The US comprises less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet US prisons hold more than 25 percent of all people imprisoned globally. Many of these prisoners labor at twenty-three cents per hour, or similar wages, in federal prisons contracted by the Bureau of Prisons’ UNICOR, a quasi-public, for-profit corporation, which is the US government’s thirty-ninth largest contractor. As incarceration rates explode in the US, thousands are placed in solitary confinement, often for having committed minor disciplinary infractions within prison.
Censored News Cluster: The Police State and Civil Liberties
Sara Flounders, “The Pentagon and Slave Labor in U.S. Prisons,” Workers World, June 6, 2011, http://www.workers.org/2011/us/pentagon_0609.
James Ridgeway and Jean Casella, “Cruel and Usual: US Solitary Confinement,” Al Jazeera English, March 19, 2011, http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2011/03/201137125936219469.html.
http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2011/11/07/prison-slavery-in-today’s-u-s-a/
http://www.mediafreedominternational.org/2011/04/04/solitary-confinement-in-the-us-cruel-and-usual-punishment/
Student Researchers: Leta Frolli and Taylor Wright (Sonoma State University)
Faculty Evaluators: Sheila Katz and Patrick Jackson (Sonoma State University)