via questionnaire that was mailed to the defendant), adds in any victim impact statements, and mixes it all up with the police version of events. It also has a full copy of the defendant's record, which often erroneously contains juvenile charges that should have been expunged.

Based on this report, and the guidelines, the judge decides what to sentence.

Oh, you're allowed to call witnesses. Sometimes they even make a difference! A real triumph in a sentencing hearing is knowing that you swayed the judge, even a little.

There's also the potential of being sentenced by a jury, if you want. And I promise, you do not want.

What is the trial penalty?

I mentioned this last post, but let's dig in now.

People who go to trial and lose get bigger sentences than people who plead guilty. This used to be even more true than it is now. Why?

1) People who plead guilty have bargained for lower sentences. This is true.

2) People who go to trial essentially can't get the "acceptance of responsibility" change in their guidelines.

3) Judges get mad at people who clog up the dockets with "frivolous" trials.

4) How it used to be was that juries did the sentencing in jury trials. This was horrendous, for many reasons!

a - At first, attorneys were forbidden from even telling juries that parole had been abolished!

b - Once they were allowed to say that parole was abolished, they were not allowed to explain the system that had taken its place. That's because –

c - JURIES CANNOT SUSPEND JAIL TIME. Judges can! But juries cannot. So if the sentence range for a crime is 5-20 years, a judge can sentence someone to 5y with all 5y suspended – essentially, no active jail time. A jury's FLOOR for the same crime would be 5 active years.

d - Juries are not allowed to see the sentencing guidelines and are not allowed to know what an appropriate sentence for a similar crime would be.

Juries land above judges on sentence a truly significant part of the time (I think it tends to shake out that juries are harsher ⅔ to ¾ of the time). So, the way it used to be was that jury trials were a huge gamble – win big, or lose enormous. Now you can have judge sentencing with a jury trial. You still have the other couple problems with the trial penalty.

And anyone who opts for a trial is probably going to spend more time in jail awaiting their court date than someone who goes for a plea. That's just how scheduling works. Trials also require more preparation and work. There's no way to change that, I think.

–

Sentencing Ranges

In my jurisdiction, misdemeanors carry up to 1 year in jail (so, six months, at 50% – Truth In Sentencing!!) and felonies are crimes that carry any more than that. I hear that there are places where misdemeanors go to 2 years and places where misdemeanors don't go up to 1 year. Who truly fucking knows.

Felonies here also carry a range of classifications, from Class 6 (0-5 years in prison) to Class 1 (life).

Jail vs. Prison

Jail is sentences for misdemeanors or less than a year (around here). Jail is local, chaotic, and contains many people awaiting trial. Jail is also shit and the people in it are treated like shit. They are also shamelessly exploited on every level. Most jails now have tablets that inmates can have. This is not a luxury. It is so that they can charge inmates $1 for every picture they send and $.50 for every text message. Pure profit.

Prison is for sentences longer than a year. It ranges in classification, generally, from low security to high security to solitary confinement 23/24 hours. People in prison are often treated better than people in jail, fucking buck wild, I know, but my clients are usually pretty eager to get moved on to the Department of Corrections. In prison they can get better commissary, they have more stability, some places they can get radios and little tvs.

Why does jail/prison exist?

I don't imagine many of you actually asked this question, and maybe seeing it in black and white will bring it home that jail and prison actually don't have to exist. There was a time before jails and prisons, where people got whipped, maimed, humiliated, or killed for justice; prisons were supposed to be a more humane alternative.

Prisons, in theory, had four purposes.

1) Punishment. Prison does punish. Unfortunately, as dog and dolphin trainers figured out like a century ago, punishment doesn't actually get good results, and it has a lot of negative effects. It feels good, to the person doing the punishing. It feels satisfying. It is self-reinforcing, in that way. We expect that people change their behavior in response to punishment. They don't, really; they become more covert, they become more ashamed, and they do bad behaviors more, because they believe now that they are bad. Positive reinforcement of desired behaviors is shockingly effective to produce long-term change, and the positive reinforcement can be simple and small.

Yes, I'm telling you that it's time to let go of the idea of punishment, completely and wholeheartedly. There is no room for punishment in a society striving for improvement. It does not work. You may think I'm full of shit when I say this. Please just remember that it was said, and think about it every now and then. Think about the consequences people suffer for crimes that go above and beyond any kind of punishment. Think of a world where, instead of blaming a criminal for their behavior, we gather together and tell them: how did we fail you? Because there are places in this world that are like that.

