How a Prisoner Funds America

Hi–here’s some interesting research on ‘crimes’. It appears that all crimes are commercial and have a commercial value to them. It makes you look at improvements to the freeways, cities and towns in a different light…….especially when those improvements are funded by ‘municipal bonds.’  Basically there are 8 people on the board of directors of CCA (Corrections Corporation of America)-Joseph E. Russell, the top holder, and John M Ferguson. Russell owns 64,000 shares of CCA stock which is worth about $70 million. Ferguson owns 34,000 shares valued at about $37 million.

Fidelity Management and Research is the top stock holder, the top investment firm that is selling the bonds as investment securities. They pool them and sell them as mortgage backed securities. They also when they pool them, they sell them as mutual funds on the stock market. By pooling you mean the securities on the inmates. What they are doing is they are actually taking the mortgage backed securities, which are really bid bonds, performance bonds and payment bonds. They pool these bonds and when they pool them together they call them mortgage backed securities. They take these to TBA which is the Bond Market Association. It’s an actual market for bonds. Anytime a bond is issued there has to be an underwriter. The bonds have to be underwritten. Bonds that are issued have to be indemnified so there has to be surety (spelling?) to indemnify the bonds. The brokerage houses and the insurance companies indemnify the bonds. They’re called surety companies.

After the surety companies indemnify the bonds, which is underwriting them, they do this through an investment banker or the banks themselves do this. They job it out to them. They buy up all these shares and turn around and sell them as investment securities. The shares represent the stock which represent the account of CCA. All of this has been funneled through CCA, the Corrections Corporation of America. What they are doing is selling stock in the prison system by selling the prisoners’ accounts as securities through the securities exchange. They are making huge amounts of money off it. They privatize the prisoners’ accounts and bring all these investors in and what they are doing is underwriting all these prisoner’s accounts (bonds). This is after the surety company guarantees the bonds. Then they are underwritten through an investment bank or banker. Then they are put out on the market and resold to the public. In other words the banks are buying up all the shares and then they resell them as investment securities to the public. The public them buys them as
mutual funds or they can buy them as debt instruments, equity instruments. What they are really doing is they are buying up debt instrument. They are using the fiscal accounting cycle of accrual and they sell the prisoner’s ‘capital and interest’ as it is called in accrual accounting. They resell these to the public because the prisoner did not do full settlement and closure on the account. They sell the prisoner accounts as a commercial dishonor and sell it to the public as a commercial dishonor.

When you go in the courts they always say they are operating under a statute jurisdiction. The Black’s Law Dictionary 4th edition says a statute is a bond or obligation of record. That’s what all the criminal statutes are……..bonds or obligation of record. Go in and read the definition of a recognizance bond and you find that it is a bond or obligation of record. They are selling bonds. They are charging prisoners under a bond; the prisoner signs the bond and the bond becomes the agreement for the payback. This is done when the prisoner signs the final court papers at a sentencing hearing.

Just: how many of us remember when our government attempted to finance from the private sector during the second world war? Weren’t they selling war bonds? They were soaking up the people’s equity in terms of buying bonds, transferring your funds to the government. The government by purchasing those bonds, was promising to pay you back your investment at sometime in the future with interest. At that time what they were collecting from the people was their so-called cash equity. What Gene saying now is that people have gotten too poor, too stingy, too smart to buy bonds to finance the government. How long has it been since you heard the Post Office or anyone trying to get you down to buy US savings bonds? So what they are doing now instead of getting us to voluntarily give our cash equity to the government for a promise to be paid back in the future, they are securing from us some violation of a statute by which the law ascribes from us a penalty; i.e., the payment of a sum of money due. If you get into to dishonor by nonacceptance, what they are trying to do is get an acceptor which is the same thing as a banker. They need someone to pay off the obligation and if you get into dishonor, they sell your dishonor and put you into prison as the collateral and they sell the bond. The bond is issued and they get a surety to underwrite the bid bond with a performance bond and then they get an underwriter to underwrite the performance and payment bonds. What the performance bond does is it guarantees the bid contract, or the bid bond. What the bid bond does is guarantee the payment of the performance bond. This is done through a surety company. Then they get an underwriter or an investment banker to underwrite it. After it’s underwritten, they sell it to the public as investment securities, debt instruments, or mutual backed securities.

