today's Morning Star, sponsored by "workers in uniform"

They're probably the most left-wing union atm outside the RMT and FBU, which says a lot about the quality of the TUC.

You sound just like the Socialist Party, this statement is ridiculous, one can't help thinking special pleading.

Admin: no flaming, I'm clearly not pleading special anything, surely you know my views on trade unionism and the Morning Star already.

Edit: To make it quite clear to you, I think the POA is a reactionary entity largely full of the dregs of society. My point was they are STILL more left wing than most of the TUC unions. I was in fact aiming to be quite nasty towards TUC-style trade unionism as a whole.

To admin: Well, he said I sounded like the Socialist Party, which from him is quite as strong as a F*** you from anyone else.

Entdinglichung :

Saw this from PC Barnett in The Guardian:

So another Peterloo is on the cards....

...Not really of course - just shows his distortion of history. He implies that the massacre was not something committed by the State: for a Peterloo to be on the cards, the working class would have to be as undomesticated as 200 years ago; and the ruling class would have to give up the pretence of the spectacle of democracy - could be proved wrong, but I can't see that happening in the UK in the next 4 or 5 years. Not whilst the TUC (Tories' Unofficial Cops) still command ignorant respect.

still, gotta love the implicit threat; 'cut police jobs and we'll start massacring people'.

So they think it's wrong to imprison people for profit?

Yeah they've got a big anti-privatisation thing going on atm, apparently only the state is responsible enough to run prisons.

And you apparently don't have in mind the structural results of having a profit making industry made out of law enforcement. I encourage you to look at California which had a massive growth industry in prisons. The exploitation of prison labour and the per-person funds from the state in order to run the prisons turned into profits - some percentage of which naturally goes back to creating an even more repressive state with even more people being put in jail in order to ensure growth.

The state may not give a damn about those who it puts in prison but creating a profit motive for putting people in prison is not the same. It does matter and it is totally regressive and should be stopped.

Pre-privatisation Britain has a similarly high percentage of its population in prison or going through the justice system to the US. In terms of numbers, afaik it's way more down to economics and the use of crime as a political cudgel against popular opinion than it is to "for profit" jailing. That's not to say that people (and prison officers) might not face shitter conditions under privatisation mind.

Sorry but this is just bullshit, the US has a prison population of about 700 out of 100,000 and the UK has one around 140 out of 100,000, furthermore since the mid 80's the US prison population has more than doubled and it should come as no surprise that this correlates to the rise in prison privitisation.

You are bang on that it comes down to economics and prison privatisation isn't simply about being paid to lock people up, it is connected to the rise in prison work industrialisation. Furthermore to overlook the massive attack on the working class that it would be to privatise the prison system because the POA are also against it is just fucking idioitc just as it would be to shrug your shoulders at the invasion of Iraq cause the Ba'athist regime were pretty damn opposed to it.

It is a sad reflection of the union movement that the POA are both more militant and have a wider analysis of what is going on than the TUC twats who are when not deliberately sabotaging struggles paralyse what little activity they do engage by fixating on 'popular opinion' management.

None of this means that anarchists or communists drop their critique of prisons as prisons or means they could work hand in hand with the POA or such nonsense.

Ah k yeah actually there's a big discrepancy there, might have been thinking about something else.

On the other hand though Russia gets second place worldwide with over 600 and operates a (notoriously) state-run system. France also has a significantly higher percentage of private prisons than the UK but a much lower incarceration rate.

I'd definitely agree about the point on prison work industrialisation - and actually that privatisation in a British sense might be the catalyst for that - but not necessarily that the concepts are indivisible. While ideologically neo-liberal governments might push for it in the private sector, pro state-capitalist ones can comfortably incorporate the concept given the right political circumstances.

No one is suggesting that privatisation is the only factor in prison population, conditions and labour but within liberal western states it will be privatisation that will be the main mechanism and catalyst for an increase in prison population, attacking prison conditions and prisoners rights as well as paving the way for the growth of prison labour, especially as wider social circumstances become worse and worse.

On a mildly related topic, does anyone have any info on the efforts of Ohio prisoners unionizing with the IWW as a response to forced labor with little or no pay? Staughton Lynd mentions the incident in his book 'Lucasville' but not in any detail.

jacobian:

The point is to oppose prisons - they're there essentially for locking up the poor (the fact that a few murderers - not the main ones of course - get locked up is hardly the point); Stalinist russia, China today etc. had/have State-run prisons. Is capital punishment, say in China, less abhorrent than if it was run for privateprofit (it is in fact run for the profit of capital: ever since being hung for a lamb, capital punishment is punishment by capital)? And, with kind of reference to revol's comment - would the war in Iraq be worse if it was run by private armies exclusively? Sure, privatisation in present conditions make things worse, but then State-run prisons, in the Stalinist epochs in various countries , were probably a bit worse than the previous private ones, and certainly invovled greater nulbers being imprisoned. To oppose privatisation without opposing prisons as such is a typically Leftist evasion of the whole picture.

It seemed to be what jacobian was tilting at, hence my original response which was mainly aimed at underlining the weakness of a "stay nationalised" campaign predicated on such.

revol68 pointed out that the privitisation of prisons correlate with the rise in prison populations. This has a simple economic explanation which lends credence to the idea that it is not only correlated but a causative factor.

