FRACTAL

by Tony Ortiz

  And the Private Prison stuff, Charlie chimed in.

  Relax guys, I’m getting to that said Brooke as she continued. Prior to his DNA exoneration, there were two key things going on. One was the fact that up until this point, convictions of any kind relied largely on non-scientific things like eye-witness testimony, confessions, or if you got lucky, fingerprint proof. When you factor in things like misremembering and the trauma of eye witnesses, false confessions by the accused, and taking plea deals as a lessor of two evils option between more and less years, you can just imagine how many innocent people are still behind bars today.

  I nodded in agreement as I listened intently.

  The other thing that was going on was Private Prisons, which became a publicly known thing around 1984. From that point forward the entire justice system, whether they realized it or not, was and still is financially incentivized to incarcerate people. Period. Those two issues are a bad combination of things that inevitably lead to a non-zero number of people being falsely incarcerated.

  How’s the financial incentive thing work? I asked.

  Ok, here's a basic breakdown. The government cost to house a prisoner in a public prison is lets say $200 per day. A private prison comes along and says they can do it for $150. It’s cheaper for the government in this case to pay that private prison a stipend and let them handle it. From the government perspective it's just contracted work like Charter Schools or the manufacturing of weapons for the Military. At face value it saves the taxpayer money and is a more efficient way to do things.

  The problem there is two fold. A public prison is a non-profit and has an end goal of safely housing and rehabilitating inmates. Albeit with more emphasis on the housing part. A private prison on the other hand, is run by a corporation. It’s end goal is to turn a profit and to raise the potentiality of that return, for the shareholders, quarter after quarter in perpetuity. That's literally every corporations mandate. When rehabilitation and safety are not at the top of your list of priorities past the point of passing routine government inspections and you get paid a stipend based on the number of prisoners you house ... you’ve literally created a system where the more people are in prison, the more money you make for yourself and all the related cottage industries that sprout up around it, said Brooke.

  It was and still is a big issue for us said Jake. An important takeaway from all this is that it’s not just the corporations that run these Private facilities that are to blame, or the politics that paved the way for them to exist. It’s the trickle-out dependency that has been created. You have for example the prison guard unions that become dependent on this type of system. - The more this model expands, the more jobs are created for the administrators of the prisons. You have an immediate boom in construction jobs around building the prisons. The demand for Correction Officers goes up. Then factor in the companies that supply the mattresses, pillows, sheets and everything you need to stock the place.

  Then think about the leading food suppliers like Aramark. A quick aside about them that helps illustrates the point is that in 2014 they were fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for infractions like meal shortages and unsanitary conditions like maggots found in food. Despite that, the company still continues to make hundreds of millions of dollars per year providing the prison food supply. You also have telecommunication companies that have exclusive contracts with operating the prisons phone systems, which make hundreds of millions, healthcare companies like Corizon that specialize in prison healthcare, if you can even call it that, also makes a killing. It’s endless.

  You know why the south was on the wrong side of history? Asked Charlie before he answered his own question. Because of the benefits of slave labor. Labor is one of the most, if not the most, substantial cost in any industry. That was such a blindingly enabling incentive that even considering getting rid of slavery wasn't part of the zeitgeist then. Now as a Nation all we did was just relabel that slave labor as prison labor. The biggest “free-market” touting companies have used prison labor as a profit driver for many years. Some of the public prisons pay their workforce $2 per hour, some even pay minimum wage. Private prisons pay as little as 17 cents per hour bro.

  C’mon, seriously? I asked in awe. What kind of shady companies do that?

  Maybe you’ve heard of some said Charlie. Companies like IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Wal-Mart, have or have had some level of a Prison workforce.

  Microsoft, AT&T, our Military uniforms, Dell, Compaq, said Brooke.

  Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, McDonald’s uniforms, said Miguel.

  Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, the Target stores, and so many more, said Laura. The entire system literally thrives and survives off of eating lives.

  Shit, I didn’t know it went that deep, I responded.

  Yea man, said Charlie. Just look up the name UNICOR. That’s the d/b/a that the American prison-labor industry does business under. They cloak it as a program of rehabilitation and preparation for release, but anyone with half a brain knows what it is. Most of those manufacturing jobs don’t even exist in this country anymore.

  I would imagine all that workforce supply and momentum generated by the private prison system, influences politicians and law makers to increase sentencing penalties and create laws that feed that need, I said. It's logical for them to continue to meet the labor demand. Just to play devil’s advocate though, what's the alternative? I asked.

  What do you mean? Miguel responded.

  I mean, people are going to commit crimes right? Some even horrible, heinous ones. We need prisons to house them. That's obvious, but how well should these known monsters be treated? Don't get me wrong, we shouldn't push up against the cruel and unusual punishment line, but I don't think we should pamper them either.

