From the March-April 2017 issue of News & Letters
If there is an institution that merges corporate and government power and does so in a way that exempts itself from legal oversight, that institution is a fascist one.
Shane Bauer of Mother Jones magazine went undercover as a prison guard inside of a for-profit prison in Winn, Louisiana, in 2014. He exposed, in a well documented June 2016 story, corrupt and intolerable inhuman practices that made incarceration profitable for degenerate fascists.
One example of the abusive policies at the prison that Bauer recounted was a training session in which guards were taught to allow prisoners to attack other prisoners and not to interfere! They were taught to call on other guards to gang up on prisoners and beat them. This prison-for-profit, as an institution, corrupted and debased the entire community around it with its immoral practices.
The vicious, inhuman institution, CoreCivic, was revealed to be so odious and criminal that the Obama Administration decided to phase out federal funds for for-profit prisons completely. Another one of the abuses cultivated during the Bush era was at last coming to an end.
Then Donald Trump became president. He appointed Jeff Sessions, a brazen racist, as Attorney General. Among other things, Sessions attempted to falsely accuse civil rights activists of voter fraud because they took absentee ballots to post offices for senior citizens who lived in isolated rural communities. This vicious racist needs to be removed from office by any means we can use.
The degenerate Sessions has, as one of his first acts, reinstated federal contracts for for-profit prisons. This decision affects tens of thousands of prisoners.
The populations of for-profit prisons are mostly nonviolent drug offenders and immigrants. Law enforcement officials say that crime has been decreasing for years. Arrests are down. The prison population is decreasing. Those are facts.
Racist Sessions, crackpot liar Trump and the fanatical fascists at CoreCivic disagree with reality. They claim we need more arrests, more people in prison and more profit for fascists committing human rights violations.
After the story appeared in Mother Jones the fascists at Correctional Corporation of America changed their name to CoreCivic and hired another corporate fascist outfit for an “aggressive media campaign” in which they illegally threatened journalists who tell the truth to the public about their criminal abuse.
Suppression of the free press and civil liberties generally, is another defining characteristic of the ideology of fascism, as is organized criminal activity by institutional officials.
For-profit prisons need direct action by the people to close them down permanently. Prisons rely on outside services, and these must be disrupted and discontinued to force the closure of every one of these prisons. CoreCivic must cease to exist.
By direct action, we can make it impossible for the fascists to function. The executives and shareholders should be thwarted in everything they attempt to do. Let us make them infamous and reviled everywhere they go.
—Thomas Richard Jackson
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