Prison Broke, the Series

Arnold Swarzenegger has suggested that California might ease its budgetary crisis by paying Mexico to build prisons to house some 20,000 illegal immigrant prisoners.  He also believes that California should consider outsourcing prison services to the private sector.  According to CorpWatch: The largest provider of private prison facilities in the United States is Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).  Excellence in Corrections is CCA's motto.  You have to admit that their sales pitch (website) is pretty slick.  But what does "excellence in corrections" really mean?  Would recidivism be reduced; or would the real measure of success be a lower cost to house an exploding prison population? 

A hundred years ago private prisons were a familiar feature of American life, with disastrous consequences. Prisoners were farmed out as slave labor. They were routinely beaten and abused, fed slop and kept in horribly overcrowded cells. Conditions were so wretched that by the end of the nineteenth century private prisons were outlawed in most states.

The modern concept of the penitentiary was born in 1779, when John Howard introduced the Penitentiary Act to correct the abuses that Howard had documented in his report, The State of Prisons in England and Wales.  Under Howard's concept, prisoners were expected to work long hours in heavy manual labor during the day and be confined in individual cells at night to meditate upon penitence or remorse over their bad deeds. 

But prison management means different things to different people.  The out-of-control fascist US Attorney General Eric Holder is  currently persecuting Maricopa County Sheriff, Joe Arpaio for alleged civil rights violations.  Holder's Department of Justice has become the Department of Injustice and may as well be staffed by the National Lawyers Guild or the ACLUseless. There's also the very real possibility that Arpaio and some of his staff might be indicted by a Federal grand jury looking into alleged abuses of power by Arpaio.

 

Proverbial ham sandwiches aside, forcing inmates to wear pink underwear and live in tents is made to sound like the second coming of Abu Gharib, but only if you're so inclined to believe the Liberal-Fascist vermin press and other Leftist America haters.  The above-cited Wikipedia article on Abu Gharib is rife with undocumented  allegations written in the style of the average Daily Kos kook.  This is in line with the general m.o. of the Left, which is to lie and then lie some more.  I've yet to meet a Liberal Fascist ideologue that ever told the complete truth about anything or anyone they are opposed to.   

The 19th Century English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham designed  a prison building, which  he called the Panopticon.   The key feature of the building is that prisoners can be simultaneously watched.  Although the Panopticon was not constructed, according to the Wikipedia article on the subject, the the design had an important influence upon later generations of thinkers. Twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that the Panopticon was paradigmatic of a whole raft of nineteenth-century 'disciplinary' institutions.  Ironically, the former Mexican prison,  Palacio de Lecumberri in Mexico City, Mexico was inspired by the Panopticon.  It now houses the General National Archive.

It's not beyond the span of possibilities that a privately run prison might take on the clinical coldness of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange in which experimentation with behaviorial modification techniques in prisons  might become commonplace.  Moreover, the temptation to make a prison even more profitable could result in a fascist gulag mentality in which common decency becomes an afterthought. Prisoners could be rented out to big Pharma for drug experimentation, used for dangerous projects, slave labor, or even for organ transplants.  The possibilites for predatory socialist commercialism is frightening.

There is always the temptation to let the private sector take over government services or for politicians to say that they will run government "like a business."  There isn't a more boneheaded concept floating around the political arena.  Governments are not profit making entities.  Core government services such as law enforcement, fire protection,  code enforcement, zoning, and yes, prisons are the  responsibility of government and not CPAs or Harvard MBAs.

One last question Arnie, how we gonna pay for building prisons in Mexico?  Did you instead ever think of billing Mexico and other countries for the cost of maintaining their wayward citizens on the oppressed California taxpayer's dime? No, of course not.  Pinhead politicians seldom have any good ideas--just the really stupid ones.

 

This and that

The Power of One...

For those that think that they can have no impact on those around them take a gander at these recent news items.

News Item: 1 

A major freeway was shut down for about eight hours Tuesday morning as officers negotiated with a suicidal woman sitting on a freeway overpass, which backed up traffic for miles and created a nightmare for commuters. The woman was taken into custody shortly before 10 a.m. and the lanes were reopened.--Debbi Baker, San Diego Union-Tribune Staff Writer

From 1:30 a.m. until 10:00 a.m., a city was brought to a standstill by a suicidal woman. Every freeway artery was clogged and adjacent surface streets became busy.

