OF THE
TIMES
"I have seen my brother Vik's body and his death certificate, but Vik is not dead".It is hard to imagine that a year has passed since Ken O'Keefe said those words from Gaza. There were a few hours when the famed Italian peace activist Vittorio 'Vik' Arrigoni, remained missing, and that was a tense period, but it didn't last long enough and soon came the word that this courageous man and friend of so many, was dead, brutally murdered.... gone.
[A] growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It's hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.Consider this: despite the fact that violent crime in America has been on the decline, the nation's incarceration rate has tripled since 1980. Approximately 13 million people are introduced to American jails in any given year. Incredibly, more than six million people are under "correctional supervision" in America, meaning that one in fifty Americans are working their way through the prison system, either as inmates, or while on parole or probation. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of those being held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses - namely, marijuana. Presently, one out of every 100 Americans is serving time behind bars.