Facebook Caves to the Prison-Industrial-Complex

In a decision setting back prisoners' rights and helping to advance the

interests of prison bureaucrats and their guard union allies, Facebook

announced plans to work with the California Department of Corrections

and Rehabilitation to shut down pages set up for prisoners. Spokespersons

for the Department claimed that prisoners were using their Facebook pages

to "stalk victims" and "conduct illegal activities," and that this was all related

to the increased incidence of cell phones found inside the prisons.

What a load of crap!

I'm one of the prisoners with a Facebook page that
will be shut down to appease the shrill hate groups that continue to try
and own the public debate about prisons, about crime and punishment,
and about what kind of justice should be practiced here in the Land of
the Free. It's past time to address some of this fear mongering
head-on, even if my keepers surely won't appreciate it.

The prison-industrial complex is a huge jobs engine
for unionized public employees. Governor Andrew Cuomo spelled it out it
accurately when he withstood intense lobbying pressures and closed a
couple of prisons in New York, "I'm not running a jobs program, putting a
lot of people in prison to give a few people high paying jobs." This
is the fundamental truth about prison. The people who profit off of
mass, disproportionate incarceration know that a reckoning is coming.
Crime is at historic lows. State budgets are upside down, like the rest
of the country. The majority of people in prison are not monsters.
The public's safety is not the issue. The threat is to the paychecks of
public employee unions.

For the past quarter of a century, the playbook has
been simple, direct, and frighteningly successful. Play the fear card,
mention the word "victim," and shut down rational debate. It's unclear
to me how anyone could "stalk their victims" through Facebook. This is a
perfect example of dragging a particularly stinky red herring across
the trail, something prison bureaucrats are wont to do.

For an interesting case in point, during a recent
interview on Los Angeles public radio station KCRW's excellent public
affairs program "Which Way L.A.,"
host Warren Olney repeatedly asked California prison chieftain Scott
Kernan how allowing men at Pelican Bay to wear a warm hat during the
winter could be a security threat. (This was one of the legitimate
demands of hunger strikers.) Bossman Kernan never really answered the
question and, instead, kept rambling on about how dangerous these
"offenders" are and how these issues impacted "victims." Interestingly,
both prisoners and victims of crime have been commodified into roles in
support of the prison-industrial complex.

The prison system has two great fears: The first is
that the rest of society will learn that prisoners are, in actuality,
fellow human beings who deserve to be treated in a humane fashion, and
the second is that what really goes on in these places might be exposed
to the cleansing light of public scrutiny.

To prevent the first of their fears from being
realized, the prison system has upended basic civil rights and created a
de facto no information zone around prisoners. When I came to prison
more than 30 years ago, I could write to anyone in the media through
confidential mail. Any reporter with legitimate credentials could come
inside a prison and interview any prisoner. Today, I can only contact
the media through closely censored mail and recorded, monitored collect
phone calls. And reporters, on the rare occasions they manage to slip
through the fences and get into these places, are strictly forbidden
from interviewing any specific prisoner.

For the great rip-off of society to continue, it's
imperative for the public to continue to be hoodwinked into believing
that the prisons are incredibly dangerous, filled with slavering beasts
ready to go on a killing spree at the first opportunity. Nothing ruins
this sham more than the taxpayers getting a good look at prisoners in
the flesh. We don't have horns or tails, and the vast majority of us
aren't even in prison for a violent crime. The rationale, such as it
is, for preventing the press, in a supposedly free country, from
directly interviewing prisoners is it could cause discomfort to a
victim. Invocation of the "victim" is, again, used to justify virtually
any depredations of both civil rights and common humanity.

More frightening to the system than the public finding
out prisoners, generally, aren't the embodiment of evil, is the
possibility that what actually goes on inside will be revealed. What is
imagined and what is reality are so far apart as to be wholly
disconnected. The guards have invested heavily in promoting the
perception that death stalks them everyday in these places, and their
bureaucrat allies (just about all of whom started out as guards) happily
sign on to this fiction because it provides the perfect excuse for why
the system is such a dismal failure.

