Week 12- Post 1

 Source: 13th documentary on Netflix

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/incomejails.html 

• ALEC (american legislative exchange council) proposed many laws like mandatory minimum sentencing of 85% of their sentence, 3 strikes and you are out
• these laws generated the profit that would go to the shareholders
• they pushed forward policies that increased prison sentences and the number of people in prison
• through ALEC, CCA (corrections corporation of america) became the leader in private prisons the number of people in prisons
• today they are a multibillion-dollar business that gets rich off punishment
• so through alec they had a hand in shaping crime policy across the country, which was not just prison privatization but the rapid increase in criminalization
• cca directly benefited/profited from its investment in ALEC
• many people were harmed by their policies
• CCA was on the taskforce in ALEC that passed the law SB 1070 whihc gave police the right to arrrest anyone that looked like an immigrant
• there was an influx of immigrants (including children) being brought into facilites and this was worth more than 11 million dollars each month
• the conditions of these facilities were not great at all. called "detention facilities" but it is literally prison for the immigrants 
• to help with the prison overcrowding there were wrist/ankle monitors
• people incarcerated within their own communities
• pricate company making money off the gps monitor rather than the person being locked in a literal cage
• Prison Industrial Complex
• refers to the system of mass incarceration and the companies that profit from mass incarceration
• includes both operators of private prisons as well as a vast sea of vendors
• Securus Technologies, that supplies telephone services that made 114 mil in profits last year
• Aramark, one of the food service providers, in more than one state they have been accused of having maggots in the food that theyve served
• Corizon healthcare, provides healthcare services in 28 diff states, has had multi-million contracts for its service
• UNICOR, gets 900 mil annually from prison labor
• one of the reasons it has been so difficult to talk about mass incarceration in this country and to question it is because it has become so heavily monetized
• Kalief Browder was walking home from a party with hsi friends in the Bronx when he was stopped by police and charged with a crime. they told him "we're going to take you to the precinct and most likely let you go home" but he never went home. they said he could post bail. it was 10,000 dollars. which kalief browder and his family could not pay. he had the choice of going to prison for 15 years or going home by admitting he was guilty for a crime he didn't do. he did not take the plea deal and exercised his right for a trial. in those 3 years he was waiting and not getting charged for anything, thats when his mental health started to deteriorate and he started to get into fights. three years on Rikers Island, 2 of that in solitary confinement, and he was still so young. he suffered so many beatings both by ppl he was locked up with and the guards that he ended up attempting suicide on multiple occasions.after 3 years of awaiting the trial, they dropped all charges and kalief was set free.
• he says "if i would've just pled guilty, then my story would've never been heard. nobody would've took the time to listen to me. i'd have been just another criminal."
• One reason that the unconvicted population in the U.S. is so large is because our country largely has a system of money bail, in which the constitutional principle of innocent until proven guilty only really applies to the well off
• more than 600,000 people are sitting in over 3000 local jails throughout the US
• over 70% of these people are being held pre-trial meaning that they have yet to be convicted of a crime and are legally presumed innocent
• there are thousands of people in jails right this moment that are sitting there for no other reason than because they are too poor to get out
• 97% of those people who were locked up have plea bargain and that is one of the worst violations of human rights
• there are peopel in this country pleading guilty to crimes they didn't commit just because the thought of going to jail for what the mandatory minimums are is excruciating

immanuel kants perception of freedom: to act according to a law you give yourself, based off us being autonomous beings, but its heteronomous when ur acting according to a law you dont give urself. relates to the story of the guy in jail- acting bc of the limits money puts on him, cant pay for bail. kant rejects utilitarianism. find a way to tie utilitarianism in,, idk 

• as long as we act according to inclination/pleasure we act as means to the realization fo ends given outside of us (instruments rather than authors for the purposes we pursue)
• thats the heteronomous determination of the will
• but when we act autonomously we stop being instruments

the guy acted autonomously and didnt act heteronomously bc he didnt act in accordance to the desires of personal preference of being home with hsi amily, instead he chose freely and did not want to be seen as guilty for a crime he didnt do

• getting revenge for crimes appeals to our moral intuitions. if someone intentionally harms other: they should suffer the consequences. Revenge was an idea present after Breivik's killing spree, in newspapers survivors quoted stuff about looking forward to breivik recieving his punishment. also shown in the title surrounded by the name of everyone killed by breivik.