It’s all done through bonds…bonding. That’s what all these municipal bonds are. What they are doing is following everything through the prison system. The prison system is being privatized. Through privatization , private enterprise can fund the prison system cheaper than the government can. They are subsidizing everything through privatization.

ALEC does this; the American Legislative Exchange Council, promotes privatization through foundations like the Reason Foundation owned by David Knott. They get the foundations to promote this and gets investors to come in. Cornell was merged with Trinity venture Company which is an investment company. What they did was change their name to Reid Trinity Venture and then merged with SB Warburg. (Warburg was out of Germany or France and partnered with Rothschild). SB Warburg is in Chicago, Illinois, and they merged with BIF in Switzerland, which is a settlement and closure bank, and the biggest bank in the world for settlements. They are connected to Cornell Company which is owned by David Cornell.

 

“Private Prison Industry” Experiences Boom

Leslie Berestein
Copley News Service

May 11, 2008

At the beginning of the decade, the private prison industry was in a tailspin. After several profitable years in the 1990s, companies contracting prison beds to public corrections agencies were losing revenue at an alarming rate.

Capital earned during the 1990s had been poured into a speculative prison-building boom that backfired. State corrections agencies, a mainstay of what was then a relatively new industry, had begun pulling inmates out. There were too many prison beds and too few prisoners.

They basically had overbuilt,” said Anton Hie, an analyst in the Nashville office of Jefferies and Co. who covered industry leader Corrections Corporation of America and its closest competitor, the GEO Group, for several years through the end of 2006. “There was a lot of promise of new inmates that never came. … It kind of all came crashing in.”

Then, in early 2000, CCA announced a lucrative new contract. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was to house 1,000 detainees at the company’s San Diego Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa, built as part of the late-1990s construction boom. The agency agreed to pay a per diem fee of $89.50 for every person held.

In a news release at the time, a company principal heralded the San Diego agreement as “one of the largest contracts ever to be awarded to the private corrections industry.”

It was one of a series of federal contracts that experts credit with saving the private prison industry, and at the same time marking a turning point in the way that immigrant detainees – illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers, legal residents appealing deportation and others – are held.

“The private prison industry was on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1990s, until the feds bailed them out with the immigration-detention contracts,” said Michele Deitch, an expert on prison privatization with the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas in Austin.

As increasingly tough immigration laws have called for the detention and deportation of ever more immigrants, the demand for bed space by immigration authorities has helped turn what was once a dying business into a multibillion-dollar industry with record revenue and stock prices several times higher than they were eight years ago.

In San Diego, CCA is in the permitting process to build a nearly 3,000-bed facility that the company hopes will be used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. It would hold more than four times the detainees held in San Diego now.

Federal contracts from three agencies – ICE, the U.S. Marshals Service and the Bureau of Prisons – account for 40 percent of the 2007 revenue of CCA, which controls almost half of the private prison beds in the United States. Thirteen percent of the company’s revenue, which hit a record of nearly $1.5 billion last year, comes directly from ICE. The company reported a net income of $133 million last year.

The competing GEO Group, formerly known as Wackenhut Corrections Corp., credits the three agencies for 27 percent of its operating revenue last year, with ICE responsible for 11 percent. The company, which earned total revenues of $1.2 billion in 2007, runs the Western Regional Detention Facility in downtown San Diego, a U.S. Marshals Service prison from which ICE rents short-term space.

Other prison players that have benefited from immigration-detention contracts include the Cornell Cos., based in Texas, and Management and Training Corp., a privately held Utah company that in 2006 opened what is now the nation’s largest ICE facility, a set of tentlike structures in Willacy, Texas, that holds 2,000 people and will soon hold more. A 1,086-bed expansion was completed in March.

Detention contracts are not the only ones fueling the recent growth of prison companies, which have benefited from other federal contracts while enjoying a resurgence in demand for state prison beds.

