Music Industry and Private Prison for Profit Connection!! One industry feeding another industry, by any means necessary!!

[roots69]

Hmm.. It all makes sense!!







Facts about Hip-Hop and Prison for Profit



httpss://raprehab.com/facts-about-hip-hop-and-prison-for-profit/
The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or “would be,” depending on your analysis) very lucrative.
GoldenUndergroundTV recently released an interview I did with them late last year. I got a bit animated at the end. Only so many interviews in a row I could handle being asked about Chief Keef.
My tirade wasn’t really about Chief Keef. It wasn’t about Gucci Mane or Wocka Flocka or any of the acts spontaneously catapulted into stardom by synchronized mass media coverage despite seemingly universal indifference (at the very best) regarding their talent. Whose arrests, involvement in underaged pregnancies, concert shootouts, and facial tattoos, dominate conversation for weeks at a time, with their actual music a mere afterthought, if thought of at all.
My tirade was about marketing. It was about media powers seeking out the biggest pretend criminal kingpins they can find, (many of whom who shamelessly adopt the names of actual real life criminal kingpins like 50 Cent and Rick Ross), and exalting them as the poster children for a culture. It was about an art form reduced to product placement, the selling of a lifestyle, and ultimately, a huge ad for imprisonment.
This is not my opinion.
Last year Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the biggest name in the private prison industry, contacted 48 states offering to buy their prisons. One stipulation of eligibility for the deal was particularly bizarre: “an assurance by the agency partner that the agency has sufficient inmate population to maintain a minimum 90% occupancy rate over the term of the contract.
What kind of legitimate and ethical measures could possibly be taken to ensure the maintenance of a 90% prison occupancy rate?
Two months later an anonymous email was sent out to various members of the music and publishing industries giving an account of a meeting where it was determined that hip-hop music would be manipulated to drive up privatized prison profits. Its author, despite claiming to be a former industry insider, did not provide the names of anyone involved in the plot, nor did he specify by which company he himself was employed. As such, the letter was largely regarded as a fraud for lack of facts.
Ninety percent of what Americans read, watch and listen to is controlled by only six media companies. PBS’s Frontline has described the conglomerates that determine what information is disseminated to the public as a “web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and culture.” Business relationships.
Last year a mere 232 media executives were responsible for the intake of 277 million Americans, controlling all the avenues necessary to manufacture any celebrity and incite any trend. Time Warner, as owner of Warner Bros Records (among many other record labels), can not only sign an artist to a recording contract but, as the owner of Entertainment Weekly, can see to it that they get next week’s cover. Also the owner of New Line Cinemas, HBO and TNT, they can have their artist cast in a leading role in a film that, when pulled from theaters, will be put into rotation first on premium, then on basic, cable.
Without any consideration to the music whatsoever, the artist will already be a star, though such monopolies also extend into radio stations and networks that air music videos. For consumers, choice is often illusory. Both BET and MTV belong to Viacom. While Hot 97, NYC’s top hip hop station, is owned by Emmis Communications, online streaming is controlled by Clear Channel, who also owns rival station Power 105.
None of this is exactly breaking news, but when ownership of these media conglomerates is cross checked with ownership of the biggest names in prison privatization, interesting new facts emerge.
According to public analysis from Bloomberg, the largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated. Interestingly enough, Vanguard also holds considerable stake in the media giants determining this country’s culture. In fact, Vanguard is the third largest holder in both Viacom and Time Warner.
Vanguard is also the third largest holder in the GEO Group, whose correctional, detention and community reentry services boast 101 facilities, approximately 73,000 beds and 18,000 employees. Second nationally only to Corrections Corporation of America, GEO’s facilities are located not only in the United States but in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa.
You may be thinking, “Well, Vanguard is only the third largest holder in those media conglomerates, which is no guarantee that they’re calling any shots.” Well, the number-one holder of both Viacom and Time Warner is a company called Blackrock. Blackrock is the second largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America, second only to Vanguard, and the sixth largest holder in the GEO Group.
There are many other startling overlaps in private-prison/mass-media ownership, but two underlying facts become clear very quickly: The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or “would be,” depending on your analysis) very lucrative.
Such a scheme would mean some very greedy, very racist people.
There are facts to back that up, too.
Prison industry lobbyists developing and encouraging criminal justice policies to advance financial interests has been well-documented. The most notorious example is the Washington-based American Legislative Council, a policy organization funded by CCA and GEO, which successfully championed the incarceration promoting “truth in sentencing” and “three-strikes” sentencing laws.
If the motive of the private prison industry were the goodhearted desire to get hold of inmates as quickly as possible for the purpose of sooner successfully rehabilitating them, maintenance of a 90% occupancy rate would be considered a huge failure, not a functioning prerequisite.
Likewise, the largest rise in incarceration that this country has ever seen correlates precisely with early-80’s prison privatization. This despite the fact that crime rates actually declined since this time. This decreasing crime rate was pointed out enthusiastically by skeptics eager to debunk last year’s anonymous industry insider, who painted a picture of popularized hip-hop as a tool for imprisoning masses.
What wasn’t pointed out was that despite crime rates going down, incarceration rates have skyrocketed. While the size of the prison population changed dramatically, so did its complexion. In “‘All Eyez on Me’: America’s War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex,” Andre Douglas Pond Cummings documents the obvious truth that “the vast majority of the prisoner increase in the United States has come from African-American and Latino citizen drug arrests.”
Add to this well-documented statistics proving that the so-called “war on drugs” has been waged almost entirely on low-income communities of color, where up until just two years ago, cocaine sold in crack form fetched sentences 100 times as lengthy as the exact same amount of cocaine sold in powdered form, which is much more common in cocaine arrests in affluent communities. (In July 2010 the oddly named Fair Sentencing Act was adopted, which, rather than reducing the crack/powder disparity from 100-to-1 to 1-to-1, reduced it to 18-to-1, which is still grossly unfair.)
This is not to suggest that the crack/powder disparity represents the extent of the racism rampant within the incarceration industry. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal prison system, even where convicted for the exact same crimes, people of color received prison sentences 10% longer . Where convictions are identical, mandatory minimum sentences are also 21% more likely for people of color.
Finally, let us not forget the wealth of evidence to support the notion that crime-, drug- and prison-glorifying hip-hop only outsells other hip-hop because it receives so much more exposure and financial backing, and that when given equal exposure, talent is a much more reliable indicator of success than content.
Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) put it best; “‘hip-hop” is just shorthand for ‘black people.’” Before our eyes and ears, a “web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and culture” has one particular business raking in billions of dollars while another defines the culture of a specific demographic as criminal. Both business are owned by the same people.
Mainstream media continue to endorse hip-hop that glorifies criminality (most notably drug trafficking and violence), and private prison interests, long since proven to value profits over human rights, usher in inmates of color to meet capacity quotas. The same people disproportionately incarcerated when exposed to the criminal justice system are at every turn inundated with media normalizing incarceration to the point that wherever there is mainstream hip-hop music, reference to imprisonment as an ordinary, even expected, component of life is sure to follow.
Conspiracy theorists get a lot of flak for daring entertain the notion that people will do evil things for money. Historical atrocities like slavery and the Holocaust are universally acknowledged, yet simultaneously adopted is the contradictory position that there can’t possibly be any human beings around intelligent enough and immoral enough to perpetrate such things.
Even in the midst of the Europe-wide beef that was actually horse-meat fiasco, and the release of real-life nightmare documenting films like “Sunshine and Oranges,” there is an abundance of people content to believe that the only conspiracies that ever exist are those that have successfully been exposed.
The link between mass media and the prison industrial complex, however, is part of a very different type of conversation.
The information in this article was not difficult to find; it is all public.
This is not a conspiracy. This is a fact.

 

[peterlongshort]

Wow!

 

[roots69]

Hmm... Oh more to come!!


20 Years Later, Parts Of Major Crime Bill Viewed As Terrible Mistake


Surrounded by lawmakers, President Bill Clinton hugs then-Sen. Joseph Biden after signing the $30 billion crime bill at the White House on Sept. 13, 1994.
Dennis Cook/AP
Twenty years ago this week, in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton signed a crime bill. It was, in effect, a long-term experiment in various ways to fight crime.
The measure paid to put more cops on the beat, trained police and lawyers to investigate domestic violence, imposed tougher prison sentences and provided money for extra prisons.
Clinton described his motivation to pass the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act in stark terms.
"Gangs and drugs have taken over our streets and undermined our schools," he said. "Every day, we read about somebody else who has literally gotten away with murder."

