US Spreading ‘Prison Imperialism’

Following on from this earlier post about the US prison system the one below discusses international impacts:

Above photo: Prison in Colombia.

Where else will you hear about US prison imperialism besides from the Alliance for Global Justice? Simply put, there is no other organization that has as thoroughly researched and exposed these programs than AfGJ.
Did you know that the US government has been exporting its style of mass incarceration to at least 25 other countries–what we call “prison imperialism”? 

These efforts began in 2000 with the Program for the Improvement of the Colombian Prison System. Since then, US involvement in foreign prison systems has spread to Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantánamo Bay, Mexico, Honduras and around the world. It is closely related to other efforts to militarize police and international borders. These are replications of US models of crowd suppression, police brutality and racial profiling; border zones transformed into marshal law zones; and mass incarceration.

AfGJ understands implicitly that police brutality and racial profiling in Ferguson is intimately related to CIA torture programs and police repression around the world. We understand that the struggle against militarized borders in the US is just one side of an international struggle. And we can see that spreading mass incarceration around the world serves no one except the free traders and profit warriors and police state repressors. 

Indeed, wherever the US has neoliberal, free trade agreements, it is also building new jails and/or restructuring the entire prison system. These prisons help uphold and maintain the US empire. Prison Imperialism is not about fighting crime–it’s about social control and repression of dissent. In the US, crime rates have gone down since the 1970s, but prison populations have skyrocketed by over 700%. In Mexico, the US funded prisons aren’t about incarcerating big time narco-traffickers. Most the imprisoned are there for “victimless crimes”. In Colombia, US involvement in the prison system was justified as a way to alleviate overcrowding. But today, overcrowding is at an all time high and there has been a big spike in political arrests and reports of torture.

taken from here