the war on youth

By age 23, up to 41 percent of American adolescents and young adults have been arrested at least once for something other than a minor traffic violation, according to a new study published today in the journal Pediatrics.
– ABC News

America’s youth are being arrested at rates that have almost doubled since 1968. It reflects our country’s slide to an unyielding ‘police state’ and systemic priority to provide fodder for the booming prison industry.

“In fact, in New York City, one student is arrested every day…94% are black or Latino”
– The New Civil Rights Movements

The study’s authors say such a high percentage of arrests may point to a host of potential health and behavioral problems that put young people at risk for criminal activity.

Those are alarmingly high numbers. There are social, economic, educational and family risks associated with arrests. And we all have to be worried about that.
– Dr. Eugene Beresin, a child psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School.

On the other side of the spectrum is the increasing trend of trying and sentencing children as adults.  Sometimes to life in prison:

The US has 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Prisons are a growing and extremely profitable industry – for which we as tax payers are obliged to pay huge sums of money. We pay room and board, corporations profit from a cheap, captive, labor force.

Clearly, a substantially profitable business model has been created at our expense. Both as tax payers and a civil society. The non-value we place on the incarcerated has consequences. Prisons have lost the mandate to reform and have become the center place of recidivism. A virtual life sentence. There is profit in recycling the prison population and more in increasing it.

“The Corrections Corporation of America and G4S (formerly Wackenhut), two prison privatizers, sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM…

Nearly 1 million prisoners are working for slave wages in prison on behalf of Fortune 500 companies….These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.”

And now this:

A Private Prison Company Offers to Buy 48 states’ Prisons for $250,000:
It is very concerning when a private corporation makes an offer to buy 90% of the state based jail systems in the U.S. for “as low as” $250 million.
– See more at: http://www.classwarfareexists.com/private-prison-company-offers-to-buy-48-states-prisons-for-250-million/#sthash.wMvjvLY4.dpuf

– Source: ClassWarfareExists.com
http://www.classwarfareexists.com/study-41-of-americans-have-been-arrested-by-the-time-theyre-23/#sthash.pY8DGYYv.dpuf