YouTube
And if Clinton and Congress reflected the punitive mindset of the American people, what they didn't know was that soaring murder rates and violent crime had already begun what would become a long downward turn, according to criminologists and policymakers.
Nicholas Turner is president of the Vera Institute, a nonprofit that researches crime policy. Turner took a minute this week to consider the tough-on-crime rhetoric of the 1990s.
"Criminal justice policy was very much driven by public sentiment and a political instinct to appeal to the more negative punitive elements of public sentiment rather than to be driven by the facts," he said.
Article continues after sponsor message


And that public sentiment called for filling up the nation's prisons, a key part of the 1994 crime bill.
These days, Jeremy Travis is president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. But 20 years ago, he attended the signing ceremony for the crime bill — and joined the Clinton Justice Department.
"Here's the federal government coming in and saying we'll give you money if you punish people more severely, and 28 states and the District of Columbia followed the money and enacted stricter sentencing laws for violent offenses," Travis says.
But as Travis now knows all too well, there's a problem with that idea. Researchers including a National Academy of Sciences panel he led have since found only a modest relationship between incarceration and lower crime rates.
"We now know with the fullness of time that we made some terrible mistakes," Travis said. "And those mistakes were to ramp up the use of prison. And that big mistake is the one that we now, 20 years later, come to grips with. We have to look in the mirror and say, 'look what we have done.'"
Nick Turner of Vera put the human costs even more starkly.
"If you're a black baby born today, you have a 1 in 3 chance of spending some time in prison or jail," Turner said. "If you're Latino, it's a 1 in 6 chance. And if you're white, it's 1 in 17. And so coming to terms with these disparities and reversing them, I would argue, is not only a matter of fairness and justice but it's, I would argue, a matter of national security."
Talk to combatants in the long and sometimes nasty debate over the crime bill 20 years ago, and another item on the table back then looks different with hindsight too. It's a concept known as midnight basketball.
Rep. Bobby Scott, a Virginia Democrat, voted against the bill years ago, in part because it didn't do enough to support prevention programs.
In between votes in the Capitol this week, Scott reflected on the debate.
"Midnight basketball was described as paying money so that crackheads could play basketball in the middle of the night," Scott said. "What they left out was the fact that every time they put midnight basketball in a neighborhood, the crime rate plummeted. You saved more money than you spent on the midnight basketball. They left that part out."
Funding for the midnight basketball program and other prevention initiatives never fully materialized because of political fights over the bill. But today, ideas like that one win support from Republican governors who have branded their approach as "Right on Crime." They're taking money away from prisons and putting it into social programs.
Lately the Obama administration, including Vice President Joe Biden, who was the lead Senate sponsor of that 1994 bill, is embracing those very policies and supporting new legislation to reduce mandatory minimum prison terms.

 

[DixonBawls]

Google
The letter that changed hip hop

 

[roots69]

Private Prison Contracts and Minimum Occupancy Clauses


The private prison industry has become incredibly lucrative, with the two largest for-profit prison companies bringing in a combined $3.3 billion in annual revenue as of 2015.[1] The federal government and state governments increasingly depend on private prisons to house inmates in the United States, with approximately seven percent of state prisoners and eighteen percent of federal prisoners housed in private prisons.[2] Some states go so far as to ship their inmates from overcrowded prisons to private prisons in other states.[3] Furthermore, the federal government reversed its position from foregoing the use of private prisons to contracting with them again as recently as February of this year.[4]

There are a variety of ways that private prisons maintain profits. One specific clause that many of the contracts between private prisons and federal and state governments include is a minimum occupancy clause.[5] These clauses state that the government contracting with a prison must maintain a specific percentage of occupancy at that prison. A version of this clause used by prisons is a per-diem rate clause, which establishes high, fixed per diem rates per person housed in the prison up to a specified percentage of prison occupancy, then a lower, fixed per diem rate for every individual past that threshold percentage.[6]

Minimum occupancy clauses are a prominent feature of private prison contracts because they help guarantee profits and alleviate the risk of revenue fluctuation.[7] One study found that approximately sixty-five percent of contracts between private prisons and federal or state governments contained a form of minimum occupancy clause.[8] Private prison companies and federal and state governments have added these clauses through contracts for new facilities and through amendments in renegotiations of contracts.[9]

Many of the minimum occupancy clauses guarantee private prison companies over ninety percent occupancy, or payment for ninety percent occupancy, for their facilities.[10] A good example of a minimum occupancy clause is the clause from the Bay Correctional Facility in Florida.[11] The clause reads, “Regardless of the number of inmates incarcerated at the Facility, CONTRACTOR is guaranteed an amount equal to 90% occupancy (887 inmates) times the 90% Per Diem Rate subject to legislative appropriations.”[12] In this case, Florida pays the company $43,046.11 per day to house inmates.[13] Likely the highest minimum occupancy clauses exist in Arizona, where the Arizona State Prison – Florence West, Arizona State Prison – Phoenix West, and the Marana Community Correctional Treatment Facility, the first two run by GEO Corp and the latter run by Management and Training Corporation (MTC).[14] These minimum occupancy clauses all guarantee 100% occupancy payments.[15] Arizona renewed the Arizona State Prison – Florence West minimum occupancy clause through June 30, 2018 on April 21, 2017.[16] The renewal also guarantees an additional ninety-five percent occupancy payment for emergency beds.[17]

As a country, we should examine these contracts in detail, specifically the minimum occupancy clauses, because the number of inmates housed in private prisons is only increasing.[18] As prison population increases, our dependency on private corporations could increase as well unless we as a society decide to change how we house our prisoners. We should determine whether we want shareholders and profit margins directing decision making for our prisons,[19] or if there is a better policy to implement for prisoners and incarceration.

[1] Michael Cohen, How For-Profit Prisons have Become the Biggest Lobby No One is Talking About, Wash. Post, (Apr. 28, 2015), https://www.washingtonpost.com/post...-one-is-talking-about/?utm_term=.bcd7f63e932f (last visited Oct. 26, 2017); see also Chico Harlan, The Private Prison Industry was Crashing – Until Donald Trump’s Victory, Wash. Post, (Nov. 10, 2016), https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...donald-trumps-victory/?utm_term=.ac429b2a7e7e (last visited Oct. 26, 2017) (stocks for CoreCivic and Geo Group increased after Donald Trump’s election).

[2] E. Ann Carson & Elizabeth Anderson, Prisoners in 2015 (Monika Potera et al. eds., Bureau of Justice Statistics 2016) https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/p15.pdf (last visited Oct. 26, 2017).

[3] Solomon Moore, States Export Their Inmates as Prisons Fill, N.Y. Times (July 31, 2007), https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/us/31prisons.html (last visited Oct. 26, 2017).

[4] Compare Memorandum from Jefferson B. Sessions III, Attorney Gen., Rescission on Memorandum on Use of Private Prisons (Feb. 21, 2017), https://www.bop.gov/resources/news/pdfs/20170224_doj_memo.pdf (directing the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to continue the federal government’s use of private prisons) (last visited Oct. 26, 2017), with Memorandum from Sally Q. Yates, Deputy Attorney Gen., Reducing our Use of Private Prisons (Aug. 18, 2016), https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/file/886311/download (enlisting the help of the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons to reduce and subsequently end the federal government’s use of private prisons) (last visited Oct. 26, 2017).

[5] Mike Brickner, Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and “Low-Crime Taxes” Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations, In The Public Interest (Mike Brickner et al. eds., 2013), https://www.inthepublicinterest.org/wp-content/uploads/Criminal-Lockup-Quota-Report.pdf (last visited Oct. 26, 2017) [hereinafter Criminal Lockup Quota Report].

[6] Department of Management Services, Bureau of Private Prison Monitoring & The GEO Group, Inc., Operations and Management Service Contract Bay, Correctional Facility (Jan. 13, 2014), https://www.dms.myflorida.com/content/download/90674/524385/Bay_Contract_-_Executed_Redacted.pdf (last visited Oct. 26, 2017).

[7] Criminal Lockup Quota Report, supra note 5, at 2; Michael G. Anderson, If You’ve Got The Money I’ve Got The Time: The Benefits of Incentive Contracts with Private Prisons, 34 Buff. Pub. Interest L.J. 43, 68-69 (2015).

[8] Criminal Lockup Quota Report, supra note 5, at 2.

[9] Criminal Lockup Quota Report, supra note 5, at 3.

[10] Criminal Lockup Quota Report, supra note 5, at 14-16.

[11] Department of Management Services, Bureau of Private Prison Monitoring & The GEO Group, Inc., Operations and Management Service Contract, Bay Correctional Facility, 62 (Jan. 13, 2014), https://www.dms.myflorida.com/content/download/90674/524385/Bay_Contract_-_Executed_Redacted.pdf (last visited Oct. 26, 2017).

[12] Id.

[13] Id. at 61-62.

[14] Criminal Lockup Quota Report, supra note 5, at 14-16; State of Arizona Department of Corrections, Solicitation Documents, 102 https://procure.az.gov/bso/external...Summary.sdo&external=true&searchType=contract (last visited Oct. 26, 2017) [hereinafter MTC Solicitation Documents]; State of Arizona Department of Corrections, Offer and Acceptance, https://procure.az.gov/bso/external...Summary.sdo&external=true&searchType=contract (last visited Oct. 26, 2017) [hereinafter Offer and Acceptance].

[15] Criminal Lockup Quota Report, supra note 5, at 14-16; MTC Solicitation Documents, supra note 14, at 102.