However, it’s the federal contracts that pay best, experts say. Housing federal detainees typically brings in more per “man-day,” an industry term for what is earned per detainee. Companies also house immigrants for other federal agencies. CCA and GEO Group, for example, contract with the Bureau of Prisons to house foreign-born inmates under a federal “criminal alien” program. Both companies contract extensively with the U.S. Marshals Service, which receives federal funding to hold a growing number of immigrants being prosecuted for illegal re-entry after deportation.

“The federal system over the last five to seven years has been by far the largest-growing part of the (private prison) system, and it is because of the immigrant-detainee population,” Deitch said.

For the federal government, the appeal of contractors is obvious: According to ICE, the agency spent $119.28 per day on average last year to house a detainee at an agency-run facility, compared with $87.99 per day at a contract detention facility.

EMPTY BEDS TO RICHES

The private prison industry as it exists today dates to the 1980s, when state governments were grappling with overcrowding. Tougher sentencing guidelines created demand for more prison space, but many states lacked the funds and political support to build it.

The industry did well meeting this demand for several years, but it was almost done in a decade later by overexpansion and other problems. By the end of the 1990s, the industry was in “capital destruction mode,” said Hie, the analyst.

“They were victims of their own success,” Hie said. “They had so much money to spend on new prisons that they went out and did it.”

At the same time, the industry was rocked by a series of highly publicized escapes, riots and other scandals, among them a 1996 videotape showing inmates in a now-defunct firm’s Texas prison being kicked by officers and attacked by dogs, which prompted an FBI investigation.

“Many states started learning that they were not saving money, and more importantly, that there were a lot of liabilities associated with privatization,” Deitch said. “A lot of states stopped contracting.”

CCA’s stock value took a dizzying tumble, falling from a high of $70.13 on Jan. 1, 1998, to $1.15 on the same date three years later. In 2000, the company reported a net loss of $253.7 million.

Rival Wackenhut’s stock price, while not nearly as high, dropped to less than a third of its value between early January 1998 and 2001. Some smaller companies went out of business, Deitch said.

Fortunately for the industry, the federal government began seeing a surge in demand around this time, fueled by federal drug-sentencing laws that had created more inmates and tougher 1996 immigration laws that made more immigrants deportable.

In 2000, the federal Bureau of Prisons entered into an agreement with CCA to house foreign-born convicts in a California City prison, initially built on speculation in the late 1990s to house state prisoners that didn’t arrive.

The same year, CCA announced its immigration-detention contract in San Diego.

Since then, new immigration policies that focus on detaining and removing deportable immigrants have become commonplace, leaving federal immigration authorities with insufficient space to house them.

The industry leaders’ stock prices have rebounded. Since 2001, CCA shares have split twice and multiplied tenfold, closing recently at $26.17. The GEO Group, which changed its name from Wackenhut Corrections in 2003, has also completed two stock splits and seen its stock value jump from roughly $2.50 a share in early January 2001 to $26.76 recently.

Meanwhile, the industry has broadened its political influence, spending more to lobby agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security and the Bureau of Prisons. CCA alone boosted its federal lobbying expenses from $410,000 to $3 million between 2000 and 2004, according to the Center for Public Integrity.

Immigration-detention contracts can make or break quarterly profits. In its fourth-quarter 2007 financial data, the Cornell Cos., which had flat revenue last year, partly blamed a $2 million loss on the withdrawal of ICE detainees from a troubled facility in Albuquerque, N.M.

CCA, meanwhile, credited part of its success last year to revenue from ICE moving into a Georgia prison on which construction began in 1999 but was suspended a year later for lack of clients.

A NEW BUILDING BOOM

Now, as in the late 1990s, the industry is on a building spree. CCA is building or expanding nine facilities around the country for federal, state or undetermined customers. This does not include the company’s planned megaprison in San Diego, which has yet to obtain county approval.

In October, the GEO group announced it would add 1,100 beds to its ICE contract facility in Aurora, Colo. According to its most recent financial report from 2006, the company opened or expanded half a dozen facilities that year.

Unlike a decade ago, analyst Hie said, there is more demand to support the latest building boom. Strong demand also helps companies push terms favorable to them. “Take or pay” arrangements such as the one at San Diego, where ICE must pay for a set occupancy level even if beds go unfilled, are commonplace.

