The Rant Institute

The Prison Industrial Complex can be described in a number of ways.   Angela Davis, for example, describes it as “a complex web of racism, social control, and profit.”    In 1998, Eric Scholosser, writing in “The Atlantic Monthly,” defined the PIC as “a set of bureaucratic, economic, and political interests that encourage spending on prisons, regardless of need.”    Julia Sudbury, who wrote Global Lockdown: Race, Gender, and the Prison Industrial Complex , says the PIC refers to a “symbiotic and profitable relation between politicians (state and national) corporations (executives and shareholders) the media, and state correctional institutions (including correctional officers’ unions) that generates the racialized use of incarceration as a response to social problems rooted in the globalization of capital.”   Barry Yeoman put it this way: “Not since Slavery has an entire American Industry derived its profits exclusively from depriving humans beings of ...

SLAVERY 3.0:DECIPHERING AN AMERICAN DILEMMA "Capitalism needs and must have prisons to protect itself from the criminals it has created."   -   Eugene Debs, 1920             Contrary to what many people believe, slavery in America did not end after the Civil War; it simply mutated into something far worse.     From the smoldering ashes of those blood soaked battle fields, a new system of slavery soon arose to re-enslave African Americans with all the legitimacy and morality of law.   That new system was named after a caricature of a clumsy, dimwitted black slave called Jim Crow.   Unlike the first version of American slavery, which was an economic system of racism operating for profit, Jim Crow was a social system of racism operating out of fear and revenge.   In the parlance of modern day technology, this Jim Crow system of enslavement could be called Slavery 2.0.      ...

An argument that Christians like to throw around these days traces its roots back to Thomas Aquinas. It’s called The Argument from Design . Basically, this argument suggests that, because everything looks designed, it must therefore be designed, which in turn means there must be what Father Daniel O’Reilly of Columbia Catholic Ministry referred to as, a “benevolent designer." One potential confirmation bias present in this argument comes from the problem we have of making order among ideas.   As Jacques Barzun explained in The House of Intellect , we may then come to believe, quite mistakenly, that the order has been discovered ready made in the facts. [i] Assuming we have not succumbed to the mistake Barzun warns of, like the other arguments, the problems with this reasoning should be readily apparent. First, if we look at a random generated pattern long enough, it may well begin to look as if it were designed, because our brains naturally try to discern patterns and d...