The Federal Bureau of Prisons provides a weekly population count of federal prisoners every Thursday. As of 7/22, there were 211,094 Federal prisoners. I think that many in the general public wrongly assume that the majority of prisoners are locked up in federal facilities. Incarcerating people is a state and local issue. All the more reason for each of us to educate our neighbors and family members about the inhumanity and ineffectiveness of incarceration.

Note: The following chart is particularly relevant for those interested in the privatization of prisons.

I first read George Jackson’s Soledad Brother in college. I remember being mesmerized by the anger and passion in his letters. His letters are an indictment of American racism and of the country’s treatment of black people in particular. Once I read Soledad Brother, I wanted to read other books written by prisoners so I sought out Eldrige Cleaver’s Soul on Ice among many other books. This experience fed my interest in the prison industrial complex and launched my activism around prison issues especially as they related to violence against women and girls.

Over the past couple of days, I have been reading a book called America is the Prison by Lee Bernstein. Even though I am slammed with work, I have had a difficult time putting the book down. It is well-researched and fascinating. The title of the book comes from a quote by Zayd Shakur, who was one of the New York Black Panther 21. Zayd declared that “all of America is a prison where the people are being held captive by the real arch criminals.”

Bernstein meticulously documents the prison arts renaissance of the late 60s into the 1970s. He also highlights the cultural work of prisoners who created powerful works of art (literature, visual, and performance). Bernstein provides an important historical context for understanding why so many penal institutions began to defund arts and educational programs in the 1980s. These are the programs that had ironically provided people like Jackson and Miguel Pinero with platforms for expressing themselves. When these same prisoners used the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house, repercussions were swift and repressive.

Bernstein provides a valuable window on a time that I knew little about beyond having seen the products of that period several decades later. He has provided invaluable historical context to those works of art in this book. I highly recommend the book.

I came across this excellent post by Stacey Patton. She writes about BP’s use of prison labor to clean up the oil spill and makes the appropriate historical connection to the convict leasing system.

Patton writes:

Since Louisiana has the highest rate of incarceration of any state in the country – of which 79 percent of its 39,000 inmates are black – it ’s no surprise to hear that BP is using prison labor to clean up the largest oil spill ever in U.S. history.

A recent report by reveals that in the days after the Deepwater Horizon wellhead explosion, cleanup workers could be seen on Louisiana beaches wearing scarlet pants and white t-shirts with the words “Inmate Labor” printed in large red letters. Costal area residents were rightly outraged given that they had seen their livelihoods disappear and are now desperate for work.

For me, the key passage in her blog posting is this one:

Black Codes or Jim Crow laws helped create the post-emancipation prison industrial complex in the South that was driven by profitability, racism and corruption. Black men, women and children were habitually arrested for violating Black Codes, failure to pay fines or on trumped up charges so they could be secured as labor convicts. Charged for trivial offenses, blacks were often handed heavy sentences served out in mines, railroads and farms where they endured brutal beatings, harsh working conditions and high mortality.

For a terrific book about the history of the Black Codes and Convict Leasing, read Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II by Douglas Blackmon.

Interestingly today’s New York Times has an article suggesting that the Delta’s Black Fishermen are being left behind by BP. BP’s racism and exploitation knows no end. On the one hand, they are using cheap black prison labor for the clean up while discriminating against black fishermen. People of color in this country need to BOYCOTT BP, for real. I for one have stopped buying any gas from them and will begin to research other products that they make so that I can boycott those too.

My goddaughter is a big fan of Justin Bieber. According to her, he is a musical “genius.” I try very hard to keep a straight-face as she tells me this. At 11 years old, one can be forgiven for such heresy.

Anyway, today she e-mailed me a link to an article about said Bieber. I always try to keep up with what she is interested in so I opened the link. It was an article from CBS News titled Justin Bieber Tweets He's a "Bad Man," Picture of Him in Prison Jumpsuit.

The article included this photograph apparently tweeted by the teen heartthrob Bieber.

According to the article

The 16-year-old “Somebody To Love” singer tweeted pictures of himself from the set where he was seen in a prison jumpsuit with his hands behind his back. The caption to the photo read in part: “I told you I was a BAD MAN!!”

This blog is called Prison Culture because I believe that penal institutions permeate and structure all aspects of American society. This incident is actually a prime example of the portrayal of prison in popular culture. Bieber has been taught that prisoners are BAD MEN. Obviously, he is posturing and the term BAD is probably being used by Bieber to promote his “STREET” cred and to increase his cool quotient.

