website analysis

Link: prisonindustrialcomplex.org

This website is a good start and attempt at addressing the issues presented in the Prison Industrial Complex. However, with this strong website name I would have expected it to go further in depth about what the PIC’s objectives are, what they are doing, who is affected, and why it is bad. Instead, in this website the creator (George H. Russell) speaks very strongly in opposition to the complex and calls for education and change but it is not a very informative website.

George H. Russell gives a list of companies that benefit from the imprisonment of others he says that some of these are:

1. Contractors who built prisons along with the hundreds of sub-contractors that make specialized prison beds, toilets, window bars, toilets, locks etc.



2. Food services that unload hundreds of tons of inferior food products on our prison population.



3. Clothing manufacturers who manufacture not only guard uniforms but prison uniforms as well, plus the silly garb that is given to convicts upon release.



4. Other profiteers include gun manufacturers, those who make the chemicals used to kill our citizens, casket makers for the dead ones, the medical profession tasked with keeping the condemned alive until they can be put to death, and even the P.R. operatives who lie to the press about the system and its abuses. 


            The problem with this list is that it does not include the companies that use prisoners to make and build or sell their products such as long distance telephone companies, GM, Chevron, IBM, Motorola, Compaq, Texas Instruments, Honeywell, Microsoft, Victoria's Secret and Boeing. Federal prisons operate under the trade name Unicor and use their prisoners to make everything from lawn furniture to congressional desks. This irony is sad and true simultaneously, prisoners are trapped in a system where they are subconsciously promoting their own oppression.