As we head into the fifth month of the outbreak millions of working families feel like they have been kidnapped and sent to hell.
Detaining immigrant children has morphed into a surging industry in the U.S. that now reaps $1 billion annually — a tenfold increase over the past decade.
Adelanto, a town of 32,000, is home to three prisons. This was not a coincidence. With a history of agriculture, excessive water use, the Great Depression, cheap vacant land filled with a military base which closed in the 1990s, Adelanto turned to prisons. During the 1980s, under increasingly stringent drug laws and harsh sentencing policies, demand for new prisons had grown. So had the belief that prisons could nourish economic development in rural communities.
The star of the new Netflix series was reimagined as a modern black champion. The show's creative team looked to current events to ground Cage in reality from a specifically African American perspective. They wanted the show to fulfill “comic-book geek sensibilities” while also digging into subjects such as police brutality, the gentrification of Harlem (where the show takes place), and even the privatization of prisons.
In the rush to find targets and mobilize outrage, assigning too much culpability to private prisons runs the risk of ignoring bigger forces. Private prison operators are bit players in a broader drama directed by state actors. Elected officials, "tough on crime" advocates and corporate interests have used mass incarceration to advance a political agenda of criminalizing the poor and dismantliing the social safety net of the working class.
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