[16] Criminal Lockup Quota Report, supra note 5, at 14-16; State of Arizona Department of Corrections, Contract Change Order/Amendment (Apr. 21, 2017) https://procure.az.gov/bso/external...Summary.sdo&external=true&searchType=contract (last visited Oct. 26, 2017) [hereinafter Contract Change Order].

[17] Contract Change Order, supra note 15.

[18] Meredith Hoffman, Correction: Immigration Detention-Texas story, Associated Press, (updated Apr. 14, 2017), https://apnews.com/b70c0d6c21384140bdd8158215cb2130 (last visited Oct. 26, 2017).

[19] See generally Michael G. Anderson, If You’ve Got The Money I’ve Got The Time: The Benefits of Incentive Contracts with Private Prisons, 34 Buff. Pub. Interest L.J. 43 (2015)(discussing the flawed nature of contracts between the federal and state governments and private prison companies); see also Julia Edwards & Mica Rosenberg, Shareholders in U.S. Private Prison Company Sue Over Phase-Out, Reuters (Aug. 24, 2016), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...ison-company-sue-over-phase-out-idUSKCN10Z2JU (last visited Oct. 26, 2017).

 

[roots69]

Google
The letter that changed hip hop

Thanks for sharing

 

[roots69]

Jailhouse Roc: The FACTS About Hip Hop and Prison for Profit


Right now, three companies (Warner Records, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music Group) control around 90% of the depiction of Hip Hop. At the same time, two companies, CoreCivic (formerly CCA Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group own almost all the private prison beds in the USA. What connects these two industries together? Vaunguard and Blackrock which are the largest shareholders in both media and prisons!

 

[roots69]

Hmm

[1990] The music industry invested into private prisons and conspired to only promote racial stereotypes in gangsta rap to influence a whole generation by misguiding impressionable young minds into adopting glorified criminal behaviors which often lead to their incarceration

 

[roots69]

TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2012
"The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation"

Hello,

After more than 20 years, I've finally decided to tell the world what I witnessed in 1991, which I believe was one of the biggest turning point in popular music, and ultimately American society. I have struggled for a long time weighing the pros and cons of making this story public as I was reluctant to implicate the individuals who were present that day. So I've simply decided to leave out names and all the details that may risk my personal well being and that of those who were, like me, dragged into something they weren't ready for.

Between the late 80's and early 90’s, I was what you may call a “decision maker” with one of the more established company in the music industry. I came from Europe in the early 80’s and quickly established myself in the business. The industry was different back then. Since technology and media weren’t accessible to people like they are today, the industry had more control over the public and had the means to influence them anyway it wanted. This may explain why in early 1991, I was invited to attend a closed door meeting with a small group of music business insiders to discuss rap music’s new direction. Little did I know that we would be asked to participate in one of the most unethical and destructive business practice I’ve ever seen.

The meeting was held at a private residence on the outskirts of Los Angeles. I remember about 25 to 30 people being there, most of them familiar faces. Speaking to those I knew, we joked about the theme of the meeting as many of us did not care for rap music and failed to see the purpose of being invited to a private gathering to discuss its future. Among the attendees was a small group of unfamiliar faces who stayed to themselves and made no attempt to socialize beyond their circle. Based on their behavior and formal appearances, they didn't seem to be in our industry. Our casual chatter was interrupted when we were asked to sign a confidentiality agreement preventing us from publicly discussing the information presented during the meeting. Needless to say, this intrigued and in some cases disturbed many of us. The agreement was only a page long but very clear on the matter and consequences which stated that violating the terms would result in job termination. We asked several people what this meeting was about and the reason for such secrecy but couldn't find anyone who had answers for us. A few people refused to sign and walked out. No one stopped them. I was tempted to follow but curiosity got the best of me. A man who was part of the “unfamiliar” group collected the agreements from us.

Quickly after the meeting began, one of my industry colleagues (who shall remain nameless like everyone else) thanked us for attending. He then gave the floor to a man who only introduced himself by first name and gave no further details about his personal background. I think he was the owner of the residence but it was never confirmed. He briefly praised all of us for the success we had achieved in our industry and congratulated us for being selected as part of this small group of “decision makers”. At this point I begin to feel slightly uncomfortable at the strangeness of this gathering. The subject quickly changed as the speaker went on to tell us that the respective companies we represented had invested in a very profitable industry which could become even more rewarding with our active involvement. He explained that the companies we work for had invested millions into the building of privately owned prisons and that our positions of influence in the music industry would actually impact the profitability of these investments. I remember many of us in the group immediately looking at each other in confusion. At the time, I didn’t know what a private prison was but I wasn't the only one. Sure enough, someone asked what these prisons were and what any of this had to do with us. We were told that these prisons were built by privately owned companies who received funding from the government based on the number of inmates. The more inmates, the more money the government would pay these prisons. It was also made clear to us that since these prisons are privately owned, as they become publicly traded, we’d be able to buy shares. Most of us were taken back by this. Again, a couple of people asked what this had to do with us. At this point, my industry colleague who had first opened the meeting took the floor again and answered our questions. He told us that since our employers had become silent investors in this prison business, it was now in their interest to make sure that these prisons remained filled. Our job would be to help make this happen by marketing music which promotes criminal behavior, rap being the music of choice. He assured us that this would be a great situation for us because rap music was becoming an increasingly profitable market for our companies, and as employee, we’d also be able to buy personal stocks in these prisons. Immediately, silence came over the room. You could have heard a pin drop. I remember looking around to make sure I wasn't dreaming and saw half of the people with dropped jaws. My daze was interrupted when someone shouted, “Is this a f****** joke?” At this point things became chaotic. Two of the men who were part of the “unfamiliar” group grabbed the man who shouted out and attempted to remove him from the house. A few of us, myself included, tried to intervene. One of them pulled out a gun and we all backed off. They separated us from the crowd and all four of us were escorted outside. My industry colleague who had opened the meeting earlier hurried out to meet us and reminded us that we had signed agreement and would suffer the consequences of speaking about this publicly or even with those who attended the meeting. I asked him why he was involved with something this corrupt and he replied that it was bigger than the music business and nothing we’d want to challenge without risking consequences. We all protested and as he walked back into the house I remember word for word the last thing he said, “It’s out of my hands now. Remember you signed an agreement.” He then closed the door behind him. The men rushed us to our cars and actually watched until we drove off.

A million things were going through my mind as I drove away and I eventually decided to pull over and park on a side street in order to collect my thoughts. I replayed everything in my mind repeatedly and it all seemed very surreal to me. I was angry with myself for not having taken a more active role in questioning what had been presented to us. I'd like to believe the shock of it all is what suspended my better nature. After what seemed like an eternity, I was able to calm myself enough to make it home. I didn't talk or call anyone that night. The next day back at the office, I was visibly out of it but blamed it on being under the weather. No one else in my department had been invited to the meeting and I felt a sense of guilt for not being able to share what I had witnessed. I thought about contacting the 3 others who wear kicked out of the house but I didn't remember their names and thought that tracking them down would probably bring unwanted attention. I considered speaking out publicly at the risk of losing my job but I realized I’d probably be jeopardizing more than my job and I wasn't willing to risk anything happening to my family. I thought about those men with guns and wondered who they were? I had been told that this was bigger than the music business and all I could do was let my imagination run free. There were no answers and no one to talk to. I tried to do a little bit of research on private prisons but didn’t uncover anything about the music business’ involvement. However, the information I did find confirmed how dangerous this prison business really was. Days turned into weeks and weeks into months. Eventually, it was as if the meeting had never taken place. It all seemed surreal. I became more reclusive and stopped going to any industry events unless professionally obligated to do so. On two occasions, I found myself attending the same function as my former colleague. Both times, our eyes met but nothing more was exchanged.

As the months passed, rap music had definitely changed direction. I was never a fan of it but even I could tell the difference. Rap acts that talked about politics or harmless fun were quickly fading away as gangster rap started dominating the airwaves. Only a few months had passed since the meeting but I suspect that the ideas presented that day had been successfully implemented. It was as if the order has been given to all major label executives. The music was climbing the charts and most companies when more than happy to capitalize on it. Each one was churning out their very own gangster rap acts on an assembly line. Everyone bought into it, consumers included. Violence and drug use became a central theme in most rap music. I spoke to a few of my peers in the industry to get their opinions on the new trend but was told repeatedly that it was all about supply and demand. Sadly many of them even expressed that the music reinforced their prejudice of minorities.

I officially quit the music business in 1993 but my heart had already left months before. I broke ties with the majority of my peers and removed myself from this thing I had once loved. I took some time off, returned to Europe for a few years, settled out of state, and lived a “quiet” life away from the world of entertainment. As the years passed, I managed to keep my secret, fearful of sharing it with the wrong person but also a little ashamed of not having had the balls to blow the whistle. But as rap got worse, my guilt grew. Fortunately, in the late 90’s, having the internet as a resource which wasn't at my disposal in the early days made it easier for me to investigate what is now labeled the prison industrial complex. Now that I have a greater understanding of how private prisons operate, things make much more sense than they ever have. I see how the criminalization of rap music played a big part in promoting racial stereotypes and misguided so many impressionable young minds into adopting these glorified criminal behaviors which often lead to incarceration. Twenty years of guilt is a heavy load to carry but the least I can do now is to share my story, hoping that fans of rap music realize how they’ve been used for the past 2 decades. Although I plan on remaining anonymous for obvious reasons, my goal now is to get this information out to as many people as possible. Please help me spread the word. Hopefully, others who attended the meeting back in 1991 will be inspired by this and tell their own stories. Most importantly, if only one life has been touched by my story, I pray it makes the weight of my guilt a little more tolerable.

