fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3516 ]

[ SECRET POST #3516 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3516 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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The entire rest of this post is either spoilers or have content warnings.

02. [SPOILERS for Over the Hills and Far Away]

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03. [SPOILERS for Pokemon Sun and Moon]

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04. [SPOILERS for Inside]

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05. [SPOILERS for The Girl With All The Gifts]

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06. [SPOILERS for Steven Universe]
[WARNING for suicide]

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07. [WARNING for non-con]

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08. [WARNING for incest]

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09. [WARNING for suicide]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #502.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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It's long, but worthwhile, engaging and you can do it in chunks.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer

It's an journalist's four month investigation of practices in a privately operated prison in Louisiana. This guy talks about how he went undercover, getting hired as a corrections officer, and how it started fucking him up.

Edited 2016-08-19 23:42 (UTC)

Excerpt:

Chapter 1: "Inmates Run This Bitch"

Have you ever had a riot?" I ask a recruiter from a prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).
"The last riot we had was two years ago," he says over the phone.
"Yeah, but that was with the Puerto Ricans!" says a woman's voice, cutting in. "We got rid of them."
"When can you start?" the man asks.
I tell him I need to think it over.

I take a breath. Am I really going to become a prison guard? Now that it might actually happen, it feels scary and a bit extreme.

I started applying for jobs in private prisons because I wanted to see the inner workings of an industry that holds 131,000 of the nation's 1.6 million prisoners. As a journalist, it's nearly impossible to get an unconstrained look inside our penal system. When prisons do let reporters in, it's usually for carefully managed tours and monitored interviews with inmates. Private prisons are especially secretive. Their records often aren't subject to public access laws; CCA has fought to defeat legislation that would make private prisons subject to the same disclosure rules as their public counterparts. And even if I could get uncensored information from private prison inmates, how would I verify their claims? I keep coming back to this question: Is there any other way to see what really happens inside a private prison?

CCA certainly seemed eager to give me a chance to join its team. Within two weeks of filling out its online application, using my real name and personal information, several CCA prisons contacted me, some multiple times.

They weren't interested in the details of my résumé. They didn't ask about my job history, my current employment with the Foundation for National Progress, the publisher of Mother Jones, or why someone who writes about criminal justice in California would want to move across the country to work in a prison. They didn't even ask about the time I was arrested for shoplifting when I was 19.

When I call Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, the HR lady who answers is chipper and has a smoky Southern voice. "I should tell you upfront that the job only pays $9 an hour, but the prison is in the middle of a national forest. Do you like to hunt and fish?"

"I like fishing."

"Well, there is plenty of fishing, and people around here like to hunt squirrels. You ever squirrel hunt?"

"No."

"Well, I think you'll like Louisiana. I know it's not a lot of money, but they say you can go from a CO to a warden in just seven years! The CEO of the company started out as a CO"—a corrections officer.

Ultimately, I choose Winn. Not only does Louisiana have the highest incarceration rate in the world—more than 800 prisoners per 100,000 residents—but Winn is the oldest privately operated medium-security prison in the country.

I phone HR and tell her I'll take the job.

"Well, poop can stick!" she says.

I pass the background check within 24 hours.

Edited 2016-08-19 23:44 (UTC)

Private prisons are a scam. They save the taxpayer nothing, and they support draconian laws that lock up people who should be fined and given community service.

So you're against law-and-order policies and things like mandatory minimums and three strikes laws when it comes to the criminal justice system?

Yes. I see them as overly harsh and expensive to enforce. And I'm not convinced they are a deterrent to crime.

What's your position on drug war stuff, if you don't mind me asking?

It's not something I've paid a lot of attention to, as it's not really something that interests me. I will say that several of my classmates who sat through D.A.R.E. with me in fifth grade grew up to be drug users and pushers in adulthood. Apparently, 'just say no' doesn't really work.

Honestly, I find drugs to be abhorrent and disgusting, but I can't say I care if some fool wants to melt their brain with marijuana. If nobody is getting hurt, and I'm not being asked to pay for their rehab, why is it any of my business?

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diet_poison - 2016-08-20 19:43 (UTC) - Expand

I admit I'm surprised at you given that you're a conservative. Most conservatives I've known seem to believe in all that stuff, and that prisoners shouldn't have rights. "Make prison so bad they'll never want to go back!" is the driving philosophy. It's weird and disturbingly authoritarian.

I'm just reacting here cause I can't read it now, but it sounds really interesting. TBH, I don't see how that job can not fuck you up.

I'm still surprised I got hired at an airport with having journalist on my CV, but hey, apparently you can do this too.

Private prisons are a scourge in this country.

So I heard.

+1000

Yup.

This pretty much blew the lid off the private prison industry. The Justice Dept. recently announced they're ending the use of private prisons.

The three publicly-traded private prison companies all saw their stock go in the toilet. So, so good.

Oh, wow. That's good at least.

The best news we've had in a long time regarding justice/prison in this country.

The American prison system is appalling. Reform is urgent, but it's not sexy and hot button like immigrants or abortion, so it doesn't get the attention it needs. Nobody wants to stress about the well-being of people in jail. But our system is dysfunctional on every level and a travesty on a human rights level. So I'm happy a ball is rolling, however slowly, for reform.

The thing is it's really not just the prison system. Literally every aspect of the American criminal justice system is completely and totally fucked from top to bottom. Criminal law, public defenders, district attorneys, policing, prisons - all of those systems are completely and totally fucking broken.