The demand from ICE is staggering: Last year, all of the agency’s 3,619 new detention beds were contracted.

Agency officials said there are no plans to build any more federally run detention centers, leaving contractors to fill the void.

During the February conference call, CCA executives told investors that ICE was planning to privatize three of its detention centers in California and Arizona. The agency has three facilities in these states – in El Centro, San Pedro and Florence.

“We estimate the capacity is somewhere at 11,000 beds,” said CEO John Ferguson.

Asked about this claim, ICE spokeswoman Pat Reilly in Washington, D.C., replied in an e-mail that the contractor was in error and no such plans were imminent. However, she added, “privatization is always an option

Lead poisoning imperils thousands of Detroit’s children

By Debra Watson
14 March 2003

Studies show that tens of thousands of children in Detroit are suffering the effects of lead poisoning due to industrial pollution and old and deteriorated housing. The crisis has been compounded by the failure of business as well as state and federal authorities to mount any serious cleanup.

In 2001 nearly 17,000 young Detroit children tested had elevated levels of lead in their blood, according to a recent series of articles on lead poisoning in the Detroit Free Press. The actual number of children with high blood-lead levels is much higher, as only a fraction of Detroit’s children are ever tested.

Lead enters a child’s bloodstream after being ingested either from paint chips, lead in the soil or most likely lead dust from disintegrating paint. Once in a child’s bloodstream the lead travels to the brain, soft tissue and bones. Children who have poor diets and lack sufficient calcium and iron are hurt the most. The poisoning can begin even before a child is born. When an adult woman gets pregnant any lead stored in her bones as a child leaches out to poison her fetus.

The US housing department (HUD) says of lead: “[It] can reduce IQ, cause learning disabilities and impair hearing. Children who have elevated blood lead levels often experience reduced attention spans, hyperactivity and can exhibit behavior problems. At higher exposures, lead can damage a child’s kidneys and central nervous system and cause anemia, coma, convulsions and even death.”

One in ten young children in Detroit have lead levels in their bodies high enough to cause irreparable health problems. The percentage is likely greater than currently acknowledged. Reliable experts in the scientific community maintain that no amount of lead is safe and even 5 micrograms per deciliter (µg/dL) is enough to damage a child for life.

George W. Bush is currently stacking a US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) advisory committee with panelists sympathetic to the lead industry to get a new standard this year, hoping for an acceptable blood-lead level to be set higher than the current official upper limit of10 µg/dL.

The State of Michigan has been sued because only a small percentage of children on Medicaid are tested when they are young. The Detroit Free Press reported that last year Bush tried to have the requirement simply dropped from federal regulations. The paper also noted the attempt by former Michigan Governor John Engler to return $5 million in lead abatement grants in 1995 to the federal government on the grounds that it would require setting up “a costly licensing and regulation program” for companies that remove lead paint. An Engler spokesman claimed that Michigan had more pressing problems than lead poisoning.

The series pointed to studies that have shown a child with a blood-lead level of just 10 will lose from two to eight IQ points. The Detroit Free Press did not report that several experts have attributed differences in test scores between low-income inner-city children and their counterparts in wealthier suburban neighborhoods in part to brain damage caused by lead poisoning in poor neighborhoods.

The 1,000-year cleanup

Lead was taken out of paint in the US in 1978, 50 years after European countries outlawed it. Nevertheless, US courts have rejected scores of cases attempting to hold paint companies liable for lead paint cleanup. Lead was added to US gasoline in the 1920s, phased out in the late 1970s and finally completely banned from gasoline in 1986. There was a considerable drop in the percentage of all US children poisoned in the years after lead was removed from these two major sources.

But this also caused lead poisoning to be concentrated in children in low-income families. These poorer families are often condemned to live in crumbling housing in polluted neighborhoods. The Detroit Free Press quoted Don Ryan, executive director of the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning, who estimated it would take $50 billion to $100 billion to clean up the worst of the lead poisoning in the 25 million US houses or apartments that have significant hazards. He said the federal government targets only about $150 million a year for lead abatement.

