CALIFORNIA HIGHWAY MAXIMUM CONTROL
We understand that prisons run on fuel. High octane for maximum performance in some cases. California's prison-built, industrial highway is now at full throttle. Everything spent for prison construction, prisoner incarceration, is high tech, high priced and happening at high speed, while setting the national trend for prison marketing. Keepers of human cargo. New companies are reinventing themselves to fit in-need and demand instantly met. Anything is possible; any capital venture worth consideration with an expanding, captive consumer base in place for life.
The last 15 years have seen a $12-billion investment stake driven into the state's cutting-edge prison construction boom. Four billion annually in taxpayer monies is divvied up in operational costs. Five billion next year, and so on. Thirty-three major prison facilities are scattered helter-skelter throughout the state mostly in financially strapped rural areas. A new prison site is projected to open each year until the well runs dry.
Big business is booming. California once again has discovered gold. But all of this is to the utter destruction of large segments of the state's young population of color, used as prison filler-upper. State police and security interests, private business and a voracious working middle-class, have all emerged to plunder an exposed and vulnerable underclass, mostly poor, disadvantaged Latino and Black youth. Nightly we see televised neighborhood sweeps, tattooed bodies rounded up by police and destined for correctional warehousing. Each body taken into the state's prison apparatus now represents a $25,000 yearly correctional departmental accruement. Two brown skinned, semi-illiterate Mexicans to a cell represents yet another job-slot opening for yet another guard recruitment, swelling union ranks. The prison union goon-squad has become super tough and entrenched on Capitol Hill where, for the most part, chicken-hearted politicians avoid raising their ire or taking their fire.
Prisons are doing enormous volumes of business trafficking in human lives. Prisoncrats with politicians in their pockets are the new state power-brokers, devious and heartless. Wardens outrank state senators. The marketing in disposable bodies is the new wave of "prisons of tomorrow." The coming prison-state gloats as society looks the other way. Prisons are mostly out of view, but they've taken over the state's politics and conscience within the largest and costliest prison complex the world has known. We stop to ask, "Is this somehow part of the coming new world order, or are some of us just prone to being the worst of the worst and need locking up?"
The recent structural addition of High Desert Prison to a pre-existing complex in Lassen County has now given California its first so-called mega-colossus. While Chowchilla's prison-duplex near Madera boasts the largest women's installation in the nation, California's top-of-the-line prison-design model is the control unit concept--a unit meant to shut the world down. More expensive, easier management, and by their very nature, destructive to human life, this high-tech innovation has been designated: ADXSEG (administrative segregation) or SHU here in its home state of origin. Maxi-maxi's or super max lock-ups, adsegs, holes, and solitary confinement have been around a long time, but the SHU concept and all it implies took its first crude form and test-run in San Quentin's Adjustment Center during the early 70's. What makes SHUs unique--as well as sinister--is the intent behind implementation.
Behavior modification is achieved through sensory deprivation, round-the-clock harassment, brutality, and closed-circuit monitoring, coupled with psychologically damaging, indefinite isolation--inside the raceway to hell. Meanwhile inside the SHUs, inside the control unit concept, the racist, stereotyped profiling of prisoners to be managed, modified and broken becomes prison policy drawn by draconian minds and left for implementation by criminally prone, desensitized staff. Debriefing--co-opting a prisoner willing to become a state informant to save himself from further punishment--has developed from this malo-experiment. Institutionalized brutality and state-sanctioned terrorism has made this experiment work. The courts have let it happen. No constitutional guarantees need apply.
Various institutional design-patterns for housing prisoners to be modified and broken are architecturally available to fit different security regimens and behavior-modification plans. Some with windows, some without. Fresh air is an option, as is direct sunlight. Walk-alone or single-status exercise periods are another feature. Cutting off family supports and outside contacts have been factored in by virulent classification committees intent on maximum to absolute control. No outside interferences from so-called "loved ones."
From forerunner models at Marion and Florence, Arizona, to more ultra versions at Corcoran and Pelican Bay, to the super federal model at Florence, Colorado, since dubbed "Alcatraz of the Rockies," the spread of SHUs (security housing units) and MCUs (maximum control units) has ricocheted and rapidly spread nationwide. Control units have become the state-of-the-art dream for prison regimes, opening up state slavery as a viable new economy.
Here at home, nobody in government that we know of seems overly alarmed to voice vigorous concerns about dollar-cost drain or cost to human life that we see flowing into the gaping maw that has opened to swallow us. "Someone feed that ferocious beast before it eats us all" is the catch phrase in state capitol where most politicians suck these days. Human flesh housed in cages of concrete and steel, warehoused, overripe and rotting until the stink smells. Many are the numbers warehoused and being driven insane inside the state's subterranean death cells.
To be sure, something foul is eating our children in California. Calososaurus-tech!