When you find out that your child will be living somewhere new you do your research and find out all you can about the place they will be living. In fact when my daughter and her family were moving to Costa Rica I did so much research I decided to move us here as well.
When I found out Micah was in Florence prison I decided to research and find out all I could about the place.
I already knew a few things about the place. My step dad worked there for a couple of years about 31 years ago. Just knowing that makes the place somewhat suspect for sure. Also know my son-in-law was in the immigration holding center there for four months before they shipped him back to Hondurus. I drove my daughter down a couple of weekends to visit him before he left.
As you can see I already hated the place before I even started researching it. Now for the icing on the cake. Florence is one of Arizona'a many private prisons. Yes that is right really rich jerks own prisons. Now I don't know about you but that kind of smells of something that happened a long time ago that we actually abolished, called slavery.
The owner of Florence is CCA. They have a very distinguished board of rich old guys who have nothing better to make money off of than human slavery. In fact they even sell the things the prisoners make in the slave shops. Do the prisoners get the money? Hell no!
In fact the private prisons receive so much money per prisoner from the government. That is not all though. You want to know another big money maker for the state? Well the phone service has to pay a percentage of what they charge the inmates to call their families. The state makes money off these calls to the families. Many of the inmates cannot even afford to call family because of the charges as I have mentioned before.
I ask myself how can these men sleep at night? How can they look in the mirror and stand what they see there? I know if they knew my son like I do they would not be able to stand themselves one minute more. They would not like the fact that the private prisons are more dangerous, and the prisoners are actually more poorly cared for than the governement prisons.
Of course that is giving them the benefit of the doubt that they still have some spark of humanity left, which apparently they do not!
I am really sorry for what your family is going through (been there done that). I respectfully disagree with you calling anything type of work prisoners do slavery they are prisoners, and deserved to be punished for their crimes. I bet it is hard for you to see it like that because you know your son and know that he is a good person, but I would be willing to bet most of the men in that prison are not. And in my opinion better the prisoners work to pay their bills than the tax payers of this country.
ReplyDeletehola Aislinn and thank you for your comment. I definately understand where you are coming from having felt the same way for many years. As you said being involved in this system has taught me many things, the main one being prison does not reform anyone nor make them better people. In fact being incarcerated does quite the opposite. The reason I refer to work being done in prison as slavery is because in many private prisons they do not pay them. That is not all prisons, just some. Working for no pay is slavery, for anyone even a prisoner who by the way is still a person eh?
ReplyDeleteAgain thank you for your comment