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Prisons
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Prisons are big business in the US. California's system has been called the "Golden Gulag" (Ruth Wilson Gilmore's The Golden Gulag says that since 1980 the US prison population has increased 450 per cent, despite falling crime rates), showering money on the powerful prison guards union, on remote communities that house prisons, and on corporations.
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The Federal Bureau of Prisons does not have any information on non-Federal inmates! However, most states have their own locator systems. Contact the Department of Corrections in your state for further information. For your convenience, the phone numbers are provided here. For additional information, The Corrections Connection includes links to many state and local corrections-related Web sites.
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The Federal Bureau of Prisons operates many minimum-security facilities, including the prison at Eglin Air Force Base in Eglin, Florida, and the Federal Detention Center in Oakdale, Louisiana. State minimum-security facilities include a unit of the New Jersey State Prison at Jones Farm in West Trenton, New Jersey, and Walden Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina. Inmates involved in the minimum-security Medfield Massachusetts Prison Project work in hospital wards performing various chores. In Canada, Elbow Lake Institution in Harrison Mills, British Columbia, and Beaver Creek Institution in Gravenhurst, Ontario, are examples of minimum-security institutions.
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Prisons do less now to prepare inmates for life outside. Vocational and educational programs have been cut and inmate participation in them has dropped. Drug treatment is even scarcer than it used to be. Though the proportion of inmates with drug problems has remained steady, the percentage receiving treatment plunged from 25 percent in 1990 to only 10 percent in 1997. States have ... gutted parole. "Truth-in-sentencing" laws-most states now require violent felons to serve 85 percent of their sentences-mean that more and more prisoners are serving most of their sentences in prison then are released without any restrictions.
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Prisons have historically been used for a number of purposes. They are most commonly used to jail criminals, but they have ... been used to lock away political dissidents, the mentally ill, prisoners of war and even people who couldn't pay their debts. The prison camps of the American Civil War were notorious in both the North and South for being unsanitary places with horrendous living conditions. Overcrowding, disease and malnutrition lead to hundreds of deaths [Source: AltonWeb]. In the 18th and 19th centuries, people who couldn't afford to pay their debts were often thrown into jail, or used as forced labor. The time spent working or in jail was an alternative way to pay off the debt.
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Prisons may ... be used as a tool of political repression to detain political prisoners, prisoners of conscience, and "enemies of the state", particularly by authoritarian regimes. In times of war or conflict, prisoners of war may also be detained in prisons. A prison system is the organizational arrangement of the provision and operation of prisons, and depending on their nature, may invoke a corrections system. Although people have been imprisoned throughout history, they have also regularly been able to perform prison escapes.
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