We shouldn't try to compare apples with oranges either. The US already serves as a very good place in which to compare public with private prisons since they coexist simultaneously. Many of the results are quite clear: that incidences of inter-prisoner violence is greater, violence directed at wardens is greater, sentences are higher in States with private prisons, and the Department of Justice has concluded that there are no more than a 1% cost savings to the state [this obviously doesn't take into account the massive rise in cost of having more people incarcerated as it's calculated per prisoner].

The economic incentive also leads to really direct manipulation of the legal system such as when Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corp paid two judges $2.6m to send 2000 children to their prisons.

Nationalisation/Privitisation isn't always clear cut - and national services can be used to attack the working class even as privitisation can. There is simply no easy rule of thumb that allows us to decide when it's better and when it's worse from an abstract principle. Remaining "neutral" and saying that it doesn't matter is blinkered. In some cases privitisation is unequivocally worse for the working class.

You do realise I pointed out the need to maintain a critique of prisons per se whilst also understanding how privatisation is an attack on the working class on a wide variety of levels?
Just as how we all have a critique of wage labour and yet it doesn't stop us pointing out and criticising attacks on workers wages and rights and understanding how these measures are tied into wider socio economic developments and ruling class strategy.

But yes thanks for pointing out the obvious and giving yourself a chance to flex your ohh so radical critique of prison whether private or state managed, some deep shit.

well, a handy rule of thumb is if capital/the state is proposing it, it's in the interests of capital. works whether it's privatising British prisons or nationalising Venezuelan industry.

I never said it was the only factor. I said it makes things worse.

And what is the weakness of an anti-privitisation campaign in comparison to sitting on your arse while they privitise it? I'm not in the UK so I can't speak to whether or not people care enough to stop such a thing and whether you could win a campaign against private prisons. All I'm saying is that you can be pretty sure that if they do privitise, it's worse for the working class, and not opposing it on the principle that "private, public, doesn't matter" is not in touch with reality.

i think it also correlates with the war on drugs

That's true, but even that equation doesn't tell us exactly where the working class stands. The US health care bill that was passed is actually a good example of this. This was driven by a lot of industries in the US being throttled by a specific section of the bourgeoisie, the insurance companies. They used the political system in the usual way, as a forum for sorting out the different competing economic interests of the bourgeoisie. The bill is pretty shit, and is about as far from the NHS as the earth is from Mars. However, it's better for the vast majority of people than what existed prior despite its origins.

oh yeah of course but they both feed into each other.

No revol pointed out that switching from one system to another provides an obvious catalyst for a rise in prison populations towards a specific aim. I pointed out that this aim is not dependent on private control, and isn't always the case (hence mentioning Russia), while accepting the thrust of his argument.

Which is why I wrote a caveat:

revol:

revol:

revol -I didn't know you were also called "jacobian" (is it permitted to have 2 names at once?).
Also, some of the posts crossed - got distracted half-way through writing mine and didn't go back to see that you'd written something else, though what I said about jacobian still stands, at least as s/he originally put it. My "deep shit" was just to pre-empt a possible defence of screws which I've seen on libcom before. Moreover, far too many people here oppose this and that immediate development of specific policies when they campaign against this or that without ever mentioning the whole picture, which is reserved for the avant-garde only, and I kind of assumed jacobian was doing just that, particularly since I've never seen anything by him/her before. and this, by him/her confirms what I'm saying:

As if anyone here is not opposing privatisation - but opposing it also means

by very clearly opposing both - hardly deep shit, but jacobian doesn't even seem to feel the need to situate opposition to privatisation as part of an opposition to prisons as such. And in practice, apart from arguing about it, what does this opposition mean? Attacking companies that profit from virtual slave labour in prisons?

Why do you identify with jacobian, revol? And if you come out with yet another of your sardonic "you're so boring" yawns, you'll be pleased to know I won't bother responding.

And isn't the opposition to privatisation on the part of screws just because they're looking after their own narrow interests? Like cops in France occasionally go on strike, because of their performance-related pay - or the cop in South Africa who said something like "we have nothing to lose but our chains" (or was it "we have nothing to lose but our chins"?)

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association lobbied heavily to keep 'three strikes' laws in operation in California. A quick google around gives us:

.
California doesn't have the highest rate of imprisonment in the states, but the overcorwding (150000-170000 in a system designed for 110000) has led to a federal judgement ordering them to reduce prisoner numbers by 27%

The top three and bottom three all have private prisons. Minnesota is trying to import prisoners from pennsylvania to avoid shutting a prison facility.

edit: here are all the stats you could need http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/pub/pdf/p08.pdf
if you change the number 08 in the URL you can get the report for that year(I've not tried to see how far back it goes but 08 is the most recent one I could get to that way.

Apparently in the period 2000-2008 black prisoners dropped by 28000 and white and hispanic increased by 100000 each., Blacks still the largest minority group and considering demographics that's an astonishing number.

Up until the mid- to late-60s, the uk operated a kind of 6 or 8 (repeat offenders, anyway) strikes and you're "out" - often for very petty offences. Seem to remember one guy got between 6 or 8 years for stealing a couple of bottles of milk or a corn flakes packet (can't remember the details); another got a similar sentence for breaking into a shop at night and falling asleep, whilst drunk, in the shop window. No privatised prisons then.

woah good point.

there were no privatised prisons 1930's Soviet Union either.

deep shit...