How many innocent people are there in prison? (source : innocenceproject.org)
We will never know for sure, but the few studies that have been done estimate that between 2.3% and 5% of all prisoners in the U.S. are innocent (for context, if just 1% of all prisoners are innocent, that would mean that more than 20,000 innocent people are in prison).
More broadly, we know that innocent people are often identified as suspects by law enforcement and that DNA testing often clears them before they go to trial, but that DNA testing is impossible in the vast majority of criminal cases. In approximately 25% of cases where DNA testing was done by the FBI during the course of investigations, suspects were excluded by the testing. That doesn’t mean we believe 25% of convictions are in error, but when coupled with the fact that DNA testing is only possible in 5-10% of all criminal cases, it shows that science cannot always clear innocent suspects, which can result in wrongful convictions.”
Another growing problem in the USA, where so many people are falsely put away, without having proper testing done, so many have been convicted of hearsay, or just by looking up things, Prosecutors have found ways of using everything that people do against them, and that is violating a persons’ rights. Also the Police have found ways of being sneaky and lying about those that wait in prison by lying to others claiming they confessed to crimes that they did not make, to which this is has to stop! As these innocent people are sitting in these cells, as their lives are being wasted and loved ones suffering of the loss of not having loved ones with them, you have tons of sex offenders roaming around these streets, to where our children can not go outside anymore alone. Many sex offenders will even admit that they know they will commit the crime again, so why is it that they have more rights than these innocent prisoners do, and our children?
Many states in the USA don’t like to admit to being at fault to which this is what is keeping innocent people behind bars. I don’t understand how the police can sit here and put away bad drug dealers but than again, let other drug dealers still do what they do, as to which others get paid. When is this corruption going to stop? As innocent people have been put away, it’s hurting the people more than helping, due to it’s the taxpayers money that is helping to supply the prisons. Just like the cases where a little girl was killed and they pressured the brother into admitting that he did it when in fact that he didn’t. Or when someone is convicted of shooting another, but yet their was no gunshot residue on his hands, or even evidence of a gun being in the car, but yet he was convicted and has spent 14 years so far. Even talking to guards that transport prisoners, I was told that it he got screwed. They are supposed to be using DNA testing to clear prisoners, but yet you only see a few results here and their. When it comes down to it, it does not pay, to keep innocent people in prison.
This all needs to change and better solutions need to be found and this all needs to be fixed to where only the true ones that should be behind bars are convicted. . So much corruption that is found each day. And only We the People can make these changes by standing up for our Rights and the innocent people that are behind bars.
“Prison Industrial Complex” (PIC) is a term used to attribute the rapid expansion of the US inmate population to the political influence of private prison companies and businesses that supply goods and services to government prison agencies. The term is analogous to the military–industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of in his famous 1961 farewell address. Such groups include corporations that contract prison labor, construction companies, surveillance technology vendors, lawyers, and lobby groups that represent them. Activists have described the Prison-Industrial Complex as perpetuating a belief that imprisonment is a quick fix to underlying social problems such as homelessness, unemployment, drug addiction, mental illness, and illiteracy.
Jailing Americans for Profit: The Rise of the Prison Industrial Complex (source : huffingtonpost.com)
“Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today — perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system — in prison, on probation, or on parole — than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America — more than six million — than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.” — Adam Gopnik, “The Caging of America”
In an age when freedom is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business. At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, the flawed yet retributive American “system of justice” is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.
As author Adam Gopnik reports for the New Yorker:
A growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.
By the Numbers: The U.S.’s Growing For-Profit Detention Industry (source : www.propublica.org)
The growth of the private detention industry has long been a subject of scrutiny. A recent eight-part series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune chronicled how more than half of Louisiana’s 40,000 inmates are housed in prisons run by sheriffs or private companies as part of a broader financial incentive scheme. The detention business goes beyond just criminal prisoners.
As a Huffington Post investigation pointed out last month, nearly half of all immigrant detainees are now held in privately run detention facilities. Just this week, the New York Times delved into lax oversight at industrial-sized but privately run halfway houses in New Jersey.
We’ve taken a look at some of the numbers associated with the billion-dollar and wide-ranging for-profit detention industry—and the two companies that dominate the market:
General Statistics:
1.6 million: Total number of state and federal prisoners in the United States as of December 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics
128,195: Number of state and federal prisoners housed in private facilities as of December 2010
37: percent by which number of prisoners in private facilities increased between 2002 and 2009
217,690: Total federal inmate population as of May 2012, according to the Bureau of Prisons
27,970: Number of federal inmates in privately managed facilities within the Bureau of Prisons
33,330: Estimated size of detained immigrant population as of 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security
Corrections Corporation of America
66: number of facilities owned and operated by Corrections Corporation of America, the country’s largest private prison company based on number of facilities
91,000: number of beds available in CCA facilities across 20 states and the District of Columbia
$1.7 billion: total revenue recorded by CCA in 2011
$17.4 million: lobbying expenditures in the last 10 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics
$1.9 million: total political contributions from years 2003 to 2012, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics
$3.7 million: executive compensation for CEO Damon T. Hininger in 2011
132: recorded number of inmate-on-inmate assaults at CCA-run Idaho Correctional Center between Sept. 2007 and Sept. 2008
42: recorded number of inmate-on-inmate assaults at the state-run Idaho State Correctional Institution in the same time frame (both prisons at the time held about 1,500 inmates)
The Geo Group, Inc., the U.S.’s second largest private detention company
$1.6 billion: total revenue in year 2011, according to its annual report
65: number of domestic correctional facilities owned and operated by Geo Group, Inc.
65,716: number of beds available in Geo Group, Inc.’s domestic correctional facilities
$2.5 million: lobbying expenditures in the last 8 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics
$2.9 million: total political contributions from years 2003 to 2012, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics
$5.7 million: executive compensation for CEO George C. Zoley in 2011
$6.5 million: damages awarded in a wrongful death lawsuit against the company last June for the beating death of an inmate by his cellmate at a GEO Group-run Oklahoma prison. An appeal has been filed and is pending.
$1.1 million: fine levied against the company in November 2011 by the New Mexico Department of Corrections for inadequate staffing at one of its prisons
Prison Industry Stealing U.S. Jobs (source : http://americanfreepress.net/)
•With 8% unemployment, why are prisoners working while citizens aren’t?
As if American businesses don’t have enough trouble competing with free traders, who exploit cheap labor in third world countries to make sizable profits, they are also fighting government-run corporations that pay prisoners pennies on the dollar to manufacture cheap goods and undercut private industry.
Is it any wonder that the United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the industrialized world? According to a recent report on cable news, the U.S. government is using federal prison inmates to steal business away from civilian manufacturers by producing comparable merchandise for pennies on the dollar.
At the very heart of this scheme is Federal Prison Industries, or Unicor, a U.S. government-owned corporation that employs 13K prisoners at slave wages to produce everything from windbreakers to solar panels. Although the agency is currently restricted to selling their products exclusively to the federal government, they still cut into a major slice of several industrial markets.
Michael Mansh, owner-operator of Ashland Sales and Service, a Pennsylvania apparel manufacturer that does contract work for the U.S. Air Force (USAF), recently spoke with this AMERICAN FREE PRESS reporter about the impact Unicor has on many small businesses.
“I make certain products, and [Unicor] makes the identical product,” said Mansh. “They get paid higher prices than commercial manufacturers even though their labor rates range somewhere between 23¢ and $1.15 per hour. They don’t pay workers compensation,they don’t pay taxes and they don’t have to pay any of the benefits private enterprise has to pay—yet they get paid a higher price by Department of Defense than I do.”