UNICOR - Federal Prison Industries, Inc (UNICOR) is a prison labor program whereby inmates produce goods and services for the public sector. Under US federal law, all physically able inmates who are not a security risk or have a health exemption are required to work either for UNICOR or another prison job. Inmates earn between $0.23 to $1.15 per hour. Private prisons are run by private corporations who enter into a contract with the government, outlining how a corporation is getting paid, which can be determined by the size of the prison, or in most cases, the number of its inmates. Companies which profit off cheap prison labor include McDonalds, Wendy’s, Walmart, Starbucks, Sprint, Verizon, Victoria’s Secret, Fidelity Investments and JCPenney.
Companies benefiting off the prison industrial complex (PIC) in general include Aramark, 3M, Amazon, Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Microsoft, Western Union, and Wells Fargo. Private prison operators include CoreCivic, Ferrovial, GEO Group, Serco Group and American Airlines.
Drugs
The Three Strikes System, which was put into use in the early 90s, gives prisoners lengthy mandatory minimum sentences after three arrests. This was a result of the legacy of Reagan's war on drugs, which was being waged as the CIA was controlling the drug trade in South America, shipping bricks of cocaine on military planes into the US to use the proceeds to fund terrorists like the Contras. All the while, the prisons and anyone with stock in them made money off of drug-related incarcerations. New York Governor, Nelson Rockefeller, of the Rockefeller family pushing for mandatory prison sentences of 15 years to life for those caught with small amounts of Cannabis, cocaine or heroin.
In a 2016 article for Harper’s Magazine, journalist Dan Baum recounted a story told by John Ehrlichman, Richard Nixon’s Domestic Policy Advisor during his presidency: “You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Rap
Ever wonder why rap music promotes crime and drugs?
In 2012, CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America, the biggest name in the private prison industry, contacted 48 states offering to buy their prisons. One requirement of eligibility for the deal was assurance that the agencies have sufficient inmate population to maintain a minimum 90% occupancy rate over the term of the contract.
Both BET and MTV belong to Viacom. The largest holder in CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corp of America) is Vanguard Group Incorporated.
Vanguard is the number one largest holder in both Viacom and Time Warner; Vanguard is also the largest holder in the GEO group, and the second largest owner of private prisons in the US.
The prospect of welfare incentivizes single motherhood, eliminating the deterrence of a present father figure from young men getting involved in crime. This is also probably why black people say call their seniors 'unc,' as they are raised by men in the neighborhood who are not their father.
Note from the editor
Ice Cube, one of the founding fathers of gangster rap, grew up in a nuclear family; his father was a school groundskeeper; he never got arrested once, and now he's a millionaire who bought a basketball team. It's the very fact he didn't practice what he preached that he's where his is today, which is ironic considering he used to argue that rap is a commentary on reality and not a cause. At some point he stopped singing about drugs and violence entirely; now that he's an unc, all he sings about is gloating and shitting on young rappers; he even acknowledged in an interview that the point of gangster rap in the 90s was to process blacks into the prison system, which is cliqued up with record companies. His song The Nigga Trap opines on this.
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By: Derrick Broze
Raped by: Otto Heckel
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