Thank you.

 

[dagoon121]

This shit is pure hell. America

 

[roots69]

The Music of Mass Incarceration

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©2020. Published in Landslide, Vol. 13, No. 2, November/December 2020, by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association or the copyright holder.
Intellectual property law reaches every aspect of the world, society, and creativity. Sometimes, creative expression is at the very crux of societal conflict and change. Through its history, rap music has demonstrated passionate creative expression, exploding with emotion and truths. Now the most popular musical genre in America, rap has always shared—and consistently critiqued—disproportionate effects of the criminal legal system on Black communities. The world is increasingly hearing these tunes with special acuity and paying more attention to the lyrics.


Virtually every music recording artist would consider the following numbers a major career achievement: 500 percent increase; 222 percent growth; 25 percent market share. But these are not recorded music sales or revenue numbers. Rather, they are statistics that make the U.S. number one in the world in incarceration.
Mass incarceration refers to the decades-long phenomenon in which the U.S. has locked up a sizeable amount of its population in federal and state prisons, as well as local jails. According to the Sentencing Project, the U.S. is the world’s leader in incarceration with 2.2 million people in prisons and jails, a 500 percent increase over the last 40 years.1 Despite having only about 5 percent of the world’s population, the U.S. has nearly 25 percent of the world’s prison population.2 The National Research Council reported that increased time served in prison for all offenses accounted for half of the 222 percent growth in the state prison population between 1980 and 2010.3 Most of these offenses are nonviolent crimes. There are more people behind bars for drug offenses today than the number of people who were incarcerated for any crime in 1980.4
Mass incarceration disproportionately affects people of color in the U.S. Today, more Black people are under the control of prison and corrections departments than were ever enslaved in this country.5 People of color make up 37 percent of the U.S. population but 67 percent of the prison population.6 This disparity does not correlate with the rate at which crimes are committed. For example, despite the fact that whites engage in drug offenses at a higher rate than Blacks, Blacks are incarcerated for drug offenses at a rate 10 times greater than that of whites.7 More generally, Black Americans face a greater likelihood of being arrested than white Americans.8 Black Americans are more likely to be convicted once arrested, and more likely to face stiffer sentences once convicted.9
While mass incarceration was taking hold in the U.S., rap music was gaining traction. Once deemed a passing fad of the 1970s and 1980s, rap (or hip hop) music has become mainstream, driving American culture and consumption. And its importance is not limited to entertainment, capitalism, and economics. Indeed, rap has played a vital role in the documentation of mass incarceration. From its beginnings 50 years ago, hip hop has explored a range of themes that address the root causes and detrimental effects of mass incarceration, including urban decay, poverty, community violence, hyper-policing, police misconduct and brutality, government surveillance, tough-on-crime policies, and prosecutorial zeal.
Rap music was born during an era of economic vulnerability and tough-on-crime policies, which also contributed to mass incarceration. Since its birth, rappers of all genres—party, conscious, political, and gangsta—and in every era have written songs critical of social, economic, and legal injustices. They have paid particular attention to the devastating effects of the criminal legal system on Black communities.
Government Economics and the War on Drugs
In the 1960s, urban areas nationwide began to feel the negative effects of complex social and economic transformations that restricted wage and class mobility and fostered income inequality. Jobs were shifting from the manufacturing to the service sector, meaning workers were needed in low-skill, low-wage jobs with little opportunity for advancement rather than semi-skilled jobs with unionized wages. The federal government cut funding for housing, training, and education programs that provided a safety net and promoted upward mobility. Black and Latinx residents in these communities bore the brunt of these negative trends.
The following decades saw the birth and growth of the war on drugs, which President Nixon commenced in 1971.10 President Reagan continued the battle cry in October 1982 during a weekly radio address.11 This war involved the provision of federal government funding to states to combat crime, the deployment of military tactics and strategies for policing, and a dramatic increase in the length of custodial sentences.
Just as Reagan was sounding a battle cry, the pioneering rap group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five recorded “The Message,” which critiques the impoverished conditions of urban housing projects and was one of the first rap songs of what would become rap’s ongoing commentary regarding socioeconomic conditions in the Black community. Not long thereafter, in 1984, Run-DMC, the highly influential rap group, released “It’s Like That” and “Hard Times.” “It’s Like That” addresses unemployment, the cost of living, homelessness, and the difficulties of life in poor, urban environments. Similarly, “Hard Times” illustrates financial difficulties and the need to work hard to overcome challenges.
In the late 1980s, a Black nationalist style emerged in rap music, continuing the tradition of earlier songs that trained a spotlight on policies that facilitated economic and social disenfranchisement in Black communities. Public Enemy was the most successful of this group of political or conscious artists. In 1988, the group released “Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos” on its album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. The song tells the story of a Black inmate who escaped from prison and refused to join the U.S. Army because he believed society mistreated Black men. The group’s follow-up album, Fear of a Black Planet, deals with themes of anti-miscegenation and white supremacy, institutional neglect and racism, and Black pride. In particular, the hit track “911 Is a Joke” describes how first responders, i.e., medical personnel, were slow to react to the emergency calls and needs of Black people.
Police Violence
Also during the late 1980s, gangster or gangsta rap, which, like political or conscious rap, engaged in strident critiques of society, grew out of repressive criminal justice practices, particularly in Los Angeles, California. During this time, in his 15 years heading the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), Daryl Gates built on an aggressive policing model of former LAPD police chief William H. Parker. Gangster rap in this period fixated on government hyper-aggressive, militaristic, brutal policing tactics.
The notorious hustler-turned-rapper Ice-T released in 1986 what is considered by many to be the first gangster rap: “6 ’N the Mornin’” (others will say it was “P.S.K. What Does It Mean?” released in 1984 by Philadelphia-based rapper Schoolly D). Written in the first person, “6 ’N the Mornin’” depicts physical violence, the drug trade, police chases, gun possession, arrest and incarceration, prostitution, homicide, and sex. As a B-side song, Ice-T did not expect the song to become as popular as it did. Seeing its popularity spurred Ice-T to make Los Angeles gang life a central theme in future works, although he did not affiliate with a particular gang.
Two years later, the release of the iconic gangster rap, police protest song “Fuck tha Police” can be directly linked to the actions of the LAPD.
On August 1, 1988, the LAPD conducted the infamous Dalton Avenue drug raid in South-Central Los Angeles. The raid was part of “Operation Hammer,” a large-scale police effort Gates created in 1987 after eight people were killed during a drive-by shooting of a party in South-Central Los Angeles. Operation Hammer engaged in massive sweeps and mass arrests with the aim of clamping down on gang violence. On the night of August 1, more than 80 officers raided and searched for drugs in four apartments in two buildings. In the course of the raid, officers beat residents and caused massive property damage. Ultimately, officers recovered less than one ounce of cocaine and six ounces of marijuana, and no arrests were made. Some families were left homeless as a result of the extensive damage. The city paid $4 million in damages to settle lawsuits, a couple of officers were fired, and more than 20 were put on leave without pay.
That same month, legendary N.W.A released its song “Fuck tha Police” on the album Straight Outta Compton. The lyrics excoriate local law enforcement for racial profiling, unlawful conduct, and targeting young men of color for violent treatment. The song challenges the authority of law enforcement and depicts violent responses to law enforcement.
In 1992, Ice-T’s heavy metal group Body Count issued “Cop Killer.” The song protests police brutality and references by name then LAPD police chief Daryl Gates and Rodney King, whose beating by LAPD officers in 1991 was videorecorded. Like “Fuck tha Police,” the character in “Cop Killer” seeks violent revenge for victims of police brutality.
A long-standing, national problem, police brutality is the unwarranted or excessive, and often illegal, use of force against civilians by law enforcement officers.12 Police brutality takes many forms, ranging from simple assault and battery to aggravated assault to murder. It also encompasses mistreatment such as harassment, false imprisonment, intimidation, and verbal abuse.13
It is well-documented that people of color in America disproportionately suffer police brutality.14 Reports show that Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to experience excessive police force in comparison to whites.15 Even after accounting for situational factors of a police-citizen encounter, such as resisting arrest, and officer characteristics, such as age and training, studies show stark racial disparities in police maltreatment: Black boys and men are disproportionately subject to excessive, and sometimes deadly, police force.16
About 10 years after N.W.A released “Fuck tha Police,” the quintessential conscious rapper KRS-One continued to rail against law enforcement misconduct, releasing “Sound of da Police” in 2000. Generally, the song builds out themes of institutionalized racism in policing and policing misconduct. Specifically, the song addresses drug dealing by police, law enforcement ability to use deadly force (like slave overseers), and unlawful traffic stops. Finally, the song reminds the listener that police misconduct is intergenerational; the ancestors of today’s Black people dealt with the same issues—and so do their descendants.
As the world has become more aware in recent months, there have been many well-publicized instances of law enforcement officers killing unarmed Black men, including Eric Garner in New York City in 2014; Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014; Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015; Stephon Clark in Sacramento, California, in 2018; and George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, in 2020.17 Many other killings of Black men and boys have received far less national attention but are equally disturbing and impactful.