But prison isn't just punishment. The idea is larger than that.

2) Rehabilitation – maybe you come out a better citizen? This does not happen in American prisons especially, because if you treat people worse than animals and tell them they deserve nothing, they start to believe you after a while. Programs are scarce and out of the ordinary. This, admittedly, is better even than it was eight years ago. And that was better than it was eight years before that. We used to send people to boot camp-style programs for Getting Straight (not in the sexual orientation way, but maybe also in the sexual orientation way). We did figure out that boot camps increased recidivism, not decreased. Oops.

3) Incapacitation. This is the only purpose of prison that is often achieved: while someone is in prison, they're generally not committing new crimes on the street. For an incredibly, incredibly small proportion of offenders – serial rapists, serial abusers, and serial killers – incapacitation can prove a godsend. Unfortunately, we as a society wildly overestimate the numbers of these people who will offend forever, and we pass laws that lock up people forever for shaky reasons. These draconian overreactions have gotten us policies like Three Strikes, which manage to lock people up for the rest of their life just about when they're statistically gonna stop offending, or laws that allow for the imposition of life sentences on crimes that previously didn't allow for it. Most recently, there is a new law in response to a murder committed by an undocumented immigrant who was out on bond. The solution, clearly, according to the legislature, is to make sure that no one undocumented can get bond ever again, whether they were convicted of a charge or just accused of one.

Yes, if an undocumented person is charged with any kind of crime, they can now be taken into ICE custody and disappeared before the chance to prove their innocence.

4) Deterrence. Two types of deterrence – specific (man I got sent to jail last time for this so I'm not doing it again) and general (people get sent to jail for this, I'm not doing it). It seems like this should work, but it doesn't, not really, or at least it doesn't to the amount that people think it does, or maybe it's based on the likelihood of being caught instead of the likelihood of high prison time. Or maybe it's just because people literally don't know what the normal penalty is for any given crime.

So prison doesn't stop people from doing the crime beforehand, even though it does stop people while they're in prison. It doesn't make people better. It does punish them, but punishment is creating a cycle of pain and deprivation felt far beyond individual inmates and far beyond their families. It destroys generations.

What is jail/prison like?

Boredom, frustration, and terror, I gather. It smells like the worst of high school BO plus old people plus cafeteria food with a strong overtone of bleach. It's gross.

They ignore medical issues until they're life-threatening. (Actual quote: "We're just here to keep you alive." Said, ironically, after three inmates died in three days in the local jail.) A psychiatrist visits by video once a month in the one I'm most familiar with; this is considered pretty progressive and innovative.

Many of them have eliminated in-person visitation in favor of video visitation. No, that doesn't mean you can do it on your phone from home. It means you drive to the jail and set up where there formerly was in-person visitation, and instead of your loved one sitting across the glass from you, a screen turns on and they're in their pod.

Jail charges people money per day to be there. It will come out of whatever cash they had on them when they were arrested, or it will be billed later. It was very controversial when our state passed some laws preventing this kind of debt from suspending someone's driver's license.

It isn't legal to jack it, because everywhere in a prison legally counts as a public place and public masturbation is a crime.

I don't know. I've never been in jail or prison. I just visit. Often. The smell lingers. What I see there just haunts me. There's no reason a guy locked in a room across from me has to have cuffs on in order to talk with me over the stupid little phone. There's no reason the guy I'm preparing a jury with has to be cuffed to the fucking wall while I'm at a table with him in person.

What haunts me the worst is when addicts look healthier and happier after weeks or months in prison. No one ever uses drugs except to escape something. What were they escaping that makes prison look like a sanctuary?

I know I've said this, but, again, it's the constant background noise. You become accustomed to holding a piece of paper steady so a man in handcuffs shackled to his waist can stand up far enough to sign it. You pull out the chair for him, because God knows while he's doing the penguin shuffle he can't do it himself. You carefully and deliberately make sure that your body language is open towards your client and closed towards the court, because the court needs to know that you aren't scared or grossed out or appalled by your client. You get good at telling him via gestures alone how he needs to dial his inmate number on the phone in order to connect to your side of the glass, because you've had to do it for eight years. You let their pain pass through you, because if you hold on to it, you won't have room for anything else.

idk y'all, I've kind of written myself out on this one. Join me next time for supervised probation and how it's destroyed black and poor neighborhoods, families, and culture.