  That's a fair point and absolutely people will commit crimes, responded Miguel, and those that do shouldn't expect any special treatment. However it's about privatized prisons having incentives that are directly aligned with increasing their population to justify expanding its physical size to then house even more prisoners, to increase their bottom line by any means necessary.

  That creates an environment that breeds cruel and unusual punishment, albeit not by malicious intent, but by design. It also increases the potential of wrongful convictions. When you cast a wide enough net, there's no way you can account for all the unintended capturing going on. Let alone correct for it. It’s a need that can’t be satiated.

  This industry and its related corporations, just like any other, all have lobbyists that skew numbers and data in their favor and use them to wield politicians to enact self serving laws. No bullshit, some proposals made by lobbyists, are literally copied and pasted into Bills that get signed into Law. Verbatim. It’s not a coincidence that non-violent drug offenses for example, are at the forefront of a lot of these conversations.

  I continued to listen as Charlie picked up where Miguel left off.

  Reversing these laws just doesn't fit into the status quo paradigm of these powerful special interests, said Charlie. Take something like the legalization of marijuana. With all of the anecdotal evidence that we have for it being one of the only things that increases the appetite for chemo-therapy patients that badly need their nutrients, or subsiding the epileptic seizures in children and infants when the cocktail of opioid medications they were on failed to help. The alleviation of eye pressure for people with glaucoma or debilitating migraine relief. Do you have joint pain? Here, take a couple hits of this, and see how the inflammation that's causing that pain, diminishes. Can't sleep? Put the addictive, habit forming Ambien down, take a hit of this Indica strain and sleep like a baby at levels deeper than REM. All that being indisputable fact, and marijuana having little to no serious side effects that we know of, tell me why the hell it’s such an uphill battle to legalize? Do you know what the LD-50 for marijuana is?

  I don't even know what a LD-50 is, I responded.

  It's the median l
ethal dose threshold for 50% of people that would consume it. Everything has an LD-50 rate. Tylenol, water, table salt for example has an LD-50 of 3000 mg/kg. Meaning that if one hundred people eat about 47 teaspoons worth of table salt, fifty will drop dead. You know what that number is for weed? According to the DEA, mind you, it’s 1:20,000 or 1:40,000. That means that you have to consume 40,000 Times the amount of weed that's in one joint. That's in-fucking-sane. That works out to mean that you’d have to smoke 1,500 pounds of marijuana, within fifteen minutes, in order to induce death. Which in case you were wondering, is humanly impossible.

  Passionate about weed, much? Laura said as we all laughed and Charlie continued on his rant.

  Look, I'm not saying kids who's brains are still developing should have access to it. It should be regulated the same way as cigarettes or alcohol. Then tax the shit out of it if you want to. But don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. Don't call it a dangerous gateway drug when we can't even properly test it while it's a schedule one drug. That classification is why we can’t do legit studies on it. Did you know that since it's a schedule one drug, it's federally illegal to allow for its benefits to be studied, clinically tried and documented? What kind of rigged catch-22 bullshit is that?

  Meanwhile in States that have had the balls to legalize it recreationally, hundreds of millions of dollars have been collected in tax revenue. Colorado which was the first, has projected making over half a billion, with a B, dollars in under three years through 2017. Most of that tax revenue will be spent on schools, drug prevention and rehabilitation programs. All the other States that followed are having similar success as well.

  Oh and peep this, crime is down! Not just marijuana related arrests either, that obviously plummeted. There has been little to no impact on the rate of teen use. Traffic fatalities are the same or lower. The consistent increase of violent crimes in Colorado decreased by more than half. Yet it’s still demonized more than hell itself. It’s all part of a convoluted bureaucratic shit-show that brought us to the point Brooke was getting at.

  Oh yea, continued Brooke, so after our failed attempts to block private prisons from becoming a thing, our small but significant fix in the corruption within the criminal justice system, was to introduce the option of using forensic DNA as a tool during criminal investigations and trials. Until then cases were often won by the “better” attorney. The loudest, the most charming, the most persuasive. There's still some of those theatrics that will always factor in, but it's no longer the only thing steering decisions made in a courtroom. Being able to use DNA as a tool introduced a sense of truth. A sense of blind justice. Since then, advents in Science and Technology have only increased its efficacy with developments like familial searching techniques that have paved the way for the possibility of solving cases that have been cold for decades. In the long term, this should lower the number of innocent people behind bars, and maybe even one day help abolish that possibility.

  Alright guys, lets call it, said Miguel. Tomorrow’s a big day. We need our rest.

  Everyone agreed and began to get up to turn in.

  Remind us to tell you about the impenetrable S&L crisis from the late 80’s, and how Bill Clinton’s administration led us to the Great Recession of 2008, said Jake. That’s the one that has always peaked my interest.