“The good news is that the program is highly targeted to low-income, high-risk housing,” he said. “The bad news is we’re addressing less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the significant lead hazards each year. That’s a 1,000-year program to make the housing stock safe.”

In Detroit, 56 percent of the housing stock was built before 1950. Federal lead abatement funds are not available to nearly half the families in Detroit because they are renters. A total of 1.1 million homes in Michigan need to be cleaned up. But federal, state, county and city efforts combined have abated only 1,500 homes in the state since 1994.

It is worthwhile to compare this glacial pace of lead cleanup in homes—where tens of thousands of vulnerable children live—to the ambitious completion of a new baseball field, football stadium and several casinos in Detroit in the past few years with the help of local government officials. Kwame Kilpatrick, mayor of Detroit, has followed a long line of city Democratic politicians in offering tax breaks and other favors to the biggest corporations and real estate interests in the area.

Last December Kilpatrick had poor tenants evicted from a downtown property to make way for upscale loft apartments. Lofts are being built in the city that rent for $1,600 to $2,000 a month. But for a working class family to find an affordable apartment, much less one that is not lead poisoned, is a nearly impossible undertaking.

Victims of lead poisoning

A World Socialist Web Site reporter interviewed Angela Lockett, who came to a recent town hall meeting in Detroit organized by the mayor’s task force on lead poisoning. In October her children were hospitalized because they were so severely poisoned by the lead in her rented house.

Ms. Lockett said she spoke up at the meeting because she was trying to explain that her experience was not a bit like that of the speaker who had gone before her, a young mother city officials included on the agenda as testament to the efficiency and helpfulness of the government bureaucracies.

“At that meeting I wanted to say a lot more than I did. They had that woman talk about how she had been helped and she had only one child. I have three children and I cannot get any help. I have called everywhere to try to get help to find a place to live. I called the mayor’s office. I called City Hall. I called the governor’s officer, she never called back. I have to have a place that is not poisoned. Children’s Hospital sent out letters to try to help me find a place to take the children, but there is nothing.

“When we moved four years ago, we were in desperate need of a place because we had been burned out of our old house. After we found the children were poisoned, the health department came out and gave the owners until November 15 to fix the house up. Instead the company lied and claimed we were squatters, took us to court, and the judge threw us out of the house.

“My two younger kids were born and raised in that house, and they were the ones the most poisoned. Leslie, the older one, had lead in his blood too, but not enough to have to go into the hospital. He suffers from seizures now.

“Also they gave the impression up there that it was up to the mothers to ask to have their children tested for lead. Every time I took my kids to the Wellness Plan I thought the physical they were getting meant they were being tested for lead. I realized my kids were not acting right for their age. Because of my job as a nursing assistant I was aware of problems like lead poisoning, but other mothers—how are they supposed to know to ask? My children were on Medicaid because my job paid so little, but I had to beg them to test my kids for lead.

“By the time the kids were tested it was so bad that Angel, who is three years old, had a lead level over 39. Dennis, the one who is two, had a level over 44. I had to quit working because the children were spending a long time in the hospital to be treated to get the lead out of their systems. It was scary to see the x-rays with big chunks of lead paint chips inside their little bodies. They were both in the hospital for about 10 days.

“Dennis had to go in a second time at the end of December because his level went back up to 52. I wanted to go to a shelter while I looked for a new place to live but Children’s Hospital and Social Services said no, because none of the homeless shelters had been certified lead-safe.

“Right now I’m living at my grandmother’s house, but there are 14 people living there and one of them has a baby on the way. My mother is disabled but she is sleeping on the floor so my children can have a bed.

“The Family Independence Agency says they have no responsibility to find me a place to live. I am so fed up with them. Once I had seven different workers in the space of one week. If I move my children from my grandmother’s house before having a house tested for lead they said they would have my children taken away from me.”

BLACK STATISTICS

BLACK WOMEN

• African American women suffer deadly violence from family members at rates much higher than for other racial groups within the United States.