My goddaughter and all of her friends were all a-twitter (pun intended) about this photo today. They were fascinated by Bieber in prison orange. This is particularly troubling to me because I don’t believe that my goddaughter has a clue about the truly dehumanizing and often violent experience of youth incarceration. This is in part my fault. She has a vague idea about my work but we only talk about it in passing from time to time. I had been putting off any serious conversations about the destructive effects of the PIC until she was a teenager. It looks like that conversation will now have to be accelerated by a couple of years.

So what will I say to her when we talk this weekend…

I plan to ask her about what she finds so interesting about seeing Bieber in the orange jumpsuit. What does the orange jumpsuit denote to her? I plan to tell her that it is much more likely that someone who looks like her is actually behind bars rather than someone who looks like Bieber. How many young people of color are locked up in America? I plan to tell her that prisons are not actually filled with “bad” men and women contrary to the label that Bieber attributed to himself. I plan to tell her that on any given day in the U.S. that we are locking up 90,000 youth.

Perhaps Justin Bieber can choose to shed some light on the plight of these young people instead of shamelessly promoting his appearance on CSI this fall.

P.S. Because I haven’t lost my sense of humor yet… Here’s Justin Bieber promising all of us that there will be one less lonely girl in the world…

I am unabashedly obsessed with data and in particular with data visualization. While other kids were reading the Babysitters’ Club book series, I was reading the Atlas of the World. I was fascinated by maps and by numbers. I never grew out of that.

I hope that other data geeks (who have much better design skills than I do) will gravitate towards an interest in abolishing prisons. We need better tools to help the general public visualize and conceptualize the massive scale and impact of the prison industrial complex.

In the meantime, the National Institute of Corrections has a handy tool to help anyone find state corrections statistics.

The following map illustrates the number of youth residing in juvenile detention and correctional facilities in 2006.

Last week, I wrote about boot camp and made the link between the PIC and the Military explicit.

Today, I saw an interesting example of data visualization by a design studio called Moustache. They have developed a short film called Softwar to illustrate how much the military budget can buy. They focus only on the base military budget of $549 billion dollars and leave out the additional dollars that are appropriated to cover the wars which is almost $200 billion dollars more. The film shows thousands of tanks piled on top of each other to show how much the military budget can buy. That would be 88,548 tanks at $6.2 million per tank (h/t to flowing data).

Softwar from Moustache on Vimeo.

Local, State and Federal Governments spent nearly $75 billion on “corrections” in 2009. I wish that someone would create a similar visualization of how much notebooks that could buy….

This blog focuses on the prison industrial complex in the United States. Yet I am fully aware of the fact that our PIC is intricately connected with prisons in other countries. This is particularly true of the secret prisons run by the CIA in countries across the world.

I am very interested in what is happening beyond U.S shores as it relates to prisons. Last year, I saw some captivating photographs by Patricia Aridjis depicting women in the Mexican Prison. She has an online essay about women in prison called the “Black Hours.” Take 20 minutes to go through her site. I don’t believe that you will be able to get her photo essay out of your mind. I certainly haven’t.

KIDS COUNT DATA CENTER - The Annie E. Casey Foundation

I am posting this particular map because I believe that one cannot understand the growth and expansion of the prison industrial complex without also looking at its root causes which include poverty, racism, sexism, heterosexism, etc…

Over the past few weeks, I have been thrilled to read a series of blogs at DailyKos published by soothsayer99, Radio Girl and ThisIsMyTime. They have developed a series called Criminal Injustice Kos. This is a well-researched, interesting, and provocative series of blogs.

It always amazes me (though it shouldn’t) how resistant many “progressives” or “leftists” are to prison abolition and often even to prison reform. By bringing this conversation to the Daily Kos community, soothsayer, Radio Girl and ThisIsMyTime are practicing what I wrote about earlier today. They are bringing the conversation about prison abolition and reform to a new audience rather than waiting for that audience to find them. More of this type of effort is needed across the progressive blogosphere because if we can’t convince our own communities then we are not going to convince the mainstream. That’s a fact.

The following are two terrific examples of the Criminal Injustice KOS series that specifically address the concept of prison abolition. I really encourage you to read both and to make sure to click on the links in the blogs in order to deepen your knowledge about these issues.

Criminal Injustice Kos: On Prison Abolition

Criminal Injustice Kos — Why Prison Abolition – Part-2

Make sure to visit Criminal Injustice Kos over at the Daily Kos site on Wednesdays at 6 p.m. (central time).