In 2020, society seems to have reached a tipping point. Following the police killings of George Floyd in Minnesota and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, and the killing of Ahmaud Arbery by white vigilantes in Glynn County, Georgia, and the months of protests that have engulfed America, rap artists have used their voices to draw attention to these crimes and, more broadly, to racism. Notably, legendary rapper LL Cool J posted online a spoken word tribute to George Floyd and other victims. The rap opens with: “For 400 years, you had your knees on our necks,” referencing George Floyd’s actual killing and, metaphorically, white society’s racism. Addressing government economic policies, the song turns to the topic of coronavirus stimulus relief: “I can’t be bought with a $1,200 check / Even though $1,200 can make a meal stretch.” The song continues with a comparison of the government response to the sometimes-violent protests by Black activists and the police reaction to whites protesting pandemic mitigation measures while sporting weapons and spitting in the faces of officers. After calling out names of more Black victims, LL Cool J closes with: “Being black in America is like rolling a pair of dice / But the stakes are way higher, you’re gambling with my life / Black Lives Matter, forever.”
While hyper-incarceration and police violence may be the most obvious effects of mass incarceration and the ones that receive significant public attention, there are practices and trends within the criminal legal system—such as racial profiling, surveillance, and criminalization of rap—that warrant significant scrutiny, and rap artists have heeded the call.
Race-Based Traffic Stops
Racial profiling is “the law enforcement practice of using race, ethnicity, national origin, or religious appearance as one factor, among others, when police decide which people are suspicious enough to warrant police stops, questioning, frisks, searches, and other routine police investigative practices.”18 Racial profiling is a discriminatory practice that does little to fight crime or increase public safety. “[P]eople of color are overrepresented among those who are stopped, cited, searched, and arrested” by law enforcement.19 They often are stopped for minor traffic infractions in an effort to investigate other crimes for which the police have no evidence (a.k.a. “Driving While Black”), even though research evidence reveals that contraband, such as weapons and drugs, is not more likely to be found among African American drivers than when white drivers are stopped.20
Jay-Z’s 2003 hit song “99 Problems” from The Black Album sounds the alarm regarding racial profiling and traffic stops. The second verse describes a scene in which he is driving a car containing drugs in the trunk. He is pulled over by an officer for allegedly “doing fifty-five in a fifty-four.” When the officer asks if he knows why he has been stopped, he remarks, “Cause I’m young and I’m Black and my hat’s real low.” The officer then asks him whether he is carrying a weapon because “I know a lot of you are.” When the officer asks for license and registration, he responds that his papers are “legit,” i.e., his license is valid and his car is properly registered. The officer then asks whether he can search the car, and Jay-Z’s character refuses, understanding that the officer is looking for criminal evidence. The officer gets the final word, responding that he is calling a drug-sniffing dog to the scene to search the car.
Two years later, Grammy-winning rapper Chamillionaire (Hakeem Seriki) released “Ridin’,” which itemizes the pretextual bases on which law enforcement conduct traffic stops of Black men driving in their vehicles: loud music; a flashy, tricked out vehicle; claims of erratic driving or an open warrant. The song explicitly calls out this police practice by its name: racial profiling. The story finishes with officers pulling over a driver and becoming angry when they fail to detect any criminal activity.
Mass incarceration results not only from street-level police-citizen interactions but also from more arms-length investigative practices.
The Surveillance State
Government surveillance has long been an essential feature of criminal policing and prosecution and a practice that is not limited to serious criminals or suspects. Surveillance takes many forms, from spying to eavesdropping to tracking to online monitoring. Individuals and whole communities are surveilled.
This feeling of being watched by government officials has played out time and again in the work of many rap artists. Public Enemy suspected it was being watched, a sentiment starkly revealed in the group’s logo, a picture of a man in crosshairs.
Ice Cube’s 1993 song “Ghetto Bird” focuses on the LAPD’s pervasive use of police helicopters to surveil Black areas of Los Angeles. The helicopter isn’t simply conducting flyovers of the city looking for particular offenders. It circles the area at night, shining a bright spotlight on the community, penetrating residents’ windows, and generally monitoring goings-on. When called into action, the helicopter is used in chases, following a suspect in the sky and alerting officers on the ground of the path a suspect is traveling.
More than any other, 2Pac wrote songs depicting his surveillance by government officials, not hesitating to call them out by name. For example, in “I Don’t Give a Fuck” on his 1991 debut studio album 2Pacalypse Now, he sends a “fuck you” to the San Francisco Police Department, the Marin County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI, the CIA, the first President Bush, and America. Even years later, on his fourth and final album, All Eyez on Me, released in 1996, the song by the same title mentions that the feds were watching him.
Surveillance has not been limited to individual artists. The larger hip hop community is under watch nationwide. Nearly 30 years ago, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) established a hip hop task force, i.e., a special unit of police officers targeting rap artists in the city. Not long thereafter, other major cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Miami, followed the NYPD model and set up their own task forces. The primary responsibility of these units is to keep track of rap artists’ disputes, criminal histories and activities, and general whereabouts. They continue to operate today.
Long before their public unveiling by journalists, artists have been aware of these hip hop task forces and their goals. For example, in a 2007 song titled “Hip Hop Police” by Chamillionaire (featuring rapper Slick Rick), the chorus expressly calls out government surveillance: “With so much drama in the industry / Hip hop police are listening / Be careful or you’ll be history.” In the rap, Chamillionaire narrates a story in which he is harassed by the hip hop police and ultimately arrested for murder. The officers try to convince him to snitch on other artists, including Busta Rhymes, Snoop Dogg, and an unidentified rapper who is allegedly a gang member, in exchange for a lighter sentence. Police point out that they have mounds of evidence against him, including songs he has recorded on CDs.
The Criminalization of Rap Music
There is a particularly troubling aspect of the connection between hip hop and mass incarceration: a situation where rap music documenting mass incarceration moves to rap music facilitating mass incarceration. As far back as the early 1990s, police and prosecutors nationwide have been using rap lyrics as criminal evidence to investigate, convict, and sentence young Black and Latino men.
This author’s research has uncovered hundreds of cases—mostly drug, gang, or violent crime—in which rap lyrics have been used as criminal evidence. Undoubtedly, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Despite its scope, the practice has gained public attention only in recent years. Journalists have covered the stories of high-profile defendants, such as Louisiana rapper McKinley (Mac) Phipps and, more recently, Tekashi 6ix9ine. Major legal decisions touching on the topic, such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 opinion in Elonis v. United States,21 have attracted attention. Within the music community, Atlanta-based rapper Killer Mike has raised awareness of the issue, joined by other well-known artists such as 21 Savage, Chance the Rapper, Meek Mill, and Luther Campbell.
Currently, this tactic is playing out before the public in the case of rising rap star Darrell Caldwell, better known to fans as Drakeo the Ruler. Drakeo, a gifted and popular rap artist, has been described as one of the most original new rappers to emerge out of his hometown, Los Angeles. He has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, tens of millions of views on YouTube, and the attention of national media outlets.
In 2017, Los Angeles prosecutors charged Drakeo with ordering a 2016 shooting that, according to prosecutors, was a botched attempt to kill a musical rival, fellow Los Angeles–based rapper RJ. However, at his trial in 2020, the jury acquitted him of most of the counts against him, including multiple counts of murder.
But prosecutors plan to retry him on the lone charge the jury hung on in the first trial: criminal gang conspiracy. Drakeo is a member of a well-known rap collective called the Stinc Team. Prosecutors claim the collective is actually a criminal street gang and allege that Drakeo benefited from the gang’s violence. If convicted, Drakeo faces life in prison.22
While Drakeo sits in the Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles awaiting retrial, his artistic voice has not been silenced. In March 2020, he released a new album—Free Drakeo—from jail. A collection of previously recorded works, the album is commercially entertaining and politically conscious. He followed that up in June 2020, releasing an album entirely recorded over the jail phone system: Thank You for Using GTL. As one reviewer wrote: “[A]s a statement about the carceral state, capitalism, the prison-industrial complex, the U.S. criminal justice system’s targeting of rap and rappers, and the ongoing game of real vs. fiction taking place within hip hop itself, it’s unimpeachable.”23 The song “Fictional” is particularly notable in that it tackles head-on the issue of rap as fiction versus nonfiction, which is playing out in Drakeo’s case and courtrooms across America. He raps: “It might sound real but it’s fictional / I love that my imagination gets to you.” As Washington Post music critic Chris Richards commented:

[A]fter phoning-in the performance of a lifetime, Drakeo pivots into a soliloquy... offering up his own best defense: “You’re not gonna hold Denzel Washington accountable for his role in ‘Training Day,’ so don’t do the same thing with my music. That’s all I’m saying.” He’s obviously saying so much more, but if you still can’t hear it, at least hear this part.24

In many ways, Drakeo’s case and his artistry sum up the story of mass incarceration and the efforts by rap artists across time and geography to bring attention to the problem.
Conclusion
For 400 years, Blacks in America have used music to call out and contest the injustices they have faced. Slave songs. Negro spirituals. Jazz. Freedom songs. Black nationalist protest music. Hip hop. Black music has allowed Black people to speak to the hearts and minds of those who would not ordinarily listen to their complaints.25
Rap music, in particular, has been a potent means to spread the stories of those who live today in marginalized, under-resourced, over-policed communities and educate listeners about mass incarceration. Its contribution to public discourse about the injustices of the criminal legal system cannot now be ignored. The songs are heard loud and clear.

