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Over 2.4 million prisoners are held in federal and state facilities, local jails, Indian, juvenile, and military ones, US territories, and numbers held by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), half for nonviolent offenses, many for political activism, the Truth & Justice Foundation (the National Innocence Project) estimating up to 15% wrongfully convicted overall.
Using modern-day slave labor, the Left Business Observer reports that American prisons produce 100% of US military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens." They also supply 98% of equipment assembly services, 93% of paints and paintbrushes, 92% of stove assemblies, 46% of body armor, 36% of home appliances, 30% of headphones, microphones and speakers, 21% of office furniture, and much more.
Captives in America's gulag, political and other prisoners have languished for decades, under cruel and inhumane conditions. Some die their. Others rot, endure years of solitary confinement, poor medical care, other forms of abuse, and perfunctory parole hearings denying their right to justice.
America's Longstanding Political Repression Agenda
COINTELPRO targeted political activists, J. Edgar Hoover's illegal counterintelligence program to neutralize political dissidents, including communists; anti-war, human and civil rights activists; the American Indian Movement; Black Panther Party; Puerto Rican nationalists; the Chicano Movement; environmentalists, and others challenging state authority - "threats" to "domestic tranquility" for supporting equity and justice, the rule of law, and right over wrong. Today they're called "terrorists."
Yale Law Professor/constitutional scholar Thomas I. Emerson (1908 - 1981) expressed outrage saying:
"The FBI jeopardizes the whole system of free expression which is the cornerstone of our society (raising) the specter of a police state....In essence, the FBI conceives of itself as an instrument to prevent radical social change in America....The Bureau's view of its function leads it beyond data collection into political warfare," protecting privilege from beneficial social change, denying due process and judicial fairness to society's most vulnerable, easy pickings for America's criminal injustice system.
Definitions of Political Prisoners
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