Prisons: California’s concrete empire

by Carl Harrison

Pleasant-Valley-State-Prison-Central-Cali-valley-fever-spores-inhaled-when-stirred-up-2007-by-Heidi-Schumann-NYT, Prisons: California’s concrete empire, Abolition Now! In 1978 California began building a concrete empire of jails and prisons across the state. After the building was completed, a new California Gold Rush began – a feeding frenzy for all the jobs in city, county and state law enforcement agencies.

People from all over the world and from all over America came to California to get these jobs. The unions, special interest groups in unison with this new powerful government voting pool started changing the laws to make it much simpler to lock up minorities, the poor, illiterate and uneducated, mentally ill and medically ill, developmentally disabled.

Standing armies of police were poured into the cities’ poor districts to target these people exclusively. County prosecutors and police realized that these weak people were defenseless and had to rely on public defense attorneys who were in most part overworked or lapdogs of the courts.

You see, courts control which attorneys get the most money, which places public defenders at the control of hanging judges who want convictions. Police, they obtain rank, status and higher pay when they make more arrests and cause convictions, and prosecutors also need convictions for the same reasons.

Unfortunately, the rich and middle class are simply not suitable targets for police and prosecutors because they can fight back with real defenses that police and prosecutors shy from. They prefer easy kills who can’t fight back and cause trouble for the government.

In addition, the target groups are usually a burden on government treasury because they are receiving government financial aid, which government employees want to reroute into their own agency’s pockets once the targets are locked away in jail or prison and no longer qualified for aid by virtue of incarceration.

Send our brother some love and light: Carl F. Harrison, J-43634, A-1-102, P.O. Box 290066, Represa CA 95671. This letter was typed by Adrian McKinney.