 

[Mrfreddygoodbud]

Hmm.. It all makes sense!!







Facts about Hip-Hop and Prison for Profit



httpss://raprehab.com/facts-about-hip-hop-and-prison-for-profit/
The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or “would be,” depending on your analysis) very lucrative.
GoldenUndergroundTV recently released an interview I did with them late last year. I got a bit animated at the end. Only so many interviews in a row I could handle being asked about Chief Keef.
My tirade wasn’t really about Chief Keef. It wasn’t about Gucci Mane or Wocka Flocka or any of the acts spontaneously catapulted into stardom by synchronized mass media coverage despite seemingly universal indifference (at the very best) regarding their talent. Whose arrests, involvement in underaged pregnancies, concert shootouts, and facial tattoos, dominate conversation for weeks at a time, with their actual music a mere afterthought, if thought of at all.
My tirade was about marketing. It was about media powers seeking out the biggest pretend criminal kingpins they can find, (many of whom who shamelessly adopt the names of actual real life criminal kingpins like 50 Cent and Rick Ross), and exalting them as the poster children for a culture. It was about an art form reduced to product placement, the selling of a lifestyle, and ultimately, a huge ad for imprisonment.
This is not my opinion.
Last year Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the biggest name in the private prison industry, contacted 48 states offering to buy their prisons. One stipulation of eligibility for the deal was particularly bizarre: “an assurance by the agency partner that the agency has sufficient inmate population to maintain a minimum 90% occupancy rate over the term of the contract.
What kind of legitimate and ethical measures could possibly be taken to ensure the maintenance of a 90% prison occupancy rate?
Two months later an anonymous email was sent out to various members of the music and publishing industries giving an account of a meeting where it was determined that hip-hop music would be manipulated to drive up privatized prison profits. Its author, despite claiming to be a former industry insider, did not provide the names of anyone involved in the plot, nor did he specify by which company he himself was employed. As such, the letter was largely regarded as a fraud for lack of facts.
Ninety percent of what Americans read, watch and listen to is controlled by only six media companies. PBS’s Frontline has described the conglomerates that determine what information is disseminated to the public as a “web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and culture.” Business relationships.
Last year a mere 232 media executives were responsible for the intake of 277 million Americans, controlling all the avenues necessary to manufacture any celebrity and incite any trend. Time Warner, as owner of Warner Bros Records (among many other record labels), can not only sign an artist to a recording contract but, as the owner of Entertainment Weekly, can see to it that they get next week’s cover. Also the owner of New Line Cinemas, HBO and TNT, they can have their artist cast in a leading role in a film that, when pulled from theaters, will be put into rotation first on premium, then on basic, cable.
Without any consideration to the music whatsoever, the artist will already be a star, though such monopolies also extend into radio stations and networks that air music videos. For consumers, choice is often illusory. Both BET and MTV belong to Viacom. While Hot 97, NYC’s top hip hop station, is owned by Emmis Communications, online streaming is controlled by Clear Channel, who also owns rival station Power 105.
None of this is exactly breaking news, but when ownership of these media conglomerates is cross checked with ownership of the biggest names in prison privatization, interesting new facts emerge.
According to public analysis from Bloomberg, the largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated. Interestingly enough, Vanguard also holds considerable stake in the media giants determining this country’s culture. In fact, Vanguard is the third largest holder in both Viacom and Time Warner.
Vanguard is also the third largest holder in the GEO Group, whose correctional, detention and community reentry services boast 101 facilities, approximately 73,000 beds and 18,000 employees. Second nationally only to Corrections Corporation of America, GEO’s facilities are located not only in the United States but in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa.
You may be thinking, “Well, Vanguard is only the third largest holder in those media conglomerates, which is no guarantee that they’re calling any shots.” Well, the number-one holder of both Viacom and Time Warner is a company called Blackrock. Blackrock is the second largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America, second only to Vanguard, and the sixth largest holder in the GEO Group.
There are many other startling overlaps in private-prison/mass-media ownership, but two underlying facts become clear very quickly: The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or “would be,” depending on your analysis) very lucrative.
Such a scheme would mean some very greedy, very racist people.
There are facts to back that up, too.
Prison industry lobbyists developing and encouraging criminal justice policies to advance financial interests has been well-documented. The most notorious example is the Washington-based American Legislative Council, a policy organization funded by CCA and GEO, which successfully championed the incarceration promoting “truth in sentencing” and “three-strikes” sentencing laws.
If the motive of the private prison industry were the goodhearted desire to get hold of inmates as quickly as possible for the purpose of sooner successfully rehabilitating them, maintenance of a 90% occupancy rate would be considered a huge failure, not a functioning prerequisite.
Likewise, the largest rise in incarceration that this country has ever seen correlates precisely with early-80’s prison privatization. This despite the fact that crime rates actually declined since this time. This decreasing crime rate was pointed out enthusiastically by skeptics eager to debunk last year’s anonymous industry insider, who painted a picture of popularized hip-hop as a tool for imprisoning masses.
What wasn’t pointed out was that despite crime rates going down, incarceration rates have skyrocketed. While the size of the prison population changed dramatically, so did its complexion. In “‘All Eyez on Me’: America’s War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex,” Andre Douglas Pond Cummings documents the obvious truth that “the vast majority of the prisoner increase in the United States has come from African-American and Latino citizen drug arrests.”
Add to this well-documented statistics proving that the so-called “war on drugs” has been waged almost entirely on low-income communities of color, where up until just two years ago, cocaine sold in crack form fetched sentences 100 times as lengthy as the exact same amount of cocaine sold in powdered form, which is much more common in cocaine arrests in affluent communities. (In July 2010 the oddly named Fair Sentencing Act was adopted, which, rather than reducing the crack/powder disparity from 100-to-1 to 1-to-1, reduced it to 18-to-1, which is still grossly unfair.)
This is not to suggest that the crack/powder disparity represents the extent of the racism rampant within the incarceration industry. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal prison system, even where convicted for the exact same crimes, people of color received prison sentences 10% longer . Where convictions are identical, mandatory minimum sentences are also 21% more likely for people of color.
Finally, let us not forget the wealth of evidence to support the notion that crime-, drug- and prison-glorifying hip-hop only outsells other hip-hop because it receives so much more exposure and financial backing, and that when given equal exposure, talent is a much more reliable indicator of success than content.
Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) put it best; “‘hip-hop” is just shorthand for ‘black people.’” Before our eyes and ears, a “web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and culture” has one particular business raking in billions of dollars while another defines the culture of a specific demographic as criminal. Both business are owned by the same people.
Mainstream media continue to endorse hip-hop that glorifies criminality (most notably drug trafficking and violence), and private prison interests, long since proven to value profits over human rights, usher in inmates of color to meet capacity quotas. The same people disproportionately incarcerated when exposed to the criminal justice system are at every turn inundated with media normalizing incarceration to the point that wherever there is mainstream hip-hop music, reference to imprisonment as an ordinary, even expected, component of life is sure to follow.
Conspiracy theorists get a lot of flak for daring entertain the notion that people will do evil things for money. Historical atrocities like slavery and the Holocaust are universally acknowledged, yet simultaneously adopted is the contradictory position that there can’t possibly be any human beings around intelligent enough and immoral enough to perpetrate such things.
Even in the midst of the Europe-wide beef that was actually horse-meat fiasco, and the release of real-life nightmare documenting films like “Sunshine and Oranges,” there is an abundance of people content to believe that the only conspiracies that ever exist are those that have successfully been exposed.
The link between mass media and the prison industrial complex, however, is part of a very different type of conversation.
The information in this article was not difficult to find; it is all public.
This is not a conspiracy. This is a fact.

gatdam shame..

You mean all the time they was talkin fight crime shit in the eighties, and build more prisons, only to find out many decades later it was all bullshit

because crime was going down...

its so fuckin obvious there is an entity ensuring the played out... drug dealer image stays in hip hop...

