Research on the crime control industry
Prisonsucks.com is a clearinghouse for useful, verifiable statistics about the crime control industry. Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong. One of these days the public will start listening to prison activists, so let's be prepared to win without being sidetracked by arguments over defective statistics. In some cases, the numbers we need don't exist. In others, the facts exist but activists don't know where to find them. Now you do.
October 2003
Read The Prison Index excerpts online
October 22, 2003
The Western Prison Project and the Prison Policy Initiative have posted the "Crime and Punishment in the U.S." section of The Prison Index on the web. Check it out and then purchase the entire report.
New Exposé of Private Medical Services
October 20, 2003
Geri Dreiling has published an exposé of the nation's largest "provider" of "medical" services to prisoners: Correctional Medical Services. Dying to get out was the October 15 cover story in the Riverfront Times and has been added to our index of articles about the HMO from hell: Correctional Medical Services.
Justice Policy Institute links fixed
October 15, 2003
The links to the reports from the Justice Policy Institute on the research page have been fixed again. JPI keeps on moving their documents around, making it hard to keep up. But I believe everything works now. Let me know if we missed any.
Prisoner-staff racial disparities caused by where prisons are built
October 2, 2003
Alternet has posted an article co-written by this site's editor: 32 Years After Attica: More Blacks in Prison But Not As Guards.
The article contains the first-ever national prison-by-prison analysis of the racial disparity between staff and prisoners. The recent trend towards constructing prisons in White rural areas has frustrated a key outcome of the Attica prison rebellion: a recognized national need to hire more Black and Latino staff.
If you saw this article prior to October 2, please look at it again as Alternet made some serious editing mistakes, transposing "Black" and "White."