• African-American women accounted for almost 70 percent of NEW HIV cases.
• The rate of HIV infection for African American women, ages 20 to 44 was four times higher than the rates among Latinas of the same age, and more than 23 times higher than the rates among white women.
• IF BLACK AMERICA HAD IT’S OWN COUNTRY, IT WOULD RANK ABOVE ETHIOPIA IN HIV POPULATION. WE WOULD BE 2^ND IN THE WORLD.
• AFRICAN AMERICAN MOTHERS SUFFER THE HIGHEST RATE OF INFANT DEATHS IN THE UNITED STATES.
• black women HAVE abortions at five times the rate of white women.
  • 80 % OF PLANNED PARENTHOODS ARE IN THE INNER CITIES WHERE BLACKS LIVE
• The incarceration rate for BLACK FEMALES IS 5 TIMES THE INCARCERATION

BLACK MEN

• The incarceration rate for BLACK MALES IS 8 TIMES THE INCARCERATION RATE OF white males
• Approximately one in every three black males will go to prison during his lifetime.
• More than three times as many black people live in prison cells THAN in college DORM ROOMS
• IN DETROIT, ONLY 30% OF BLACK BOYS GRADUATE FROM HIGH SCHOOL
• The real median income level for black men has been and still is much lower than the real median income of white men.
• The unemployment rate for Black men has always been triple the unemployment rate of white men.BLACK MEN experience disproportionately higher death rates in all the leading causes of death
  40% of black men die prematurely from cardiovascular disease as compared to 21% of white men.
  They have a higher incidence and a higher rate of death from oral cancer
  Black men are 5 times more likely to die of HIV/AIDS

• BLACK MEN HAVE A high suicide rate. It is the 3rd leading cause of death in 15 to 24 year olds

Black youth

• 89% OF BABYS BORN IN DETROIT ARE BORN TO SINGLE MOTHERS

• Black juveniles are held in residential custody in the United States at twice the rate for Hispanics and five times

the rates for whites.

• As of August 2005, 79 juveniles are sitting on death rows throughout the US

• African Americans aged 15 to 24 years are 6 times more likely to die from asthma than white Americans.
• Approximately 50 percent of African Americans live in a county where levels of two or more air pollutants exceed governmental standards.
• The highest blood lead levels are found among African-American children

• ON AVERAGE WHITES LIVE 6 YEARS LONGER THAN BLACKS

Prison Statistics

Prison Population

• Over 2 million prisoners are held in federal and state prisons or local jails which gives the U.S. one-quarter of the world’s 8 million prisoners
• Currently, there are almost 1.6 million people being held under State or Federal Jurisdiction
• Justice Policy Institute released that the jail population has nearly doubled in less than 2 decades, and last year the prison population grew by 25,000
• More than 1 in 100 American adults is behind bars
• As of June 2006, 203,100 women were in state or federal prisons or local jails which is a 64% increase from 1995
• In 2006, there were more than 1.3 million women inmates, parolees, and probationers in the U.S.

Literacy

• More than 60% of all prison inmates are functionally illiterate
• 85% of all juveniles who go through the juvenile court system are functionally illiterate
• Penal institution records show that inmates have a 16% chance of returning to prison if they receive literacy help, as opposed to 70% who receive no help
• The Department of Justice stated, “The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence, and crime is welded to reading failure.”

Race and Ethnicity

• A report, from the Pew Center on the States, found that only 1 in 355 white women between the ages of 35-39 are incarcerated, but that 1 in 100 black women is behind bars
• African Americans are nearly 5 times as likely to be incarcerated in jails as whites and almost 3 times as likely as Latinos
• Based on Justice Department statistics for 2006, 1 in 15 black adults and 1 in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars
• One in 9 black men between the ages of 20-34 is in prison

Single Mothers

• 78% of the nation’s jail and prison inmates grew up in a fatherless household, even though only 15% of today’s adult population grew up without a father
• 77% of women in prisons or jails are single mothers
• Nationally, nearly 8.7 million children have parents under correctional supervision (either in prison or jail, or on probation or parole). Almost 1.8 million children have parents in state or federal prison
• More than 65% of women and 55% of men in state prisons report being parents of children under 18. 64% of mothers in state prisons report living with their children before prison. One-third of mothers lived alone with their children in the month prior to arrest. One in 5 children of incarcerated mothers witnessed their mother’s arrest.
• 88% of fathers in New York State prisons report that their children live with their mothers, while only 20% of incarcerated mothers in New York report that their children live with their fathers. More than 74% of incarcerated mothers report that their children live with a grandparent or other relative and 18% report that their children live in foster homes or agencies.
• African American children are nearly 9 times more likely to have a parent in prison than white children. Latino children are 3 times more likely than white children to have an incarcerated parent.

