u s leaders moan incessantly about how other government should treat their own people america's moral superiority is routinely touted as why the u s has the judgment to intervene in the affairs of others around the world time and again they pull out the human rights card admonish the human rights abuses in other countries justifying sanctions bombing campaigns or invasions to overthrow their governments the us is the most qualified to do this of course because it is a shining moral example for how society should be run yet two point two million people sit rotting in american jails seven million in the prison system counting probation and parole astronomically higher in absolute numbers and per capita than any other country in the world the us has only five percent of the world's population yet a stunning trani five percent of its prisoners meaning one out of every one hundred people in america is living behind bars when the president populations so enormous and a country that's the global arbitrator of human rights it must be leading with a great example of what president should be so what are conditions like in the so called correctional facilities prisoners aren't just warehouse in the millions they're packed on top of each other like animals at the end of two thousand and ten the federal bureau of prisons was operating at thirty six percent over capacity on average california prisons are one hundred forty four percent of capacity in alabama the most overcrowded prisons state sits at one hundred and ninety five percent of capacity in two thousand and nine one prison in the heart of dixie was overflowing at three hundred ninet percent of capacity even the supreme court has deemed prison overcrowding cruel and unusual punishment cramped conditions may be livable needs but extreme temperatures are deadly this year a homeless veteran at rikers prison baked to death in a cell that exceeded one hundred degrees in texas at least fourteen and mates have died due to extreme heat since two thousand and seven with cells averaging ninety and reaching upwards of one hundred thirty degrees even the most basic human survival needs are choked despite here budgets prison strive to allocate only the minimum food required and of the lowest quality spending about one third feeding and mates what it should cost for basic nutritional diet in some cases prisoners are literally starving according to the southern center for human rights and maids in one georgia jail are fed only two meager portions of food a day up to fourteen hours apart resorting syrup packets toothpaste and toilet paper for sustenance even more disturbing are incidents like the one at rikers this past march where twenty two prisoners became violently ill after eating meat loaf laced with rat poison it is not just how on earth for end mates it's also how for the families and loved ones of anyone incarcerated extreme difficulty in visiting prison aside the system even makes talking near impossible in addition to severe restrictions on communications prisoners are also charged exorbitant dollar minute fees the telephone service providers kick back forty two percent of their massive revenue to the state amounting to one hundred fifty two million dollars annually two dozen texas jails have already eliminated in person visits altogether replacing them with expensive video chat services incarcerated people are also subject to savage brutality from the only people from the outside they're allowed to see extreme violence from prison guards as widespread although done hidden behind walls knowing that their actions will rarely if ever be scrutinized a survey at clinton correctional facility found that ninety percent reported common physical assaults by staff for even the most minor infractions the report also corroborates what others have found across the country that people will be brutally beaten thrown back in their cells without medical attention and threatened with more violence if they seek medical attention if wounds are too severe it's now word of the guard because routinely the medical staff will cover up for them in some cases guards or even found to be forcing contracts and of course a very abusive it's not just physical violence in two thousand and fourteen the bureau of justice reported the prison guards account for half of all sexual assault allegations and it was extremely rare for any of them to go to trial for the accused crime of the guards who are caught sexually abusing prisoners one third are allowed to resign before the investigation concludes eliminating any public record one of the guards most important job is making sure everyone's put to work all day every day making pennies on the dollar for corporate america the country's biggest corporations mcdonald's wal mart american airlines and others line their pockets with outsourced prison labor to manufacture everything from food to furniture to staffing call centers and may workers safety is outweighed by their utility to be used as corporate props i can b p use prisoners to stage gulf cleanup photos state governments have also found ways to cut costs by replacing good pain sought after careers with cheap prison labor a stunning thirty to forty percent of all california's firefighters are prisoners making immediately two dollars a day or two an hour when on the line producing two billion an annual value and maids are a hot commodity for corporate masters who only wish their minimum wage of twelve cents an hour could be applied to the entire nation and america's prisons lives are not just profit making tools they're also expendable there is no humane way to kill someone period realizing this every other industrialized country in the world has banned the death penalty but exceptional america refuses to abandon this barbaric crack this the wild west logic goes if you kill someone you deserve to die but the murky truth reveals that eighteen people facing the death penalty have been exonerated through d evidence since one thousand nine hundred nine according to proceeding of the national academy of sciences at least one and twenty five inmates on death row are innocent there's more than one way to kill a man who's locked up