September 3, 2010

Let this be a placeholder post

This is here to mark off a long dry spell where I didn't make much posting effort. The plan is to not do that anymore and get back in the groove since I garnered an international following recently. yeah what's up richard, this is a shout-out from the depth of earths cancerous tumor that your country unleashed on the world. Not holding it against you or anything just saying.
Since i'm here i will post some reminder type factoids about our horrible prison system shamefully robbed from the prison nation National Geographic page. Normally i'd link back to them since they did the work but it's so hot and the sun is down, it makes no sense.



    • With 2.2 million inmates, America has more prisoners behind bars than any other country on earth. We now have 25 percent of the world's incarcerated, with just five percent of the population.
    • America’s population behind bars has gone up 1,000 percent in the last three decades. Get-tough-on-crime legislation and minimum sentencing laws are blamed for the explosion of inmates. 
    • Of all prisoners, 95 percent will be released. Half of them are currently serving a term of two years or less.
    • According to correctional officers, drugs find their way inside even the most secure facilities, but the more secure a facility, the higher the price. Drugs regularly go for up to twenty times their street value behind bars.
    • Among prisoners, 35 percent are drug addicts; 80 percent are drug users.
    • Since many correction departments have outlawed tobacco in prisons, the going rate for cigarettes in some prisons has skyrocketed from pocket change to $5 per cigarette. A thimbleful of tobacco goes for as much as $50.
    • There are as many as 5,000 prisons or jails in the U.S., employing at least 430,000 people as staff or correctional officers.[with tons being built with the last of our national wealth notes me]
    • In 2001, the average cost per inmate in state prisons is $22,650 per year or $62.05 a day. The taxpayer price tag is twice as much as just 15 years ago.
    • The number of female inmates is increasing almost twice as fast as the men’s incarceration rate, tripling in the last decade. At least 40 percent of jailed women have minor children.
    • Inmates in America’s prisons and jails aren’t evenly divided by race; African Americans make up just 13 percent of the U.S. population but 41 percent of the overall prison population. And Hispanics have 2.5 times the rate of imprisonment of non-Hispanic whites.
    • More than half of male inmates and roughly two-thirds of female inmates have symptoms of a serious mental illness.
    • The largest population of the mentally ill in America isn’t housed in a hospital… It’s in Los Angeles County Jail, followed by New York’s Rikers Island. In all, one-fourth of all state prison beds are occupied by the mentally ill.
    • "Solitary confinement" has a new name in prison systems: segregation. Single-celled, 23-hour lock-up units in some of these prisons are designed to limit inmates’ movement and contact with other staff or inmates. Officers can care for inmates electronically — from opening an inmate’s door, to shutting off his water, to turning off his lights. [another note here: psychologists have shown that total deprivation of human interaction makes people more fucked up not less, if we have even the pretense of rehabilitation this shouldn't even be allowed.]
    • More than 80,000 inmates are kept in isolation nationwide. The average stay in some states is now years.

And that's the list they have. it's short, doesnt scratch the surface on the worst problems and is awful enough in real life to justify our country being invaded to liberate our population from this system and law enforcement cadre (which is almost done morphing into a paramilitary force) that makes it a reality.
Does it mess with your mind at all to think that you could grow up with a person and the only thing keeping them from being able to murder you without major legal repercussion when you get older is the choice you  both make for careers. 
You'd think if a job was titled something like Final Arbiter of Life and Death would lend some weight to the notion that maybe it should be a job for like highly trained and well educated people with a good psychological profile and sense of fairness.
To be fair the the task of a police officer was to keep the peace originally. remember that? protect and serve...these words sound familiar? they conveiniently left the second half of those statements silent because they still serve and protect, just not you. 
I get more nervous when I see police looking my direction than gang members now days. at least a gangster can be reasoned with. anyway im done complaining about this pox on our nation for today. oh and if anyone cares to tell me about how glad i should be that police are around because they protect me from all this potential harm just by their existance, you can save it. The reason black america never made a full integration into white society was because of the police mostly, they are the reasons we even have gangs at all. and what are the worst and most dangerous gangs? the prison gangs, the needlessly large, motivated and jaded prison gangs. And if you take the stance that I shouldn't worry about it since i'm white then kill yourself, i'm sensitive enough to morn your stupid ass death which is more than you deserve thinking like that. There's a lot of white people just on the earth numerically so we'll be part of whatever solution there is to tall this even though we were the root of the problem so lets figure out who's who and get to work.



Read more: 
http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/prison-nation-3457/Overview#tab-facts#ixzz0yXGwbZz7