Great Info again ROOTS!!!!

its like you KNOW it but to read it laid out like that, lets you know there is a demonic energy that has taken over hip hop

and made it commercial garbage that fuels the street to prison pipeline

 

[Dannyblueyes]

TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 2012
"The Secret Meeting that Changed Rap Music and Destroyed a Generation"

I'm not buying it.

The biggest problem is that in the last 30 years nobody else has ever admitted this meeting took place. Including participants who have long retired and have nothing to lose. By now several members have probably died of old age, but none of their spouses spoke up either.

More than that the whole idea is nonsensical. In 1991 the violent crime rate was more than twice what it was now. Wouldn't it make far more sense to lobby the government to increase sentences? Maybe turn certain misdemeanors into felonies? (Which is exactly what happened).

Instead we're supposed to believe that they targeted a group of record executives that had only produced 12 platinum records that entire year and told them to ratchet up the violence in their artist's lyrics. Even though this industry had spent the better part of the 1980s trying to prove that music alone didn't cause deviant or antisocial behavior.

Keep in mind that at this point 90% of these executives projects were losing money. The few that made a profit were usually either conscious artists like KRS-One and Public Enemy, or bubblegum rap like MC Hammer. For the most part, gangster rap was a niche market back in 1991. The majority of people over 30 swore up and down that all of hip hop was a fad that would be completely gone by 1992.

 

[Dannyblueyes]

Hmm.. It all makes sense!!







Facts about Hip-Hop and Prison for Profit



httpss://raprehab.com/facts-about-hip-hop-and-prison-for-profit/
The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or “would be,” depending on your analysis) very lucrative.
GoldenUndergroundTV recently released an interview I did with them late last year. I got a bit animated at the end. Only so many interviews in a row I could handle being asked about Chief Keef.
My tirade wasn’t really about Chief Keef. It wasn’t about Gucci Mane or Wocka Flocka or any of the acts spontaneously catapulted into stardom by synchronized mass media coverage despite seemingly universal indifference (at the very best) regarding their talent. Whose arrests, involvement in underaged pregnancies, concert shootouts, and facial tattoos, dominate conversation for weeks at a time, with their actual music a mere afterthought, if thought of at all.
My tirade was about marketing. It was about media powers seeking out the biggest pretend criminal kingpins they can find, (many of whom who shamelessly adopt the names of actual real life criminal kingpins like 50 Cent and Rick Ross), and exalting them as the poster children for a culture. It was about an art form reduced to product placement, the selling of a lifestyle, and ultimately, a huge ad for imprisonment.
This is not my opinion.
Last year Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the biggest name in the private prison industry, contacted 48 states offering to buy their prisons. One stipulation of eligibility for the deal was particularly bizarre: “an assurance by the agency partner that the agency has sufficient inmate population to maintain a minimum 90% occupancy rate over the term of the contract.
What kind of legitimate and ethical measures could possibly be taken to ensure the maintenance of a 90% prison occupancy rate?
Two months later an anonymous email was sent out to various members of the music and publishing industries giving an account of a meeting where it was determined that hip-hop music would be manipulated to drive up privatized prison profits. Its author, despite claiming to be a former industry insider, did not provide the names of anyone involved in the plot, nor did he specify by which company he himself was employed. As such, the letter was largely regarded as a fraud for lack of facts.
Ninety percent of what Americans read, watch and listen to is controlled by only six media companies. PBS’s Frontline has described the conglomerates that determine what information is disseminated to the public as a “web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and culture.” Business relationships.
Last year a mere 232 media executives were responsible for the intake of 277 million Americans, controlling all the avenues necessary to manufacture any celebrity and incite any trend. Time Warner, as owner of Warner Bros Records (among many other record labels), can not only sign an artist to a recording contract but, as the owner of Entertainment Weekly, can see to it that they get next week’s cover. Also the owner of New Line Cinemas, HBO and TNT, they can have their artist cast in a leading role in a film that, when pulled from theaters, will be put into rotation first on premium, then on basic, cable.
Without any consideration to the music whatsoever, the artist will already be a star, though such monopolies also extend into radio stations and networks that air music videos. For consumers, choice is often illusory. Both BET and MTV belong to Viacom. While Hot 97, NYC’s top hip hop station, is owned by Emmis Communications, online streaming is controlled by Clear Channel, who also owns rival station Power 105.
None of this is exactly breaking news, but when ownership of these media conglomerates is cross checked with ownership of the biggest names in prison privatization, interesting new facts emerge.
According to public analysis from Bloomberg, the largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America is Vanguard Group Incorporated. Interestingly enough, Vanguard also holds considerable stake in the media giants determining this country’s culture. In fact, Vanguard is the third largest holder in both Viacom and Time Warner.
Vanguard is also the third largest holder in the GEO Group, whose correctional, detention and community reentry services boast 101 facilities, approximately 73,000 beds and 18,000 employees. Second nationally only to Corrections Corporation of America, GEO’s facilities are located not only in the United States but in the United Kingdom, Australia and South Africa.
You may be thinking, “Well, Vanguard is only the third largest holder in those media conglomerates, which is no guarantee that they’re calling any shots.” Well, the number-one holder of both Viacom and Time Warner is a company called Blackrock. Blackrock is the second largest holder in Corrections Corporation of America, second only to Vanguard, and the sixth largest holder in the GEO Group.
There are many other startling overlaps in private-prison/mass-media ownership, but two underlying facts become clear very quickly: The people who own the media are the same people who own private prisons, the EXACT same people, and using one to promote the other is (or “would be,” depending on your analysis) very lucrative.
Such a scheme would mean some very greedy, very racist people.
There are facts to back that up, too.
Prison industry lobbyists developing and encouraging criminal justice policies to advance financial interests has been well-documented. The most notorious example is the Washington-based American Legislative Council, a policy organization funded by CCA and GEO, which successfully championed the incarceration promoting “truth in sentencing” and “three-strikes” sentencing laws.
If the motive of the private prison industry were the goodhearted desire to get hold of inmates as quickly as possible for the purpose of sooner successfully rehabilitating them, maintenance of a 90% occupancy rate would be considered a huge failure, not a functioning prerequisite.
Likewise, the largest rise in incarceration that this country has ever seen correlates precisely with early-80’s prison privatization. This despite the fact that crime rates actually declined since this time. This decreasing crime rate was pointed out enthusiastically by skeptics eager to debunk last year’s anonymous industry insider, who painted a picture of popularized hip-hop as a tool for imprisoning masses.
What wasn’t pointed out was that despite crime rates going down, incarceration rates have skyrocketed. While the size of the prison population changed dramatically, so did its complexion. In “‘All Eyez on Me’: America’s War on Drugs and the Prison-Industrial Complex,” Andre Douglas Pond Cummings documents the obvious truth that “the vast majority of the prisoner increase in the United States has come from African-American and Latino citizen drug arrests.”
Add to this well-documented statistics proving that the so-called “war on drugs” has been waged almost entirely on low-income communities of color, where up until just two years ago, cocaine sold in crack form fetched sentences 100 times as lengthy as the exact same amount of cocaine sold in powdered form, which is much more common in cocaine arrests in affluent communities. (In July 2010 the oddly named Fair Sentencing Act was adopted, which, rather than reducing the crack/powder disparity from 100-to-1 to 1-to-1, reduced it to 18-to-1, which is still grossly unfair.)
This is not to suggest that the crack/powder disparity represents the extent of the racism rampant within the incarceration industry. The U.S. Sentencing Commission reported in March 2010 that in the federal prison system, even where convicted for the exact same crimes, people of color received prison sentences 10% longer . Where convictions are identical, mandatory minimum sentences are also 21% more likely for people of color.
Finally, let us not forget the wealth of evidence to support the notion that crime-, drug- and prison-glorifying hip-hop only outsells other hip-hop because it receives so much more exposure and financial backing, and that when given equal exposure, talent is a much more reliable indicator of success than content.
Yasiin Bey (formerly Mos Def) put it best; “‘hip-hop” is just shorthand for ‘black people.’” Before our eyes and ears, a “web of business relationships that now defines America’s media and culture” has one particular business raking in billions of dollars while another defines the culture of a specific demographic as criminal. Both business are owned by the same people.
Mainstream media continue to endorse hip-hop that glorifies criminality (most notably drug trafficking and violence), and private prison interests, long since proven to value profits over human rights, usher in inmates of color to meet capacity quotas. The same people disproportionately incarcerated when exposed to the criminal justice system are at every turn inundated with media normalizing incarceration to the point that wherever there is mainstream hip-hop music, reference to imprisonment as an ordinary, even expected, component of life is sure to follow.
Conspiracy theorists get a lot of flak for daring entertain the notion that people will do evil things for money. Historical atrocities like slavery and the Holocaust are universally acknowledged, yet simultaneously adopted is the contradictory position that there can’t possibly be any human beings around intelligent enough and immoral enough to perpetrate such things.
Even in the midst of the Europe-wide beef that was actually horse-meat fiasco, and the release of real-life nightmare documenting films like “Sunshine and Oranges,” there is an abundance of people content to believe that the only conspiracies that ever exist are those that have successfully been exposed.
The link between mass media and the prison industrial complex, however, is part of a very different type of conversation.
The information in this article was not difficult to find; it is all public.
This is not a conspiracy. This is a fact.

