the art of boredom
Month
In the Public Interest (ITPI) released a damning report that reveals an overwhelming majority of contracts between for-profit prisons and local governments include “lockup quotas” and “low crime taxes”, language that basically guarantees a profit.
Sixty-five percent of the 62 private prison contracts ITPI analyzed included bed occupancy guarantees—whereby the state promises to keep 80 to 100 percent of private prison beds filled with prisoners at all times—and taxpayer penalties that force the state to pay for unused beds when they fail to meet an occupancy quota.
This means that when crime falls, state and local governments locked in these contracts must either ramp up arrests for bullshit crimes to keep beds full to capacity or pay a fee at the expense of their residents. As the report highlights, lockup quotas in Colorado forced taxpayers to pay $2 million to the Corrections Corporation of America or CCA (one of the largest and most abusive private prison companies) due to a decline in crime over the last decade.
The top 1 percent have gotten 95 percent of all income gains since the recovery began in 2009.
It’d help if I knew what you were referring to.
You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom: absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this or die like this without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.
”—Anaïs Nin
(via liberatingreality)