randomWalks

dj, what is with your CA fetish?

Nonetheless, Davis had a well-earned reputation as a political whore, so I'd bet the increase in prison funding during his tenure was largely paybacks to the prison industry for campaign contributions. Whether Arnold has the same problems remains to be seen.

This is a few weeks old:

What exactly is prison abolition, and what does it entail? James's discussion of abolition defines the term as "opposition to social injustice and human rights abuses stemming from captivity in the United States ... [and to] slavery in all of its social and political and economic forms." Davis notes that in most circles, prison abolition is simply unthinkable. Today we consider the prison as normal and as inevitable as the school, the hospital, or the bank. Davis compares our mind-sets to those of generations past who could not conceive of the end of chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, or the convict-leasing system.

But without prisons, what would we do with the two-million-plus people currently in cages, those we characterize in our imagination as murderers, rapists, and predators? Where would we deposit the undesirables?

When we ask these questions, we open up the vastness of what activists and scholars call the prison-industrial complex. Those criminalized in this complex include not only prisoners but also the entire communities from which they disproportionately come: people living in racialized ghettoes and poor rural regions. We are talking about the great majority of the country devastated by the imprints of racial slavery and global capitalism. This isn't just about the abolition of the prison: much like the treatment of nuclear waste, abolition would provide only temporary containment of a cataclysmic problem. Abolitionists want to eradicate what they consider the root problem: state violence. Thus, the termprison-industrial complex, first coined by scholar Mike Davis during the California prison boom of the last two decades, refers not only to the penal system (the most overt example of the problem) but also to the web of institutions that enacts state violence in all forms.

"Around 20 California lawmakers will be going to Hawaii Thanksgiving week. In the mornings, they'll be attending meetings put on by the California Correctional Peace Officer's Association (CCPOA), the correctional officers union. In the afternoon, they will engage in independent study. The union will not pay for plane tickets or hotel rooms, but campaign funds can be used to cover these expenses (for the entire family) because the conference deals with legislative matters." http://news.prisonwall.org/

Background on CCPOA by Dan Pens:

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Prison_System/CalifPrisonGuards.html

DEAN REED... Just sent a long message and was totally blocked? CIA? KGB? STASI? INTERZONE? HMMM? Waste of time. Trying through an alternative route.

Warm Respects,

Will

Will,

That discussion was accidentally deleted from our system, so comments can no longer be added. It will be back up as soon as I can find the time to fix it.

This is actually a little promising:

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger took the first step this week in setting out his agenda on crime -- and distinguishing himself from his predecessor - - by allowing a Sacramento man convicted of a 1985 murder to be released on parole.

In his first week in office, the governor on Thursday let stand a decision by the state parole board to release Fred Nesbit, 63, who had served 17 years in prison for shooting to death the boyfriend of his estranged wife. The day before, however, Schwarzenegger had blocked the release of a Visalia man who killed a woman during a 1986 drunken-driving spree.

I'm trying to imagine what could be characterized as a 'drunken-driving spree'.