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 Too often prison activists use statistics that are out of date, provided without citation or simply wrong.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.
November 2006
Vote for "One Nation Under Guard" on Current TV
November 10, 2006
Lucas Krost's 10 minute documentary is one of 6 finalists in the Current TV Seeds of Tolerance Contest. The video can be seen on their cable TV channel and on the web, and viewers can vote for their favorite.
US prisons have become big business, housing 25% of all the people in the world behind bars, the largest prison population on the planet. In a frenzy of criminal justice, we have turned our backs on the founding principles of this nation to produce state and federal prisons at an alarming rate—in the 1990s, opening 1 every 15 days in depressed rural towns and communities. Private correctional companies are entering the industry, appearing on the NY stock exchange, with an eye on the bottom line. Under this prison-industrial complex, we are locking up 1 in 3 young black men in this nation, moving them far from home, and stripping them of the right to vote, the possibility of holding decent jobs and the dignity of supporting themselves and their families. US prisons are holding the strangest of reunions: grandfathers, fathers and sons behind bars. There is no paying of their debt to society, no clean slate. One Nation Under Guard can inspire change by presenting the big picture of a US prison system that values the bottom line more than it does solutions, at enormous cost. Most people are unaware that this is happening. Current TV viewers will begin to see the real need for restorative justice, and will be moved toward supporting and joining those who are working for it. They will begin to demand change to create a prison system that delivers justice for all, not injustice for a marginalized minority.
Alan Eisner how the Census Bureau's practice of counting Black urban prisoners as residents of white rural prison towns dilutes the votes of urban communities and gives prison town legislators additional political clout.
The film contains interviews with Marc Mauer of the Sentencing Project and journalist Alan Eisner who discusses how the Census Bureau's practice of counting Black urban prisoners as residents of white rural prison towns dilutes the votes of urban communities.
The contest runs until midnight on December 1st, so check out the documentary and vote for it.
Links:
- See the video on Current TV and vote for One Nation Under Guard
- The film's website: Justice Films