What really goes on inside the prisons is horrific
treatment, provoked and encouraged racial violence, constant violations
of constitutional rights, and so much more it could fill more than a
hundred of pages of small print. In fact, it does, and anyone can read
it in the decision of the three-judge panel that found California's
prisons so deficient and inhumane it ordered a massive downsizing of the
system. (Plata, et al. vs. Schwarzenegger, et al. and Coleman, et al.,
vs. Schwarzenegger, et al. Case 2:90-cv-00520-LKK-JFM, Document 3641,
filed 08/08/2009) This was necessary because the judges knew the
special interests (guard union, contractors, suppliers) had bought so
much in the state's political process that there was no other viable way
to achieve change.

In my thirty-plus years of imprisonment in California,
the rate of incarceration went from around 100 per hundred thousand to
close to 450. The rate of parole failure went from less than 25% to more
than 70% during the same period. Similar numbers can be found in the
rest of the country. For comparisons sake, the incarceration rate of
other industrialized countries is less than 100, and the world average,
including all of the repressive countries, is less than 200. Recidivism
rates run at about 35%, everywhere else. This country has the highest
incarceration rate in the world, bar none.

To put it into another perspective, with less than 5%
of the world's population, we have fully 25% of the world's prisoners.
This is the prison nation.

Numbers can be mind numbing, but it's important to see
and internalize what all of this means. All across the country, as the
various states wrestle with diminished resources and shrinking tax
bases, decisions are being made about priorities; interests are
competing for the dollars left in the smaller pie. The prison
bureaucracy is vigorously advocating for cuts in funding for poor
children, for disabled people, for seniors, in its desperate attempt to
keep the imprisonment gravy train on track.

But that's not the full extent of it, not by a long
shot. To tilt the scales in favor of more prisons and less social
welfare spending, the system will trot out the same hoary tropes it's
used during the past generation of unchecked expansion. This Facebook
nonsense is right along with the standard fear mongering tactics of the
prison bureaucrats and their guard allies. I've seen worse in my time
inside, up to and including incitement to violence to overturn
unfavorable court decisions. Watch out for some extremely dangerous
prisoners finding themselves on the other side of the fences.

When the inevitable tragedy occurs, all the rest of us
will be tarred with the same outrage. Someone's grieving mother will
plead for retribution while the newsreaders tut-tut in sympathy. Mock
outrage will spew out of red-faced politicians in thrall to the
prison-industrial complex. The guard union will magnanimously put up
the many millions needed to pass the poorly written initiative that
results in tens of thousands of pathetic drug addicts and troublesome
mentally ill homeless people receiving long life sentences. No less
than United States Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Republican
and no flaming lefty, described this state of affairs, in regard to
California's infamous three-strikes law, as "sick."

The prison system has a unique hold on the political
process that renders it almost invulnerable to the kind of fundamental
reform 25 years of dismal failure should have demanded. The Democrats
won't criticize their public employee union allies, and the Republicans
remain wedded to the concept of keeping the disempowered classes down
and disenfranchised through mass incarceration. The prison bureaucrats
and their guard union allies have cynically, and very successfully,
played the two ends against the middle.

Neither side of our dysfunctional dyad is willing to
propose remedies to what is obvious to every independent observer: there
are too many people in prison for too long, costing society way too
much money.

Facebook's craven decision to appease the
prison-industrial complex has nothing to do with protecting crime
victims or stopping criminal activity. (Let me assure you, we knew how
to conduct illegal activity before Mark Zuckerberg "invented" Facebook,
before even Al Gore "invented" the internet.) It's all about trying to
keep the public in the dark about how their billions of dollars have
been wasted behind the electric fences, out of sight and beyond
accountability.

My 1,300 "friends" and me didn't threaten anyone. But
the prison system and its allies pose a genuine threat to society. The
sooner the public wakes up and realizes this the better off we'll all
be. Until then, be afraid; be very afraid of people claiming to be
protecting you.



Kenneth E. Hartman's memoir of prison life, "Mother California: A Story of Redemption Behind Bars”
(Atlas & Co. 2009) won the 2010 Eric Hoffer Award. He is
currently at work on a memoir about hitchhiking through the '70s. For
more information, please see www.kennethehartman.com or contact him indirectly at kennethehartman@hotmail.com