South Carolina is reaping a crop of corruption and scandal from the desolate fields of its prison system. Predatory guards wield power with few checks on their using it to seek gratification through exploitation and oppression. Prisoners, especially women, are stripped of the protections of law, morality, status and conscience, ...
The apparatus of repression provides frequent examples of the corruption endemic to late capitalism. It is hugely expensive, miniminaly accountable, and has no clear product by which to gauge its performance. Military fraud and waste are cliche. Endless police scandals regularly crop up around the country. The prisonindustrial complex is ...
By Bill Dunne
Federal authorities announced on July 6, 2000, a plan to delay the execution of Juan Raul Garza, previously scheduled for August 5, 2000. Garza was convicted in 1993 in Brownsville, TX, of ordering three drug-related murders, for which he denies responsibility. His execution would have been the ...
By Bill Dunne
Between October 19 and October 26, 1995, the U. S. Bureau of Prisons (federal prison system) experienced a series of largely spontaneous but causally related uprisings in its then 84 prison, 100,000 prisoner gulag archipelago. Involving a range of demonstrations and direct action, this widespread rebellion ignited ...
In the new world order, the ideological concerns that previously persuaded the capitalist ruling class to purchase social and labor peace with a comparatively generous social contract and high living standards no longer hold sway. The US ruling class will need to take drastic measures in order to maintain its ...
By Bill Dunne
The U.S. Bureau of Prisons recently designated the U.S. penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, as the facility at which prisoners sentenced to death by the federal courts will be housed until they are executed by lethal injection. The federal government has never previously maintained a death row. ...
By Bill Dunne
The lockdown at the U.S. Penitentiary at Marion, Illinois, is now a decade old. The magnitude of the decades in human experience is obvious in the marking of cultural epochs--the sixties, the fifties, the eighties. It even emerges in popular music as the definition of a long ...
The Protection Of The Law
By Bill Dunne
There are lots of laws on the books that say the various agencies of the government must do (or not do) this or that for the governed, from whom the "just powers" of those agencies purportedly derive. Two primary principles of democracy ...
