A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State (31 page)

Other examples: In May 2012 at Deltona High School in Florida, 17-year-old Michael Rudi had his inhaler taken from him by school officials during a search of his locker. Even though the inhaler was in its original packaging, complete with his name and directions for use, school officials decided to confiscate it because his mother had not signed "the proper form" allowing him to carry it. At some point, Michael began having trouble breathing, so school officials called his mother, Sue, but refused to give Michael his inhaler. Sue rushed to the school where she was taken to the nurse's office. The door was locked, and upon entering, they found the nurse numbly looking on as Michael lay on the ground, suffering a full-blown asthma attack. Michael claims that as he began passing out, the nurse locked the door. "It's like something out of a horror film. The person just sits there and watches you die," he said. "She sat there, looked at me and she did nothing." Officials with the Volusia County school district have stood by the nurse's decision.
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In September 2012, 8-year-old Konnor Vanatta was prevented from wearing his replica Denver Broncos football jersey with PeytonManning's number 18 on it because school officials claimed that the number 18 is associated with a local gang, the 18th street gang. Other numbers banned for gang associations are 13 and 14, as well as the reverse of all three, 81,31, and 41. Pam Vanatta, Konnor's mother, pointed out the absurdity of the situation saying, "When they are counting and when they're learning their numbers, are they going to make them skip 14,13,41,81,18 when they are counting? It's getting ridiculous."
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In December 2011,10-year-old Nicholas Taylor was severely disciplined for jokingly aiming a piece of pizza shaped like a gun at his classmates during lunch. For this childish behavior, Nicholas was relegated to the "silent" table for the rest of the semester, forced to meet with a school resource officer about gun safety, and threatened with suspension for any future infractions.
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A deaf 3-year-old preschooler in Nebraska was singled out by school administrators because one of the letters in his name, when signed, appeared to some as a gun being drawn in the air. Rather than letting him sign his name, a spokesman for the school district says they are "working with the parents to come to the best solution we can for the child."
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A high school valedictorian, heading to Oklahoma University on full scholarship, was denied her diploma because during her graduation speech, she said the word "hell." The school demanded that Kaitlin Nootbaar write them a formal apology in order to receive her diploma, which she refused to do.
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While expulsion and suspension used to be the worst punishment to be rendered against a child who had run afoul of the system, school officials have now upped the ante by routinely bringing the police into the picture. As Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project, notes, "Media hysteria really created this groundswell of support for zero tolerance and folks being scared that it could happen at their school. Now, we have police officers in every school. He's not there to be law enforcement. He's there to lock up kids."
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Tracking Students

Increasing numbers of schools have even gone so far as to require students to drape Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags around their necks, which allow school officials to track every single step students take. So small that they are barely detectable to the human eye, RFID tags produce a radio signal by which the wearer's precise movements can be constantly monitored. For example, some 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School in San Antonio, Texas, are convenient guinea pigs for the Student Locator Project, which required students to carry "smart" ID cards embedded with an RFID tracking chip.
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Although these schools already boast 290 surveillance cameras,
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the Northside School District ID program gave school officials the ability to track students' whereabouts at all times. School officials plan to expand the program to the district's 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000.
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Students who refuse to take part in the ID program won't be able to access essential services like the cafeteria and library, nor will they be able to purchase tickets to extracurricular activities.
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Unfortunately, RFID tracking is actually the least invasive surveillance tactic being used in schools today. Chronically absent middle schoolers in Anaheim, California, for example, have been enrolled in a GPS tracking program. Journalist David Rosen explains:

Each school day, the delinquent students get an automated 'wake-up' phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time. In addition, five times a day they are required to enter a code that tracks their locations: as they leave for school, when they arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8 pm. These students are also assigned an adult 'coach who calls them at least three times a week to see how they are doing and help them find effective ways to make sure they get to school.
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Some schools in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri are tracking students labeled obese and overweight with wristwatches that record their heart rate, movement, and sleeping habits.
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Schools in San Antonio even have chips in their lunch food trays, which allow administrators to track the eating habits of students.
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Schools in Michigan's second largest school district broadcast student activity caught by CCTV cameras on the walls of the hallways in real time, to let the students know they're being watched.
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In 2003 a Tennessee middle school placed cameras in the school's locker rooms, capturing images of children changing before basketball practice. This practice was stuck down in 2008 by the U.S. Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that students have an expectation of privacy in locker rooms.
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Some school districts have gone so far as to not even mention to students and parents that they are electronically tracking children. In 2010 it was revealed that a Pennsylvania school district had given students laptops installed with software that allowed school administrators to track their behavior at home. This revelation led to the threat of a class-action lawsuit, which resulted in the school district settling with irate students and parents for $600,000.
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Passive, Conditionable Objects

To return to what I was saying about schools being breeding grounds for compliant citizens, if Americans have come to view freedom as expedient and expendable, it is only because that's what they've been taught in the schools by government leaders and by the corporations who run the show. As psychologist Bruce Levine has noted, "Behaviorism and consumerism, two ideologies which achieved tremendous power in the twentieth century, are cut from the same cloth. The shopper, the student, the worker, and the voter are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects."
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More and more Americans are finding themselves institutionalized from cradle to grave, from government-run daycares and public schools to nursing homes. In between, they are fed a constant, mind-numbing diet of pablum consisting of entertainment news, mediocre leadership, and technological gadgetry, which keeps them sated, distracted, and unwilling to challenge the status quo. All the while, in the name of the greater good and in exchange for the phantom promise of security, the government strips away our rights one by one–monitoring our conversations, chilling our expression, searching our bodies and our possessions, doing away with our due process rights, reversing the burden of proof and rendering us suspects in a surveillance state.

Whether or not the powers-that-be, by their actions, are consciously attempting to create a compliant citizenry, the result is the same nevertheless for young and old alike. As journalist Hunter S. Thompson observed in
Kingdom of Fear: Loathsome Secrets of a Star-crossed Child in theFinalDays of the American Century:

Coming of age in a fascist police state will not be a barrel of fun for anybody much less for people like me, who are not inclined to suffer Nazis gladly and feel only contempt for the cowardly flag-suckers who would gladly give up their outdated freedom to
live
for the mess of pottage they have been conned into believing will be freedom from fear. Ho ho ho. Let's not get carried away here. Freedom was yesterday in this country. Its value has been discounted. The only freedom we truly crave today is freedom from Dumbness. Nothing else matters.
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CHAPTER 25

The Prison Industrial Complex

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today–perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system –in prison, on probation, or on parole –than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under 'correctional supervision' in America –more than six million –than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height."
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–Journalist ADAM GOPNIK

GEO Group Editorial Cartoon by Khalil Bendib

(Copyright of Khalil Bendib,
www.bendib.com
, all rights reserved.)

I
n an age when freedom is fast becoming the exception rather than the rule, imprisoning Americans in private prisons run by mega-corporations has turned into a cash cow for big business. At one time, the American penal system operated under the idea that dangerous criminals needed to be put under lock and key in order to protect society. Today, as states attempt to save money by outsourcing prisons to private corporations, the flawed yet retributive American "system of justice" is being replaced by an even more flawed and insidious form of mass punishment based upon profit and expediency.

As author Adam Gopnik reports for the
New Yorker:

[A] growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It's hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible.
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Jailing American for Profit

Consider this: despite the fact that violent crime in America has been on the decline,
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the nation's incarceration rate has tripled since 1980.
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Approximately 13 million people are introduced to American jails in any given year. Incredibly, more than 6 million people are under "correctional supervision" in America,
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meaning that one in fifty Americans are working their way through the prison system, either as inmates, or while on parole or probation. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of those being held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses
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–namely, marijuana. Presently, one out of every one hundred Americans is serving time behind bars.
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Little wonder, then, that public prisons are overcrowded.
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Yet while providing security, housing, food, and medical care for six million Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, to profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry, it's a $70 billion
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gold mine. Thus, with an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCAs goal is to buy and manage public prisons across the country at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, and here's the kicker, the prisons have to contain at least 1,000 beds
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and states have to agree to maintain a 90 percent occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.
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