News Item 2:

After threatening suicide, a woman slipped and fell off the Lemon Grove Avenue bridge over state Route 94 about 3:30 p.m. yesterday [NN: October 29,2009].  Traffic had been stopped on the busy freeway for about two hours as officials tried to talk her down.  Last week, another distraught woman on an Interstate 5 overpass near Balboa Park created a major traffic tie-up for thousands of San Diego commuters during the morning rush hour. After more than seven hours Oct. 20, the woman voluntarily came down from the bridge.--Breaking News Team,  San Diego Union-Tribune

Far too often, people say, "I want to make a difference."  When what they really mean is that I want to be "famous."  In the case of the two suicidal women they got their several hours of fame. 

______________________

Why I Despise Leftists...

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal and equal men are not free--sign-off for the 1960s radio show The Voice of Americanism.

For those of you that wonder why I despise leftists, I offer the following tidbits. The Obama administration will first offer H1N1 vaccines to Gitmo detainees.  While long lines of Americans wait for limited supplies of the vaccine for their children, the human chancres at Gitmo are given first preference over citizens of the United States. To quote a Gitmo spokesmouth:

 "JTF Guantanamo conducts safe, humane, legal and transparent care and custody of detainees. As such, we must provide detainees the medical care necessary to maintain their health." CNN.com

Under pressure from  loony left, these murderers and thugs are treated better than the children that the Leftists claim to love and want to protect so much. (Ignore the fact that they are all for the murder of children in the womb.) But that's only one example of leftist radical stupidity.

In California there is a Stage 3 water emergency.  While it partially due to a lack of rain, the primary reason for the water shortage is a court ordered reduction in water delivered to municipal water districts because of a court protective order for the Delta Smelt, Delta Smelt fish are preyed upon by larger fish, especially striped bass and largemouth bass which are invasive species in the Sacramento Delta.  Well, something "smelt" pretty bad when a fish comes before food production by farmers in California's Central Valley.  State Water Contractors sued in March 2009 claiming that the United States Department of the Interior and the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), challenging regulatory restrictions placed on the state's water operations.

Long ago Herman Kahn warned of the dangers of the radical environmentalist movement.  And we've seen the results of radical leftist environmentalist meddling.  While the Chinese move to drill for oil in US territory, the Obama administration and their cohorts in the Democrat-controlled Congress are standing in the way of drilling for badly needed oil.

We've essentially stopped building nuclear power plants because of a movie, The China Syndrome. Twelve days after its release the incident at Three Mile Island happened. Coincidence?  Maybe or maybe not, but it seems strange that the movie came out right before the the incident and made a lot of money.  Propaganda that pays is the hallmark of modern Leftist propaganda especially in the Hollywood Lefist community.  Most of the plum roles and work go to Hollywood lefties like George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and Tom Hanks.  Political correctness has its benefits.  

 In January of 1969, Union Oil's Platform A blew up and spilled 80,000 to 100,000 barrels of crude oil onto the shores of Santa Barbara County in California.  Since then there are no more offshore platforms within view of the beach homes of many wealthy liberal elitists. Coincidence?

This brings me to my favorite topic--bashing the flawed philosophy of socialism.  My problem with socialism is that it tries to turn men and women into equal, mediocre worker bees.  Meanwhile, the elitists, i.e., those with Ivy League degrees and the old line plutocrats will run things because you the average citizen doesn't understand how things work.  They will call you teabaggers, absolutists, or extremists when they're being polite.  You'll find the Marxist Neanderthals of the Democrat (sic) party plying their irrational intellectual vomit in the hate-filled Daily Kos, which is not exactly a repository of moderate thinking (sic).  But that is the base of the Democrat Party. Village idiot-in-training, Joe Biden said, "This has never been a place that has embraced extremism on the left or the right."  Right you are Joe, except that two of Obama's Czars have recently quoted noted philosopher and über humanitarian Mao Zedong. If you really want to get a picture of what life would be like under a liberal plutocracy/technocracy read Brave New World. If you want to know what life in America will "perfect" into after eight years of the Obama Captivity just look at the mess Robert Mugabe has made of Zimbabwe. 

It turns my stomach to know that it can happen here and is happening now.

Short Takes: Michael Moore, Van Jones, B. H. Obama, and Michael Savage

OLD NEWS FLASH: Fat Cat Moore declares Capitalism to be “Evil”!  Yawn, Ho Hum.

The latest Michael Moore movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," premiered at the Venice film festival Sunday. The movie's theme is that capitalism benefits the rich and condemns millions to poverty. Moore was quoted in a Reuters news story about the upcoming propamentary as saying:

Democracy is not a spectator sport, it's a participatory event," he told a news conference. "If we don't participate in it, it ceases to be a democracy. So Obama will rise or fall based not so much on what he does but on what we do to support him.