after america's torture became public record u s leaders a valid to ban it for good again but the empire regularly tortures people every day within its own borders c m tires used to torture their prisoners in underground dark dungeons it over a century later their torture just the same in sanitized bright boxes imagine the quality of life spent inside a windowless concrete six by nine foot cell for twenty three hours a day for years on and in a room no bigger than a king size mattress the only human interaction you have is with the guard who slips you food through a slit at red onion state prisons seventy five percent of inmates are on twenty three hour lockdown tiny cells for an average of three years in texas and maids placed in solitary have to earn their way back to the general prison population spending on average five years in isolation this kind of detachment has devastating psychological impacts not only does it exacerbate mental illness in many cases perfectly healthy prisoners develop it stream psychological disorders as a result according to the a c l u people subjected to solitary confinement exhibit a variety of negative physiological reactions including hyper sensitivity hallucinations increased anxiety and nervousness lack of impulse control severe and chronic depression appetite loss and weight loss heart palpitations talking to oneself problems leaping confusing thought process sees self mutilation lower levels of brain function including a decline in activity after only seven days in solitary yet the u s loves to use it despite international human rights bodies widely recognizing the practice as torture often we hear that the people in prison are violent criminals who need to be locked away to keep the country safe when you take a look at who's actually behind bars much more disturbing reality against unfold despite lecturing the world about the inexcusable offense of holding political prisoners the us has its own americans this puerto ricans does of the european organizers and in nam today the environmentalists in other people they have been organizing for the last two or three decades have also joined the ranks of political prisoners well it's very difficult to organize in prisons it's easier to engage in negative back to the once you start organizing and is a concerted effort by prison officials to transfer endure the hardships this involves beyond targeting activists masses of average americans like you and me are wrapped up in the albatross a prison but the prison population skyrocketing over the last several decades you would think it would correlate to the level of crime but the opposite is true crime has actually dropped dramatically over the past twenty five years while numbers sent to prison have increased that and verse three the bursting prison population also carries heavy examples of institutional racism in america despite making up only twelve percent of the population african americans constitute thirty nine percent of the prison population the facts are irrefutable if you're black or latino you are more likely to be sentenced to prison than your white counterparts in fact african american men are seven times more likely to t m and three times more likely to go to prison than white men among federal defendants black men receive twenty percent longer sentences than white counterparts committing the same crime with similar records and what great threat to these people pose to society that warns them being locked away in a federal penitentiaries mostly using drugs over fifty percent serving time in federal prison are nonviolent drug related offenders and since one thousand nine hundred eighty have constituted the largest portion fed into federal prison between two thousand and twelve and two thousand thirteen twenty percent of drug offenders had charges related to marijuana own on top of throwing people in cells for victimless crimes the state has also ensured a way to throw minor offenders away forever thanks nian three strikes laws there are currently at least three thousand two hundred seventy eight people serving life without parole for nonviolent crimes some of them as absurd as shoplifting to jack in a wallet in a tragic seventy nine percent of these cases where people's lives are trapped in the system forever and involve nonviolent drug offenses the us prison system doesn't just illustrate white supremacy embedded in the empire but patriarchy to one california prison study found that of all the women behind bars for killing their significant other ninety three percent were abused by that person and sixty seven percent killed their significant other while did finding themselves and their children from life threatening attacks from their abuser self defense even without a victim is punished in the case of morris alexander the victim of repeated abuse was given twenty years in prison for simply firing a warning shot in the air while her abuser was trying to kill her after a public outcry won her an appeal the prosecutor tried to increase the sentenced to sixty years then there's the refusal to recognize the existence and rights of trans women i missed gendering and therefore placing them in extreme danger in general four percent report sexual abuse while in prison that number shoots to fifty nine percent for trans women harrowing stats aside the empire defends mass incarceration with the monster that those in prison are there by their own doing well make our own decisions but what about those who can't in the belly of the empire how are the most vulnerable treated getting people medically deemed an able to care for themselves people with the bill the taking mental illness like bipolar schizophrenia post traumatic stress disorder and more they're discarded thrown on the streets and punished in cells in testimony before congress in two thousand and ten ohio governor ted stric estimated upwards of forty percent of mentally ill people in america become wrapped up in the criminal justice system right now there are ten times as many people with mental illness and prison and in hospital care the trend of mental illness startlingly high across the board and federal prison inmates with diagnosed mental health