Sexual Abuse

• About 80% of women prisoners have been sexually or physically abused before being incarcerated
• 87% of female inmates who spent their childhood in foster care or institutions report that they had been abused at some point in their lives
• In some facilities, 1 in 4 women are sexually abused while in prison
• Women inmates in New Jersey’s prisons are twice as likely to be raped and nearly 6 times more likely to be otherwise sexually abused by other inmates than their male counterparts

Physical Abuse and Retaliation

• Battering is the single major cause of injury to women, more frequent than auto accidents, muggings and rapes combined
• An act of adult domestic violence occurs every 15 seconds, more frequently than any other crime in the U.S.
• FBI data indicate that 30% of female homicide victims are killed by their husbands or boyfriends
• Research shows that when victims kill it is much more likely to be in self-defense than when abusers perpetrate homicide. Victims who resort to homicide have often tried repeatedly and unsuccessfully to obtain protection from their abusers.
• A Police Foundation study in Detroit and Kansas City found that in 85-90% of “partner” homicides, police had been called to the home at least once during the 2 years preceding the incident; in more than half of these cases they had been called 5 times or more.
• A Cook County (Illinois) Dept. of Corrections study of the Chicago women’s prison found that 40 percent of inmates incarcerated for murder or manslaughter had killed partners who repeatedly assaulted them. These women had sought police protection at least five 5 before resorting to homicide.
• A study on a California state prison found that 93% of women who had killed their mates had been battered by them; 67% of these women indicated the homicide resulted from an attempt to protect themselves or their children.

Drug Abuse

• As of January 2007, almost 78% of women in prison and just under 91% of men in prison for drug offenses were African American or Latina, even though studies show that Caucasians use, sell, and buy drugs in greater numbers than people of color
• The National Center of Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reports that drug and alcohol abuse play a role in the incarceration of 80% of the individuals imprisoned in U.S. jails and prisons
• As of 2000, more than 70% of women inmates were incarcerated for non-violent drug, property or public offenses

Mental Health

• Each year about 150 prisoners commit suicide, about 70 perish in deaths caused by another, and 400 die of unknown causes that were apparently not natural, self-inflicted, accidental, or resulting from homicide
• Jails are labeled the “new asylums,” since 6 out of 10 people in jail are living with a mental illness
• As of 2004 government study found that 73% of women in state prisons nationwide either had symptoms or a clinical diagnosis of mental illness and/or were receiving treatment from a mental health professional in the past year, compared to 55% of men

Labor and Costs

• Prisoners who work earn as little as $0.08 per hour. Female incarcerated in federal prisons make a minimum of $5.75 per month.
• In 2007, according to the National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections which drastically contrasts the $10.6 billion spent in 1987.
• In 2005, it cost on average $23, 876 dollars to imprison someone, yet the cost of outpatient drug treatment ranges from $4,300-$7,500 per person per year

References:

http://www.prisonerlife.com/aboutus.cfm

http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=73

http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=73

http://www.womenprisoners.org/resources/critical_statistics.html

www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/prisons.htm

http://www.claim-il.org/about.html

http://www.writeaprisoner.com/prisoner-statistics.aspx

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/28/us/28cnd-prison.html

http://www.correctionalassociation.org/general/pubs.html

http://www.writeexpress.com/LearnToRead/research/literacystatistics.html

http://christianparty.net/children.htm

http://www.fathermag.com/701/Trev1/

http://www.harpers.org/subjects/Prison/SubjectOf/Fact

http://www.akhopecenter.org/lethal.htm

http://www.alternet.org/reproductivejustice/

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,217945,00.html