The prison system is actually kind of a good case in point here. Because private prisons are, obviously, horrible and profoundly unjust. And eliminating them would be a huge improvement in terms of the conditions of imprisoned people. But you would still have massively too large a prison population, and they'd still be in inhumane conditions. Just less so.

And the really distressing point is that, even before all of the money and organizing it would take to fix all of this stuff - to build a criminal justice system that works - we can't even get to that point, because the political will doesn't exist. Because I honestly think the existing prison system is actually responsive to the views of people in this country. At the end of the day, the root of the problem - to me - is that a lot of people in this country understand the function of criminal justice to be keeping things in line, using whatever force necessary to keep poor and black and brown people in place. Who understand it to be part of the legitimate purpose of police to beat the shit out of poor black kids, because the point isn't whether or not they're guilty of a crime, the point is that regardless of guilt they're troublemakers whose very existence threatens the racialized order of society and who need to be kept in check using force. At the end of the day, a lot of the population don't seem to care about investigating crime, they care about containing threats, and at the same time have a general tendency to treat blackness itself as a threat. And so this shit is what you get.

It is entirely fucked and it is a massive shame for the nation. And practically speaking, it's really hard to see what the fuck we can actually do to change it.

Sorry I know you probably know all this I guess I just feel a bit ranty.

This comment is perfect and should be required reading

At the end of the day, the root of the problem - to me - is that a lot of people in this country understand the function of criminal justice to be keeping things in line, using whatever force necessary to keep poor and black and brown people in place. Who understand it to be part of the legitimate purpose of police to beat the shit out of poor black kids, because the point isn't whether or not they're guilty of a crime, the point is that regardless of guilt they're troublemakers whose very existence threatens the racialized order of society and who need to be kept in check using force. At the end of the day, a lot of the population don't seem to care about investigating crime, they care about containing threats

Excellent post in general, but...bingo on this especially.

It's quite disturbing to me that people just tend to assume that if you get arrested by the cops or put in jail, then clearly you did something wrong and who cares about your well-being or civil rights or whatever at that point? Way too many people don't seem to understand how many innocent people get put away (or are sitting on death row). Nor do they think about the fact that a lot of people who are in jail are there for things that shouldn't be/aren't jailable offenses to begin with.

I suppose it's because most people think, "Well, there's no way that would ever happen to me", but, y'know, I'm pretty sure the innocent people sitting in jail thought the same thing themselves at one point.

But yeah, even if people don't give a shit about actual criminals themselves (and they should, for a whole host of reasons), they should at least care about prison reform on behalf of the people who shouldn't even be there in the first place, but wound up there for all kinds of bullshit reasons.

I think people do tend to think "Well, there's no way that would ever happen to me". But I think it's in a much more racialized way than you have it here. The reason it would never happen to the people here is because they're white and (therefore, implicitly) law-abiding and a good citizen and non-threatening. Whereas, when they think of the people in jail, they think of black people, and they don't really want to think of them in those terms. They'll probably say, "Well, they probably did something."

Again, at the end of the day, I really think there are people who think of blackness (especially poor blackness) as just almost intrinsically threatening. And that directly leads to justifying policies that are punitive and forceful, because it's a necessary measure to check that threat. I don't think you can really ignore the role that racism plays in the way the whole thing operates. It is profoundly racist. It's not just racist but it is very, very racist.

Oh, absolutely. Completely agreed on that. We can just point to all the comments people make about the black people who've been shot and killed by police of late as a prime example of that, and obviously there's plenty more examples of similar attitudes and comments going back years, too.

There's been the whole thing with the news about Baltimore and the racist crap the police there have been covering up recently, too, but I think there's probably very, very few, if any, police forces anywhere in the country who DON'T have some sort of nasty skeletons of that kind in their closet :/.

My dad lived in the L.A. area in the 1960s, when he was a kid, and he told stories about actually seeing police officers roughing up black people when out and about.

Gods, this is so it.

To a large number of people, the system isn't about justice, let alone rehabilitation; it's about vengeance. You can see it and hear and it and feel it whenever people discuss what should be done to criminals and what "law-abiding citizens" should do to protect themselves. It's all fear and anger and hatred, and there's no room for compassion because those "people" deserve it, and they're rotten and can't be changed, anyway. Lock 'em up and throw away the key.

And that attitude is encouraged by the manner in which crimes are reported and the way in which we portray criminals. We tend to treat suspects as if they've already been convicted, and construct tidy narratives around that assumption, and shift the nature of the narrative depending on what the suspect looks like.

We're returning to the times when we've overtly, as a matter of course, considered entire swaths of people to have been born "undesirable," and those people fall into the exact same groups that they once did (or, well...always have, I suppose): they're poor; they belong to a race other than the dominant one; and/or they're mentally ill.

Edited 2016-08-20 01:27 (UTC)

Well, that's good, at least. But I find it sad that this report is what did it, considering that when I read it, pretty much nothing in it surprised me. And it's not like I have a ton of experience with prisons; I've never been arrested or seen the inside of a jail. The abuses detailed in the article are awful, but seem like the kind of thing that "everyone knows" happens in prisons.

It's impossible to turn a blind eye so to thorough an investigation. Before, may e everybody knew it but it was sort of officially swept under the rug

I'm partway through this. It's really good and definitely sad. I have a lot to say that I won't bc I'm on the phone where I can't type easily but I will say I loved the other comments that have been made and am largely in agreement. Thanks for linking.

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[ SECRET POST #3516 ]

"My Four Months As A Private Prison Guard." Read this.

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