issues consist of forty five percent of the population in state prisons even higher fifty six percent and a whopping sixty four percent of inmate have mental illness and local jails but this cruelty and neglect isn't just endured by mentally ill adults extended to the even more vulnerable children for example arizona department of juvenile corrections estimates thirty five percent of youth suffer mental illness with fifty percent on psychotropic drugs however the mentally ill aren't just left to languish in prison they're also executed since one thousand nine hundred three at least sixty people with mental illness or retardation have been killed by the state this is that has been shown to be stacked against poor people regardless of race even though drug use is comparable police aren't looking for drugs in beverly hills poor neighborhoods are the most heavily policed and the most routinely harassed and once you're arrested you only get the best justice money can buy a great secret of this so called justice system is that the right to be tried before a jury of their peers is hardly the norm most are pressured by fear to take plea deals told they're going to be found guilty anyway more than ninety percent of criminal cases are never tried before a jury others go to jail not for jailable offenses but for the inability to pay fines and court fees  and ten brennan center report found that of the fifteen states with the largest prison populations all had a practice of arresting people because they were unable to afford fines for example ferguson's nearly all white police force pull over african americans in mass and slap them with expensive tickets whether or not they commit traffic violations unable to pay residents are sent into the pipe line of the prison system for two weeks or more in two thousand and thirteen the city issued thirty three thousand arrest warrants for unpaid traffic tickets ferguson has a population of twenty one thousand many remain in the system because they can't afford bail like khalif broder who sat in jail for three long years for the crime of stealing a backpack at age sixteen because he was unable to pay the three thousand dollars bail ended up committing suicide as a result of abuse at rikers and insane forty percent of the inmates are there because they cannot afford to make bail but at least the system throws the gauntlet down on all crimes equally actually if you have money you can get away with pretty much anything robert richards the fourth billionaire heir to the  found guilty in two thousand and nine of raping his three year old daughter i mean years in prison did he receive for this heinous offense none the judge said he quote wouldn't fare well in prison let him go home on probation instead beyond individuals though an entire click is exempt from prosecution bank of america western union j p morgan chase and h s b c are known to be laundering billions in drug money for cartels in mexico while millions of poor people are funneled in and out of the prison system for possession of small amounts of drugs banks openly engage in full criminal drug activity to the point of making the drug trade possible without fear of any real punishment racism and any quality in the justice system don't happen in a vacuum the economic function american prisons serve cannot be overlooked when we want to understand how the freest country on earth and it up with the most prisoners i sat down with eugene puryear author of shackled and chained to talk about the roots of mass incarceration and how it evolved in the u s society well i think that what we have to understand about prisons in the united states is that there alternately a form of social control there an element that exist as a broader part of the economy that helps discipline the labor force and so when you think about slavery for instance and the things that came after it is sort of a three step process for the african american population in particular in america so on the one hand you have africans who are brought here amalgamated from a number of different ethnicities peoples nations so on and so forth molded into one people and really when you look at the development of the prison system in america in the south prisons were very underdeveloped underdeveloped because primarily slavery was the institution that was used to control labor to control where people were living where they went how they traveled the security system the patrollers sometimes called paddy rollers at that time that were all policing the population that existed at that time that was the primary labor force the service labor force then following the end of slavery what you have after a brief flourishing of reconstruction is this new system called jim crow and used things like convict leasing which was a small amount of the individual in terms of the individuals who were involved but in terms of the role that it played it was for african americans who were still needed to be this major agricultural labor indigo so on and so forth that really was the pivot of the world capitalist economy they couldn't just have people going wherever they wanted leaving the plant tape doing whatever they can do so on the one hand you see that there's no land reform during reconstruction and on the other hand that you see that the laws that were people getting people swept up into this convict leasing were primarily around quote unquote vagrancy or things of that nature essentially if you weren't employed or you people thought you were doing something suspicious you could be picked up and thrown into these labor gangs that existed that were you know in the mines primarily also in the railroads and a lot of the new industry in the south and so you can see that the role of convict leasing which was the early development of the prison system as such in the southern part of the country is almost one hundred percent aimed towards controlling labor and when we look at our current system of mass incarceration we have to look at the fact that at the same time you see prisons exploding you see a big change over that's happening in terms of the economy in america and mass incarceration militarized policing and things of