Life in the American Gulags

Lasha Darkmoon January 5, 2015

Prisons are the prototypes for the future community at large. Life outside prison will soon resemble life in prison.

An edited abridgment by Lasha Darkmoon of Chris Hedges’ The Prison State of America.

Introductory note by Lasha Darkmoon

AMERICAN GULAG

We all know that the economy of Stalin’s Judeo-Bolshevik terror state was based on slave labor in the Siberian gulags, with tens of millions of innocent people being incarcerated and worked to death.
We also know that Stalin’s Soviet Union was essentially a Jewish regime, and that not only top government officials but that those who ran and staffed the slave labor camps known as “gulags” were mostly Jews. Witness Lazar Kaganovich, the so-called “Wolf of the Kremlin”.
It would seem that the same system of cruel exploitation of the masses has now taken root in neo-bolshevik America, another country run by Jews, and that Jewish-owned corporations such as Goldman Sachs are helping to turn America into one vast gulag. This time it is a capitalist gulag, however, not a communist one. 
There is another striking difference between the Soviet gulag system and its American counterpart: a concerted attempt is now being made in America not only to make life an exploitative hell for prisoners but to replicate those oppressive conditions within American society at large—by making life equally hellish for the teeming masses outside prison  who are doing their best to survive in an Israelified police state. 

“The incarcerated poor have become the nation’s most exploited workers,” Chris Hedges notes bleakly. “They are the prototype drones for the corporate totalitarian state…. Life outside prison walls will soon resemble life in prison.” 

NIGHTMARE PRISON
(Piranesi)

“Life outside prison walls will soon resemble life in prison.”

The roughly 1 million prisoners who work for corporations and government industries in the American prison system are models for what the corporate state expects us all to become. And corporations have no intention of permitting prison reforms that would reduce the size of their bonded workforce. In fact, they are seeking to replicate these conditions throughout society.
States, in the name of austerity, have stopped providing prisoners with essential items including shoes, extra blankets and even toilet paper, while starting to charge them for electricity and room and board. Most prisoners and the families that struggle to support them are chronically short of money.
Prisoners must pay the state for a 15-minute deathbed visit to an immediate family member. New Jersey forces a prisoner to reimburse the system for overtime wages paid to the two guards who accompany him or her, plus mileage cost. The charge can be as high as $945.04. It can take years to pay off a visit with a dying father or mother.
Corporations have privatized most of the prison functions once handled by governments. They run prison “commissaries” or stores. And since the prisoners have nowhere else to shop, they often jack up prices by as much as 100 percent. These corporations, some of the nation’s largest, pay little more than a dollar a day to prison laborers who work in for-profit prison industries. They feed like jackals off the prisoners. 

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 Our prison-industrial complex, which holds 2.3 million prisoners, or 25 percent of the world’s prison population, makes money by keeping prisons full. It demands bodies, regardless of color, gender or ethnicity.

As the system drains the pool of black bodies, it has begun to incarcerate others. Women—the fastest-growing segment of the prison population—are swelling prisons, as are poor whites in general, Hispanics and immigrants.
Prisons are no longer a black-white issue. Prisons are a grotesque manifestation of corporate capitalism. Slavery is legal in prisons under the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution.
The massive U.S. prison industry functions like the forced labor camps that have existed in all totalitarian states. 
Corporate investors expect long-term returns. It is their lobbyists who write the draconian laws that demand absurdly long sentences and deny paroles.
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest owner of for-profit prisons and immigration detention facilities in the country, had revenues of $1.7 billion in 2013 and profits of $300 million. CCA holds an average of 81,384 inmates in its facilities on any one day. Aramark Holdings Corp., a Philadelphia-based company that contracts through Aramark Correctional Services to provide food to 600 correctional institutions across the United States, was acquired in 2007 for $8.3 billion by investors that included Goldman Sachs.
Note. Jews in the Soviet Union ran the gulags. In the United States, Jews are again prominent in the exploitation of the goyim masses through companies such as Goldman Sachs and other bankster corporations.  (LD)
The three top for-profit prison corporations spent an estimated $45 million over a recent 10-year period for lobbying that is keeping the prison business flush. Private prison companies often sign state contracts that guarantee prison occupancy rates of 90 percent. If states fail to meet the quota they have to pay the corporations for the empty beds. 

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The United States, from 1970 to 2005, increased its prison population by about 700 percent.
Nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government are shipped to for-profit prisons, according to Detention Watch Network.
Corporate profit is not limited to building and administering prisons. Whole industries now rely almost exclusively on prison labor. Federal prisoners, who are among the highest paid in the U.S. system, making as much as $1.25 an hour, produce the military’s helmets, uniforms, pants, shirts, ammunition belts, ID tags and tents.
Prisoners work, often through subcontractors, for major corporations such as Chevron, Bank of America, IBM, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Starbucks, Nintendo, Victoria’s Secret, J.C. Penney, Sears, Wal-Mart, Kmart, Eddie Bauer, Wendy’s, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Fruit of the Loom, Motorola, Caterpillar, Sara Lee, Quaker Oats, Mary Kay, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, Dell, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin and Target.

Prisoners in some states run dairy farms, staff call centers, take hotel reservations or work in slaughterhouses. And prisoners are used to carry out public services such as collecting highway trash in states such as Ohio. 
The wages paid to prisoners for labor inside prisons have remained stagnant and in real terms have declined over the past three decades. In New Jersey, in 1980,  a prisoner made $1.20 for eight hours of work—yes, eight hours of work; today, he  makes $1.30 for a day’s labor.
Prisoners earn, on average, $28 a month. Those incarcerated in for-profit prisons earn as little as 17 cents an hour.

However, items for sale in prison stores have risen in price over the past two decades by as much as 100 percent. And new rules in some prisons prohibit families to send packages to prisoners, forcing prisoners to rely exclusively on prison vendors. This is as much a psychological blow as a material one; it leaves families feeling powerless to help loved ones trapped in the system.
A bar of Dove soap in 1996 cost New Jersey prisoners 97 cents. Today it costs $1.95, an increase of 101 percent. The white Reebok shoes that most prisoners wear, shoes that last about six months, cost about $45 a pair. Those who cannot afford the Reebok brand must buy, for $20, shoddy shoes with soles that shred easily.
In addition, prisoners are charged for visits to the infirmary and the dentist and for medications.
When strong family ties are retained, there are lower rates of recidivism and fewer parole violations. But that is not what the corporate architects of prisons want: high recidivism, now at over 60 percent, keeps the cages full. This is one reason, I think, why prisons make visitations from relatives humiliating and difficult. It is not uncommon for prisoners to tell their families—especially those that include small children traumatized by the security screening, long waits, body searches, clanging metal doors and verbal abuse by guards—not to visit.
Prisoners with life sentences frequently urge loved ones to sever all ties with them and consider them as dead.
The rise of what Marie Gottschalk, the author of Caught: The Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics, calls “the carceral state” is ominous. Prisons are not, in the final analysis, about race, although poor people of color suffer the most. They are not even about being poor.

Prisons are the prototypes for the future community at large—for the world outside the prison gates. They are emblematic of the disempowerment and exploitation that corporations seek to inflict on all workers. If corporate power continues to disembowel the country, life outside prison will soon resemble life in prison.

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