[supjello]

Interview through the prison fence with Luigi’s fellow inmates!

[monostardust]

*sighs* Silco, Silco he's, he was a good father to Jinx yeah I mean sure not perfect but he did everything he could to raise and stabilize Jinx's fragile and chaotic mental stability the way he knew how. Silco sees himself in Jinx but he knows she's far more troubled than him. He tries to help her overcome her trauma the only way he knows how by telling her how he overcame his. He's not perfect he's most definitely not the ideal father but for a villain I gotta give credit where it's due. Unlike other villains he actually loved and cared for Jinx. She's his baby, the only one he has a soft spot for. He really loved that little girl, his daughter, the one he trusted the most, his only successor. I also think he was similar to Jinx with how he despised Vi like how Jinx despised Caitlyn. Silco hated Vi thinking she's just like Vander, a traitor, someone who abandoned Jinx. I guess that's why he wanted her dead. In his mind he really thinks Vi is nothing more than that, that she's just someone who'll continue to hurt his kid and that's why she gotta go.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Greedflation, but for prisoners

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Apr 21) in TORINO, then Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Today in "Capitalists Hate Capitalism" news: The Appeal has published the first-ever survey of national prison commissary prices, revealing just how badly the prison profiteer system gouges American's all-time, world-record-beating prison population:

https://theappeal.org/locked-in-priced-out-how-much-prison-commissary-prices/

Like every aspect of the prison contracting system, prison commissaries – the stores where prisoners are able to buy food, sundries, toiletries and other items – are dominated by private equity funds that have bought out all the smaller players. Private equity deals always involve gigantic amounts of debt (typically, the first thing PE companies do after acquiring a company is to borrow heavily against it and then pay themselves a hefty dividend).

The need to service this debt drives PE companies to cut quality, squeeze suppliers, and raise prices. That's why PE loves to buy up the kinds of businesses you must spend your money at: dialysis clinics, long-term care facilities, funeral homes, and prison services.

Prisoners, after all, are a literal captive market. Unlike capitalist ventures, which involve the risk that a customer will take their business elsewhere, prison commissary providers have the most airtight of monopolies over prisoners' shopping.

Not that prisoners have a lot of money to spend. The 13th Amendment specifically allows for the enslavement of convicted criminals, and so even though many prisoners are subject to forced labor, they aren't necessarily paid for it:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

Six states ban paying prisoners anything. North Carolina caps prisoners' pay at one dollar per day. Nationally, prisoners earn $0.52/hour, while producing $11b/year in goods and services:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

So there's a double cruelty to prison commissary price-gouging. Prisoners earn far less than any other kind of worker, and they pay vastly inflated prices for the necessities of life. There's also a triple cruelty: prisoners' families – deprived of an incarcerated breadwinner's earnings – are called upon to make up the difference for jacked up commissary prices out of their own strained finances.

So what does prison profiteering look like, in dollars and sense? Here's the first-of-its-kind database tracking the costs of food, hygiene items and religious items in 46 states:

https://theappeal.org/commissary-database/

Prisoners rely heavily on commissaries for food. Prisons serve spoiled, inedible food, and often there isn't enough to go around – prisoners who rely on the food provided by their institutions literally starve. This is worst in prisons where private equity funds have taken over the cafeteria, which is inevitable accompanied by swingeing cuts to food quality and portions:

https://theappeal.org/prison-food-virginia-fluvanna-correctional-center/

So you have one private equity fund starving prisoners, and another that's gouging them on food. Or sometimes it's the same company. Keefe Group, owned by HIG Capital, provides commissaries to prisons whose cafeterias are managed by other HIG Capital portfolio companies like Trinity Services Group. HIG also owns the prison health-care company Wellpath – so if they give you food poisoning, they get paid twice.

