Prison Industry

What's the Truth Hidden by the "Super Predators" Lie?

The desire to punish for the joy of punishing, for revenge, or for racist or sadistic domination has always had certain difficulties hiding behind the pretense of punishing for protection from danger. Creating fear of (young, black, male) “super predators” was a propaganda tactic for politicians like Hillary Clinton that bore some similarity to the efforts by politicians like Hillary Clinton to create fear of Iraqi weapons that didn’t exist. The latter was meant to hide U.S. read more

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You Should Watch Making of a Murderer

There’s a 10-hour documentary on Netflix with more to teach us than all the combined episodes of Star Wars. (Yes, it’s nice to see a storm trooper refuse to fight, but only until he gleefully joins in the killing for the other side, with all his victims still in masks so that we, the executioner audience, don’t have to see faces die.)

Making of a Murderer is a hugely important film, and it is in fact quite suspenseful. And I am about to SPOIL the plot for you. So please read more

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The Prison Gates Swing Open for Peace Activists

Kathy Kelly is just out of prison, where she’d been sent for nonviolently opposing drone murders.

An appeals court has just overturned convictions for Megan Rice, Michael Walli and Gregory Boertje-Obed, imprisoned for entering and protesting a nuclear weapons site at Oak Ridge, Tenn., three years ago. Resentencing on lesser charges, and quite possibly immediate release, is expected.

Amazingly, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the government failed to prove that the activists read more

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Peace Work Because of You

A note from David Swanson:

You may have seen this article I wrote recently on ongoing U.S. use of depleted uranium weapons. It’s on dozens of websites, including my own WarIsACrime, but also Al Jazeera, Truthout, Counterpunch, FireDogLake, OpEdNews, Washington’s Blog, Z, and many others.

Guess what I got paid, in total, from all of those outlets? —–>>>

But I can pay the bills and keep working for peace if you help read more

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Juvenile Prison: $5 Billion for Child Abuse

Every juvenile prison must be immediately closed and all of its prisoners freed.

Oh. Oh. Oh! That sounds too drastic and simplistic and revolutionary.

We talk about being reformist or revolutionary as if it were a personality choice. Yet we also talk about being scientific, about being reality-based. Unlike reactionary climate-denying racist creationists we claim, most of us, to recognize such phenomena as climate change and to act on them (leave aside for the moment whether we’re really acting read more

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