Want to know the real reason why media conglomerates own stakes in private prison?

Accept a collect call from a correctional institute and you'll know right away.

It has nothing to do with the music

 

[roots69]

Want to know the real reason why media conglomerates own stakes in private prison?

Accept a collect call from a correctional institute and you'll know right away.

It has nothing to do with the music

Its to keep those beds filled, the music is just the mindfuck part of the illusion!!

 

[roots69]

gatdam shame..

You mean all the time they was talkin fight crime shit in the eighties, and build more prisons, only to find out many decades later it was all bullshit

because crime was going down...

its so fuckin obvious there is an entity ensuring the played out... drug dealer image stays in hip hop...

Great Info again ROOTS!!!!

its like you KNOW it but to read it laid out like that, lets you know there is a demonic energy that has taken over hip hop

and made it commercial garbage that fuels the street to prison pipeline

Right on bruh, You aint kidding something evil has set in with the music. Look at all the signs and symbols thrown in the masses faces!! What got my attention was 40+yrs of the same genre of music and the only thing that changed was the players!! But like everything else, aint nobody listening so that prison pipeline stay active in the streets, music and public schools and who knows where else its connected too!!

We gotta Dodge the Highjack!!!

 

[shaddyvillethug]

Its to keep those beds filled, the music is just the mindfuck part of the illusion!!

They charge 5 dollars a minute

 

[Z MONSTER]

Post of the year. I knew this for years.

 

[xfactor]

Right on bruh, You aint kidding something evil has set in with the music. Look at all the signs and symbols thrown in the masses faces!! What got my attention was 40+yrs of the same genre of music and the only thing that changed was the players!! But like everything else, aint nobody listening so that prison pipeline stay active in the streets, music and public schools and who knows where else its connected too!!

We gotta Dodge the Highjack!!!

We also have to realize that they have occult imagery in the videos and spell cast in the lyrics to enchant the listeners with low vibrations. The masses are finally realizing how much witchcraft is used to make our people more susceptible to demon possession and mind control but that is for another thread.

5 star info drop as usual!

 

[Dannyblueyes]

Its to keep those beds filled, the music is just the mindfuck part of the illusion!!

We already know how they keep the beds filled. Predatory contracts with the states. Lobbying for longer sentences through crime bills and three strikes legislations. Fighting against the decriminalization of marijuana and other adult behavior.

This is not some super secret covert operation. It's all being done out in the open. I don't know how we stop it, but I'm pretty sure that fighting record labels isn't the answer.

 

[roots69]

They charge 5 dollars a minute

Thats pure madness!!

We already know how they keep the beds filled. Predatory contracts with the states. Lobbying for longer sentences through crime bills and three strikes legislations. Fighting against the decriminalization of marijuana and other adult behavior.

This is not some super secret covert operation. It's all being done out in the open. I don't know how we stop it, but I'm pretty sure that fighting record labels isn't the answer.

The point is showing the connection. You might think these 6 media corporation have our best interest at heart, I dont!!

 

[roots69]

We also have to realize that they have occult imagery in the videos and spell cast in the lyrics to enchant the listeners with low vibrations. The masses are finally realizing how much witchcraft is used to make our people more susceptible to demon possession and mind control but that is for another thread.

5 star info drop as usual!

Right on, bruh!! Music and the television and digital signal(HDTV) is their subconscious mind attack.. Bruh, I was thinking about putting up sum information about the mkultra and entertainment combo, so folks can see and read sum evil and demonic stuff..

 

[cashwhisperer]

The people need to get smarter and make better decisions. Stop being sheep and use their cognition to the highest order. That's the only way.

 

[Black 454]

Right on, bruh!! Music and the television and digital signal(HDTV) is their subconscious mind attack.. Bruh, I was thinking about putting up sum information about the mkultra and entertainment combo, so folks can see and read sum evil and demonic stuff..
[/QUO

Right on, bruh!! Music and the television and digital signal(HDTV) is their subconscious mind attack.. Bruh, I was thinking about putting up sum information about the mkultra and entertainment combo, so folks can see and read sum evil and demonic stuff..

Please Do

 

[roots69]

The people need to get smarter and make better decisions. Stop being sheep and use their cognition to the highest order. That's the only way.

Right on, write on.. Your so right!!

 

[TheyCallMeBe]

Great thread

 

[Dannyblueyes]

Thats pure madness!!



The point is showing the connection. You might think these 6 media corporation have our best interest at heart, I dont!!

On that we agree.

At the very least they should be called out for owning stock in these corporations. It would be interesting to piece together information and figure out how much of their profits went towards promoting the prison industry.

Remind folks that entities like Warner Brothers also own AT&T which profits directly off of the American slave trade same way the general store did in the sharecropping days.

That said, I've already turned down street activists asking me to protest radio stations until they pull one artist or another because of their content. This narrative that "labels use these artists to encourage the youth to become delinquents" is just an update of the same bullshit Dolores c Tucker and Tipper Gore pushed in decades passed. It wasn't true then and it's not true now.

 

[woodchuck]

Thats pure madness!!

That's why they bought in. Not only did they buy in, but they made it to where you couldn't use ANY other company or service. This watchdog group found about 3 different alternatives for making collect calls with cheaper companies, and somehow, the 5.99/min company gotten written into the contracts.

 

[roots69]

That's why they bought in. Not only did they buy in, but they made it to where you couldn't ANY other company or service. This watchdog group found about 3 different alternatives for making collect calls with cheaper companies, and somehow, the 5.99/min company gotten written into the contracts.

Bruh, thats just fuckin wrong!! Theres too many heads to point at in this scam, too many!!! I just hope the Creator bless me with watching it burn!!!! Just saying

 

[shaddyvillethug]

That's why they bought in. Not only did they buy in, but they made it to where you couldn't use ANY other company or service. This watchdog group found about 3 different alternatives for making collect calls with cheaper companies, and somehow, the 5.99/min company gotten written into the contracts.

Wow I was talking shit

it’s a hot 6 mins?

I see why Jody wanted a block on the phone.

 

[woodchuck]

Wow I was talking shit

it’s a hot 6 mins?

I see why Jody wanted a block on the phone.

Shit, it might be higher now.

 

[shaddyvillethug]

Shit, it might be higher now.

 

[roots69]

Wow I was talking shit

it’s a hot 6 mins?

I see why Jody wanted a block on the phone.

Shit, it might be higher now.

Brothas that fuckin wrong!!

 

[shaddyvillethug]

Free da guys

 

[darth frosty]

I've owned and operated private prisons for over two decades. Private prisons are the single greatest real estate investment vehicle around. Here is what I have learned.



Owning a private prison gives an investor a recurring and predictable stream of high margin revenue. The government contracts are long-term in nature and very lucrative. I have managed to make over $35k per prisoner annually. Let’s breakdown a deal.



I purchased the Eagle Nest Facility in 2008. Total cost was $30 million with 25% down ($7.5 million). The facility has 1,200 beds implying a cost per bed of only $25,000 (building a new prison is in excess of $150k per bed).

I entered into a perpetual contract with the United States Marshall Services at $20 million per year with 5% escalators per year. In the first year we generated $5 million in free cash flow, a 67% cash on cash return.



Prison owners get paid per person. The more people the more money. Here are the economics per person:
- $100/day per person in revenues
- $25/day per person in variable cost
- $35/day per person fixed costs
- $40/day per person in straight margin



To increase my cash flow I spent a significant amount of money on lobbying efforts to win a judge who was hard on crime. This paid off by the end of year two. To pay me back the judge sent most young men (higher margin than older men) to my facility. Cash flow went up 3x.



By year four cash flows were $15 million at 95% occupancy. To maximize my investment I started to market the facility to outside investors. Halfway through year four we sold the facility to private equity for 10x cash flow or $150 million.



In four years I turned $7.5 million into a clean $150 million. I took this money and reinvested it into other prisons across southern states. Today I manage an investment portfolio of over $1.5 billion in prison real estate.



Tips:
– Get financing from individual investors
– Focus on states “hard on crime”
– Prisoners = money. You need crime to profit
– You can use prisoners to generate ancillary revenues at dirt cheap wages (incredibly high margin)

– Become best friends with judges



Private prisons are one of the most overlooked and undervalued real estate vehicles out there. With a little sweat equity and American entrepreneurship you can become extremely wealthy through this passive investment. Shoot me a follow if you want to learn more about investing



The greatest thing about this business is that I have never paid taxes on any of my millions because of the unique U.S. tax law of depreciation on real estate and 1031 gains. Did I mention that I received $35 million in PPP loans that were forgiven? Greatest business ever.



Tomorrow I’ll show you how to profit millions from Title 42 being removed so illegal immigrants can come through the border. The opportunity is huge and a chance of a lifetime.









I will make millions from Title 42 being removed in just under a month. Here is how I will do it.






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