Wellpath delivers "grossly inadequate healthcare":

https://theappeal.org/massachusetts-prisons-wellpath-dentures-teeth/

And Trinity serves "meager portions of inedible food":

https://theappeal.org/clayton-county-jail-sheriff-election/

When prison commissaries gouge on food, no part of the inventory is spared, even the cheapest items. In Florida, a packet of ramen costs $1.06, 300% more inside the prison than it does at the Target down the street:

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24444312-fl_doc_combined_commissary_lists#document/p6/a2444049

America's prisoners aren't just hungry, they're also hot. The climate emergency is sending temperatures in America's largely un-air-conditioned prisons soaring to dangerous levels. Commissaries capitalize on this, too: an 8" fan costs $40 in Delaware's Sussex Correctional Institution. In Georgia, that fan goes for $32 (but prisoners are not paid for their labor in Georgia pens). And in scorching Texas, the commissary raised the price of water by 50% last summer:

https://www.tpr.org/criminal-justice/2023-07-20/texas-charges-prisoners-50-more-for-water-for-as-heat-wave-continues

Toiletries are also sold at prices that would make an airport gift-shop blush. Need denture adhesive? That's $12.28 in an Idaho pen, triple the retail price. 15% of America's prisoners are over 55. The Keefe Group – sister company to the "grossly inadequate" healthcare company Wellpath – operates that commissary. In Oregon, the commissary charges a 200% markup on hearing-aid batteries. Vermont charges a 500% markup on reading glasses. Imagine spending decades in prison: toothless, blind, and deaf.

Then there's the religious items. Bibles and Christmas cards are surprisingly reasonable, but a Qaran will run you $26 in Vermont, where a Bible is a mere $4.55. Kufi caps – which cost $3 or less in the free world – go for $12 in Indiana prisons. A Virginia prisoner needs to work for 8 hours to earn enough to buy a commissary Ramadan card (you can buy a Christmas card after three hours' labor).

Prison price-gougers are finally facing a comeuppance. California's new BASIC Act caps prison commissary markups at 35% (California commissaries used to charge 63-200% markups):

https://theappeal.org/price-gouging-in-california-prisons-newsom-signature/

Last year, Nevada banned any markup on hygiene items:

https://www.leg.state.nv.us/App/NELIS/REL/82nd2023/Bill/10425/Overview

And prison tech monopolist Securus has been driven to the brink of bankruptcy, thanks to the activism of Worth Rises and its coalition partners:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/08/money-talks/

When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time. Prisons show us how businesses would treat us if they could get away with it.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/20/captive-market/#locked-in

[reminder-that]

I wish I could explain why I love these things so much.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"UNION LEADER RECALLS: No Oakalla dining room, just cold beans in a cell," Vancouver Sun. June 6, 1970. Page 3. ---- By JES ODAM Being a union leader in jail is a dish of cold beans in your cell and a quick move to a forestry camp on the eve of a prison inspection.

At least, this is the way Jeff Power, president of the Marine Workers and Boilermakers Union, found it in 1966 when he was jailed for three months after being found guilty of criminal contempt of court.

The action arose from demonstrations outside the Burnaby plant of Lenkurt Electric after an injunction had been issued.

Three other city labor leaders accompanied Power to jail - Paddy Neale, secretary of Vancouver Labor Council; Tom Clarke, now dead, but at that time vice-president of the Vancouver local of the International Woodworkers of America, and Art O'Keeffe, former business agent of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

Their sentences varied from Power's three months up to six months for Neale and Clarke and four months for O'Keeffe.

"We were taken into Oakalla at night," Power recalled Friday.

"They switched us into prison clothing, put us in two-men cells and gave us cold beans to eat.

"Art (O'Keeffe) was in the cell with me and said he guessed we would be taken into the dining room in the morning, but I knew he was in for a surprise.

"In the morning they marched us down two or three levels to get our food and then back to the cell again to eat it.

"We were shifted out of Oakalla pretty quick to a forestry camp near Chilliwack.

"At first they said they would not send us to a camp but there was a group of people due to come round to look at the conditions and they shifted us out quick before they arrived." Power added.

He said Oakalla is a pretty rough place to be.

"I rode freight trains in the 30s but there's nothing worse than Oakalla," he added. "It is unbelievable."

Power said his union has wired federal Justice Minister John Turner requesting him to look at the actions of B.C. courts.

"We think they are actions in violation of all civil rights," he added.

He said in the case of jailed towboat negotiator Arnold Davis, the court heard the views of the company involved - MacMillan Bloedel Ltd.-but not those of the 2,200 MасMillan Bloedel employees affected by the Canadian Merchant Service Guild picket line.

"They (the employees) probably approved of the picket line," he said.