Moore though has done quite well for himself by capitalism according to the 2005 book Do as I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy by Peter Schweizer. At one point, Moore and his wife’s foundation held more than $280,000 in corporate stock and nearly $100,000 in corporate bonds.

According to Schweizer, Moore has also at various times owned stock in Big Pharma, Big Oil, and yes, even the evil Halliburton. One might say Moore in his own way has been an enabler for big bad capitalism. The better word is hypocrite. By the way, have you noticed that foundations are the last refuge of scoundrels or Liberal plutocrats like Warren Buffett? The common thread among many of these super wealthy indivduals is to have the government tax you even more. Despite the super wealth of many of these Liberal moral paragons, most are only philanthropists with other people's money.

Van Jones--Adios!

The resignation of "Green Czar" Van Jones, on Saturday is a welcome departure. Given the man's public statements which were overtly racist at best and downright nutty at worst, we should applaud the fact that precious tax dollars will no longer fund this fountain of hate speech. But Jones is the product of a system that bends over backwards to extend hyper-free speech rights to leftist radicals.

In nearly every American university, there are ethnic, racial, and women's studies departments that are often run and staffed by non-academically trained community activists or ex-militant group members. These so-called "professors" spread hate and discontent without providing a meaningful academic experience. In the early 1970s, one Chicano Studies class at a California State Univerisity that I attended was a campus joke because the course was a guaranteed easy "A" with little or no work required. (Those were your tax dollars "hard" at work folks.)

But these academic abuses are not limited to marginal academic departments alone.  In one class, my poetry professor called Sarah Palin "white trash" shortly after pontificating for ten minutes about the racism visited against Gypsies.  Another professor in the Telecommunications department at the same school described George Bush and Dick Cheney as "Nazi #1 and Nazi #2" during a lecture on recording techniques. The professor made the comment during a discussion of open microphones and potentially embarrassing situations that could happen. The "teachable moment" concerned the incident during the 2000 Presidential Election in which unflattering comments by Bush and Cheney about a New York Times reporter were overheard via open microphone by the crowd.

Personally, I've had grades lowered in a several of my college classes because my political viewpoint differed greatly from the Leftist professor.  (You'd think that I'd have learned to write like a Marxist drone to get a better grade in order to get into a bigtime Ivy League Law School.) Most of these abuses of power occurred even though I was doing "A" work at the time.  The bottom line is that students are often academically bludgeoned into Leftist viewpoints.  Universities often simulate an ultra-modern chic Chi-Com reeducation camp with the warmth of Soviet gulag.

If there was ever a need for a "Fairness Doctrine" it's in the universities and colleges in the United States.

Television Show Fall Preview: The "Barry O" Cult of Personality Show!

 

The "Barry O Show" debuts tomorrow at a Teacher's Union infested school near you.  Despite the protests from parents across the nation the show will go on.  The content of Barry O's Show is no longer in dispute since the "Kids Help Obama!" lesson plan from the US Department of Education was eliminated. (Hmm, since when does the Federal Government" provide lesson plan content for local screwells)?  The only problem will be Obama apparatchiks disguised as teachers providing the color commentary on Barry O speech.  They're likely to spout the party line for Barry O and cultivate Obama's cult of personality. The picture to the left depicts children thanking Stalin for a great childhood.  Sound Familiar?

Savage is Still on British PNG list! Why won't the US Department of State stand by a US Citizen?

The biggest mystery to date is why Michael Savage remains on the UK persona non grata list populated by murderers, thugs, and bigots.  While Savage is outspoken who isn't these days?  Some third grade teachers are rabid advocates for Obama and will often resort to physical violence when their rhetoric fails them (and it often does because most of them are not smarter than a 5th grader).

It's already been revealed via British government e-mails stating that Savage was put on the list to counterbalance the disporportionate representation of Muslims on the list.  Even though Home Secretary Jacqui Smith resigned based upon her incompetence and malevolence in putting Savage on the list, Savage is still battling to be removed from it.  A good guess is that the the Obama Administration via some State Department apparatchik is involved in this one.  This is also probably why the State Department has done little or nothing. The inclusion of Savage on this list is stupid. Take a look at the list and see if Savage belongs there.  Only an mentally ill idiot that believes that the Daily Kos is an example of rational and truthful thinking would agree with the list.