First of all, let's please distinguish between prisons and jails. Jails, like the LA County system, exist to hold people who have not been convicted of any crime (that is, pretrial detainees), in addition to those convicted of misdemeanors carrying a sentence of less than one year.
So before you start saying jail inmates have no rights, remember that many of them have not been convicted of any crime. Until they are tried and proven guilty, they are guilty only of not having enough money for bail.
Prisons, as currently constituted in the US, are a means to control the surplus population of the country. Traditional employment is effectively banned for much of the population, and then moneymaking methods that lie outside the mainstream economy are criminalized. This is how we have ended up with 2 million people in our prisons and jails.
Another function of prisons is to serve as laboratories of human rights abuse. Much of what we see going on at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib began in US prisons, especially in Control Unit prisons, super high-tech dungeons that isolate prisoners almost completely from human contact, driving them insane. It's interesting to note how many of the personnel at Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghraib came from a (so-called) corrections background.
US prisons have been the site of Abu Ghraib-style atrocities for decades. But because of the nature of prisons, and the fact that hardly anyone gives a rat's ass about prisoners, people aren't really aware of the facts.
A good point has been raised here: namely, that prisons do not, (or at least definitely should not) have any problems knowing where their prisoners are: therefore the large scale deployment of RFIDs may not seem to make much sense.
Looked at in a broader context, however, how better to begin large-scale testing of a technology that one might wish to deploy to monitor the population at large?
Slashdot Mirror
Essay/short story spam--it's distributed travesty! http://runme.org/project/+travesty/
First of all, let's please distinguish between prisons and jails. Jails, like the LA County system, exist to hold people who have not been convicted of any crime (that is, pretrial detainees), in addition to those convicted of misdemeanors carrying a sentence of less than one year.
So before you start saying jail inmates have no rights, remember that many of them have not been convicted of any crime. Until they are tried and proven guilty, they are guilty only of not having enough money for bail.
Prisons, as currently constituted in the US, are a means to control the surplus population of the country. Traditional employment is effectively banned for much of the population, and then moneymaking methods that lie outside the mainstream economy are criminalized. This is how we have ended up with 2 million people in our prisons and jails.
Another function of prisons is to serve as laboratories of human rights abuse. Much of what we see going on at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib began in US prisons, especially in Control Unit prisons, super high-tech dungeons that isolate prisoners almost completely from human contact, driving them insane. It's interesting to note how many of the personnel at Camp X-Ray and Abu Ghraib came from a (so-called) corrections background.
US prisons have been the site of Abu Ghraib-style atrocities for decades. But because of the nature of prisons, and the fact that hardly anyone gives a rat's ass about prisoners, people aren't really aware of the facts.
A good point has been raised here: namely, that prisons do not, (or at least definitely should not) have any problems knowing where their prisoners are: therefore the large scale deployment of RFIDs may not seem to make much sense.
Looked at in a broader context, however, how better to begin large-scale testing of a technology that one might wish to deploy to monitor the population at large?
The Bush administration is certainly engaging in test runs of this sort, as this article http://counterpunch.org/whitney05182005.html points out.
Call me paranoid, but during these times it seems to me that the most sinister explanation is usually the correct one.