that nature become a institution that is existing as a band aid because you've already decided we're going to economically devastate communities and instead of doing things that are going to help people what we have to do is ring fence and control the social conditions that are arising from this that create a number of different problems eugene in your book you say that quote sections of the population have been rendered superfluous to the normal productive process what do you mean by that well what i mean by that is when you see what's happening with this economic crisis the question is what is the answer going to be and so not only do you start to blame poor people more for the problem and cut back on social programs and the like but to restore the rate of profit what the capitalist class the ruling class the one percent whatever you want to call them in this country decided to do was globalized the chain of production and start to move factories that so called runaway factory movement first to the south in the so called sun belt the southwest california where labor is cheaper and more importantly where labor laws were completely weekend and then after that or into latin america went to asia and the process that many of us know as quote unquote globalization was really a for the cheapest possible form of labor to reduce the cost to increase the rate of profit and so not only do you have jobs moving away in the general sense but you have a rise in structural unemployment that is having a huge effect of people look at for example the employment to population ratio which is really the best way to look at how many people are employed it's very interesting to look at the peak level which starts in one nine hundred seventy nine and you start to see it is steadily going down till today and i think that's a powerful statement about the fact that not only are jobs leaving but we need fewer people to work and so what you have is a whole population of people that you've said ok we told you that we were going to integrate you into the economy black people the same way we did irish and italians but we're not going to do that we're going to send these jobs somewhere else and on the same token we're also not going to provide a lot of social programs and things of that nature so you have a whole population of people who are existing in this area who aren't really needed in the production process besides how they become used in the low wage workforce but they're still there and these are the exact same communities that just twenty years previously if we're talking say one nine hundred eighty had risen up in this mass uprising that happened in these major northern cities and when you look at the wave of major drug epidemics in america let's just big about crack cocaine crack cocaine really comes on the scene at the depth of the economic crisis of the hundred eighty s that really was devastating to black communities across this country and so you see when people have no hope when they see no future and then they're driven to look for more and more ways to escape and when you start to have the explosion of this black market economy all the other social consequences that exist from the social devastation you have to find some way to contain it if you are going to solve it and talk about the forces are behind these and what damage did they do was an interesting question do you see a star or a low a number of democrats so called liberals start to reach for these conservative solutions that speak to punitive type things well if the problem isn't the government institutions if the problem is these poor people we need to start to look for punitive measures that can change their behavior and so they start to push mandatory minimums but it doesn't become a big thing until the war on drugs and what you see then is the connection between the two they were pushing mandatory minimums before the war on drugs the war on drugs became the kindling on the fire this issue of social control is very clear they are making the laws and organizing them in a way that is deliberately aimed at putting people in a certain geographic area which are racially and class exclusive black poor people putting them in the news and sweeping them into the prison system conditions in the empire's prisons have always been horrific and people incarcerated along with their supporters on the outside of always organized together to change then in one nine hundred seventy one in the attica uprising in san quentin prison forced the government and prison authorities to take the prisoners demand seriously and succeeded in winning real reforms despite the fact that the fascist like prison forces sent their foot soldiers to wantonly slaughter twenty nine prison organizers with so little care that they also killed ten hostages in the massacre the attica rebellion lit a fire that has never gone out and two thousand thirteen saw the biggest prison strike possibly in world history where tens of thousands of california and maids came together to protest for nutrition tartarus use of solitary confinement and more in less than a week the strike spread to twenty four state prisons and four out of state contractors saudis were inmates refused to eat perform work assignments or attend required classes as a result state lawmakers were forced to hold public hearings on conditions in maximum security prisons and the prevalent use of solitary confinement hope can come from such an ugly disease the empire has exposed that these structures exist for nothing but to maintain its power and wealth while wasting the potential of so many millions of human beings so many young people so many in need who deserve to be part of society if prisoners of the most a very pression can organize coronated political actions across more than a dozen high security prisons imagine what we can do on the outside to build solidarity to and mass incarceration the fact that history's biggest empire also has history's biggest prison system highly militarized police and a mass surveillance grid it is no coincidence it's an acknowledgement that the biggest threat to the empires rule are its own people awake and using their agency to fight it