Good Boy, Jim. The number that matters? 500% That's the amount of increase in our prison populations, in just 30 years. I knew it was bad, I didn't know it was that bad.

I don't know if anything will come of these hearings, but I'm glad to see Webb at least bringing it to our attention. I think, and have said many times before, that money is the key to ending the drug war. That is, the country is broke, and increasingly the choice will be food and health care for children and the elderly, or millions to prison companies who incarcerate hippies caught with a couple of joints. Via the ever essential DrugWar Rant. Read more…

From: AMY GOODMAN Last September, a black high school student requested the school's permission to sit beneath a broad, leafy tree in the hot schoolyard. The next morning, three nooses were hanging from the tree. The black students responded en masse. Justin Purvis, the kid who first sat under the tree, told filmmaker Jacquie Soohen: "They [other black students] said, 'Y'all want to go stand under the tree?' We said, 'Yeah.' They said, 'If you go, I'll go. If you go, I'll go.' One person went, the next person went, everybody else just went." Then the police and the district attorney showed up. Substitute teacher Michelle Rogers recounts: "District Attorney Reed Walters proceeded to tell those kids that 'I could end your lives with the stroke of a pen.' "  Read more…

In the West Ward of Trenton, Councilwoman Annette Lartigue is drafting an ordinance to fine or enforce community service to curb this national epidemic.  Read more…

First:
I want to thank the Corrente Crew. I know that viscerally it’s hard to get through but trust me. There is a point. I admire Mike as an athlete, I feel for him as a brother. I understand there are consequences to breaking the law. But this isn’t about cruelty humanity or justice. But then again; It is. Read more…

If a man must fight, let it be to the death against the beast within himself. Win that battle? No man, no woman, no racial hatred, no system, no vindictiveness, and no Machiavellianism can ever defeat you!
Stanley Williams Read more…

The prison population will increase by 200,000 in the next five years and by 2025 the prison population in some areas will increase by 90%. That is at least $50,000 a head. These prisoners will be farmed out as cheap or free labor and will provide a permanent slave class. End slavery in America.

What the war did do was help drive the nation's prison population to more than quadruple its size from 1980 to 2005, with urban blacks and Latinos hardest hit -- a dramatically disproportionate result of the different networks that developed to distribute drugs. Read more…

The IndyKidz tend towards high polemicism and strong rhetoric, not strong enough language or rhetoric (see: Update with excerpt below) but I still love 'em. They were Shrill before it was fashionable, and they pay attention to stories that even the progressive blogosphere often overlooks. There is another, even longer running war going on, right here in America. And its captive victims are making the parts to feed to the military machine that is gorging itself on blood overseas:

In 2005, FPI sold more than $750,000,000 worth of goods to the federal government. Sales to the Army alone put UNICOR on the Army’s list of top 50 suppliers, ahead of well-known corporations like Dell Computer, according to Wayne Woolley, Newhouse News Service.

Over the past three years, thousands of federal prisoners have been working overtime filling Pentagon contracts for everything from radio components to body armor.

Since the beginning of the war in Afghanistan in 2001, the Army's Communication and Electronics Command at Fort Monmouth, N.J., has shipped more than 200,000 radios to combat zones, most with at least some components manufactured by federal inmates working in 11 prison electronics factories around the country. Under current law, UNICOR enjoys a contracting preference known as "mandatory source," which obligates government agencies to try to buy certain goods from the prisons before allowing private companies to bid on the work. This same contracting restriction applies to state agencies. Read more…