Thursday, January 10, 2013
You suspected that drug prohibition was racist, but you didn't suspect how much
Asians? Check.
Blacks? Check.
Latinos? Check.
AlterNet
Retired Judge Reveals the Surprising Rationale for America's Extremist Drug Laws
Frederic Block, formerly a federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton
And don't forget that the war on drugs spawned the private prison industry. Over two-thirds of those incarcerated for drug offenses are non-white.
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5 comments:
Tom Hickey - I love you!
Now that you've mentioned the fetish some people in politics have for privatisation, including prisons, I was surprised to read this was the origin of the word.
"Privatisation was not a Thatcher patent. The Spanish economist Germà Bel traces the origins of the word to the German word Reprivatisierung, first used in English in 1936 by the Berlin correspondent of the Economist, writing about Nazi economic policy. In 1943, in an analysis of Hitler’s programme in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the word ‘privatisation’ entered the academic literature for the first time. The author, Sidney Merlin, wrote that the Nazi Party ‘facilitates the accumulation of private fortunes and industrial empires by its foremost members and collaborators through “privatisation” and other measures, thereby intensifying centralisation of economic affairs and government in an increasingly narrow group that may for all practical purposes be termed the national socialist elite."
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n17/james-meek/how-we-happened-to-sell-off-our-electricity
Link goes to the TDC story you posted below.
Thanks, Ken. Fixed now.
I just received an email from unknown origin about a football game between prison kids and evangelical christian kids - the christian kids' families divided into 2 so that the prison kids would have someone to cheer them on, etc. Very touching story.
But how many of the christian side had their 401K or bank accounts with Wells Fargo or other mutual funds that invest in the private prison system ????
just google "prison system mutual fund" and names like Alberto Gonzales and Dick Cheney come up as well as Wells Fargo...maybe Vanguard ?
It makes sense that 2/3 of prison are non white since 1/3 of population is white at least where I am from.
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