by

Chris Hedges: The Prison-Industrial Complex

America - We're Number One!

Image by DonkeyHotey via Flickr

Dandelion Salad

with Chris Hedges

Originally on RT America on Aug 8, 2016

On Contact Archive on Apr 13, 2022

On this week’s episode of On Contact, Chris Hedges discusses mass incarceration with prison reform advocates Walter Fortson and Boris Franklin. From the school-to-prison pipeline, to solitary confinement, to preventing recidivism, they reflect on their own experiences to address how to fix one of the major civil rights issues of today. RT Correspondent Anya Parampil looks at the business of locking people up.

From the archives:

Chris Hedges: Wrongfully Convicted

The Lost Women by Michael Parenti

Chris Hedges Calls Out Corporate America for Their Complicity in Neoslavery + Quentin Tarantino, Cornel West, Victims’ Families Decry Police Violence

Abby Martin: Tortured and Enslaved: Enter the World’s Biggest Prison

Chris Hedges: How Prisons Ripoff and Exploit the Incarcerated, Part 1

Chris Hedges: How Prisons Rip Off and Exploit the Incarcerated, Part 2

Chris Hedges: Prison State America: Corporations Use Inmates Like Slaves

26 thoughts on “Chris Hedges: The Prison-Industrial Complex”

  1. Pingback: The Chris Hedges Report: The Long Road Home, Part 2 – Dandelion Salad

  2. Pingback: The Chris Hedges Report: The Long Road Home, Part 1 – Dandelion Salad

  3. Pingback: Chris Hedges: A Question of Freedom: A Memoir of Learning, Survival, and Coming of Age in Prison – Dandelion Salad

  4. Pingback: Chris Hedges: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, Part 2 – Dandelion Salad

  5. Pingback: Chris Hedges: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison, Part 1 – Dandelion Salad

  6. Pingback: David Swanson and Carissa Byrne Hessick: Punishment Without Trial: Why Plea Bargaining Is a Bad Deal – Dandelion Salad

  7. Pingback: Chris Hedges: The Power of the Classics – Dandelion Salad

  8. Pingback: Chris Hedges’ Commencement Address: Integrity Forged in Cages – Dandelion Salad

  9. Pingback: The Nation’s Enduring Apartheid by Paul Street – Dandelion Salad

  10. Pingback: Chris Hedges: Mass Incarceration is a Form of Social Control and the Police Function as Predators in Impoverished Communities – Dandelion Salad

  11. Pingback: End Prison Slavery! Prisoners Strike Across the U.S. and into Canada – Dandelion Salad

  12. Pingback: The USA: The Human Rights and Civil Rights Hypocrite by Paul Street – Dandelion Salad

  13. Pingback: Chris Hedges: Caged: Life From Inside and Outside the US Prison System – Dandelion Salad

  14. Pingback: Chris Hedges: The Struggle to Reintegrate into Society After Prison – Dandelion Salad

  15. Pingback: Chris Hedges: The Torture of Solitary Confinement – Dandelion Salad

  16. Pingback: Chris Hedges: The Collapse of the American Judicial System – Dandelion Salad

  17. Pingback: Jeff Sessions’ Green Light To Police Violence by Brian Bean – Dandelion Salad

  18. Pingback: Torture Hoods Used in U.S. Prisons by Sehu Kessa Saa Tabansi – Dandelion Salad

  19. Pingback: The Year of the Pig: Should Workers Support Police Strikes? (must-read) – Dandelion Salad

  20. Pingback: Chris Hedges: The Attica Prison Uprising – Dandelion Salad

  21. Pingback: Chris Hedges: Torturing the Mentally Ill in US Prisons | Dandelion Salad

  22. Pingback: US Prisoners Strike To End Prison Slavery by Mattie Boyd | Dandelion Salad

  23. Pingback: Chris Hedges: Halfway to Freedom | Dandelion Salad

  24. Pingback: Milwaukee Community in Rebellion After Cops Gun Down Youth | Dandelion Salad

  25. Pingback: Chris Hedges: The Great Black Depression | Dandelion Salad

  26. The truth is very strong medicine. This is a most repellent but necessary issue. Facing these repulsive facts is hard for anyone with a shred of decency or social conscience. It is a waking nightmare.

    The implications are simply staggering, gargantuan in two key respects.

    In the first place it reveals to those of us with access to facts, whether we are US citizens or residents or neither, the scale of social atrocity in the USA.

    In the second instance, it reveals the moral bankruptcy of a constitutional government that has sold out to the crony despotism of plutocratic racist tyrants ~ a species of hereditary dynastic compact, deeply embedded within an oligopolistic financial system that eclipses the natural order in order to outlaw humanity itself.

    Consider this: the American “neoliberal” system has actually made it impossible for a just polity to emerge. These effects are felt, not just domestically within the jurisdiction of the USA, but globally.

    It is actually hard to put into words the degree of debasement, to which US society has acquiesced ~ ‘progressively’ …although it would be more accurate to say ‘regressively…’ post-FDR, since the Japanese nuclear holocaust and the horror of Vietnam.

    We can track and record and follow this sequential generational decline throughout the cold-war years, more recently from the time of the reunification of Germany and Reagan’s urban red-lining policy; but we cannot stand apart from it.

    We are all in some sense responsible, because the US is such an international (triumphalist) brand that influences all of global society, principally through its post WW2 alliances & ‘free enterprise’ mantra.

    So long as we remain silent and submissive, we are complicit in our own diminution by conceding to our indoctrinated impotence.

Comments are closed.