Does anyone believe, as the Manteca Bulletin asserts, that prisoners eat better food and have better medicine than the taxpayers? How bad would the taxpayers' food and medicine have to be?What's odd is that the editor admits in the next paragraph that the prison guard union spews forth propaganda in their TV ads in an effort to get more money and acknowledges the guards are making extra money selling "cell phones" to prisoners.
How do you assert that the guards are manipulators and corrupt and at the same time tell us to believe the story about how the prisoners eat great food and get the best medical treatments?
That's what propaganda is. It isn't a statement that people don't believe -- effective propaganda tells us what we want to believe. We don't like to think that our society is evil or has corrupt institutions, so we are willing and long to believe that that we wouldn't treat prisoners in any but the most humane ways. We're Americans after all!
But open your eyes and look at the facts. Read about the slop prisoners are forced to eat and the deplorable medical negligence. The medical system in California prisons is so bad the federal government has been trying to put it under their control to bring it up to constitutional standards -- with little success.
Why is the press practically locked out of the prisons? Why do the courts and jails not permit inspections by third parties? Why do the prisons hold Potemkin tours of their jail facilities for the press showing the wonderful humane treatment everyone gets. It's like when the Red Cross would inspect a Nazi prison, they would always have new blankets and clean clothes and good food. Yet we find corpses being dragged out the San Joaquin jail with boot marks on their backs.
At least Sheriff Arpaio has the decency to actually say he feeds the prisoners for 40 cents a day and justifies it.
I wonder if the Bulletin and the "reporters" you spoke to before writing this piece still believe prisoners get better health care than most people now that Sid Reams died in prison after basically being denied proper medical treatment. The general feeling at the time among the "elite" was that he was asking for release due to health and humanitarian reasons just to get out of prison. Still think that? The judge who denied him (and raised his bail to an unconscionable amount) and the legal system that killed him will probably never have to answer for their role in his death. Who cares? Anyone who is arrested is obviously guilty, aren't they?
ReplyDeleteHe did not die in prison, he was in jail. According to the news he was having a taxpayer paid surgery in some fancy hospital. At least we wont have to pay for his prison stay.
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