  Clinton? Don’t you mean George W. Bush? I asked.

  Nope, Clinton, responded Jake. Don’t get me wrong, W’s deregulatory governing philosophy definitely played a major roll in it and it all went down under his watch. - Some even speculate that a different leader in place at the time may have changed the outcome. But don’t get it twisted, Bill Clinton’s actions absolutely set the stage for W’s fuck-ups. Clinton repealed the Glass-Steagall Act which was cornerstone legislation post the Great Depression. It didn’t allow commercial banks, where people like you and me deposit money into our savings and checking accounts, to merge with investment banks. Investment banks essentially underwrite and deal securities in Stock Markets, and speculate on the possibility of higher returns for those investments. Allowing the investment banks to merge with the commercial banks, gave them access to gamble with a whole new pool of funds ... the public’s life savings.

  The Clinton administration also loosened the regulations on housing rules by signing the Community Reinvestment Act. His intent was noble in that its purpose was to get banks to lend in low-income neighborhoods to help them prosper, but unfortunately this also had the unintentional consequence of spawning the eventual predatory lending catastrophe. Then sprinkle in the fact that he signed the Commodity Futures Modernization Act which made the infamous credit-default swaps exempt from regulation and you have a recipe that George W. Bush and Co. cooked up into a deliciously disastrous shit-storm-stew.

  That’s exactly why the impact of an Obama administrations willingness to allow mass surveillance won’t have it’s legacy unfold until after we see what happens with the subsequent administration having that level of reach and power, Miguel Chimed in.

  Be careful buddy, power and corruption can get to the best of us, said Jake. Have a good night everyone.

  It was my first coordinated skip so I was a bit apprehensive about being able to stay under long enough, but we all popped our little red pills and going back together worked out smoother than I could have expected. We went back eight months from present day. It was now three days prior to when the Minister was scheduled to leave, and one day before the Mine collapse.

  We wound up going back, with unsuccessful results, a half dozen times. Normally after three or four times it’s considered an impenetrable and the team cuts their losses and moves on. But Charlie was adamant about this one so we tried a couple more times.

  We tried anonymously alerting the Arizona mine authorities of the negligent inspector to see if that would trigger them to look into his past work and pull him off of this case. No such luck. In another attempt we found out where the inspector lived, and successfully made him late to work by flattening three of his tires, but he just pushed back his appointments for the day and still inspected our mine once he got there. On another day we made him miss work altogether with a bomb scare at his kid’s school. It was a bit extreme, I know, but we figured he’d miss work and another inspector would cover his inspections that day, hopefully properly, and the mine would get shut down prior to the collapse. - But that didn’t work out either.

  On the flip side we tried working on delaying the Minister’s trip. Our thought process here was that if we could just get him to talk to the Arizona authorities a few days earlier than he otherwise did, then the plan could get drafted, put in place and the miners would be rescued before the collapse.

  I learned that it’s a very delicate game we play whenever we skip back. When the stakes are this high we have to walk a fine line and stick to the script. We can’t just go up to the Minister of mining in Chile and say; ‘hey, you know that vacation you’re planning to Torres del Paine, that nobody is supposed to know about ... you shouldn’t go because a mine is going to collapse is Bisbee Arizona in a couple days’. So we planted streams of false weather reports and meteorological readings in hopes that impending inclement weather would deter his family trip, but no dice. After all these failed attempts, Miguel called it. He scrapped the project and deemed it to be an impenetrable. He had carte-blanche authority to make that decision.

  Over the next couple of weeks, we fell back into our day-to-day routines. Things went back to normal. I was hanging out with Charlie in the back patio after a long day, partaking in what has become a reoccurring ritual as of late.

  You wanna hit this? Charlie asked.

  After this tense ass week, yea man, of course. Think I’m gonna leave it all for you?

  I still can’t get over it bro. I really thought we’d be able to save those people, Hector. I mean, it felt like it was supposed to work, didn’t it?

  Yea man, I feel you on that. It was my first time going back together like that so I don’t have a
frame of reference like you do, but yea I thought we had everything covered with the right plan in place.

  I feel like just calling the dude man, Charlie said jokingly.

  Why didn’t we? I asked.

  What do you mean? Charlie asked.

  Why didn’t we just try that at the end? Why don’t we now?

  It’s an impenetrable man. It’s over. It’s done.

  Yea, yea I get that. But I mean, when we went back, why didn’t we call him at his vacation spot. To put the Arizona authorities in touch with him. We were focused on stopping the vacation from happening and maybe that's the impenetrable part, but getting them to speak wasn't. The underlying goal was to get them and the Minister to speak. What does it matter where he is or how it happens?