Let's Get Honest! Absolutely Uncommon Analysis of Family & Conciliation Courts' Operations, Practices, & History

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Posts Tagged ‘slave labor through prisons

If Dog-Fighting, Cock-Fighting, and Exploiting Prisoners as Gladiators (resulting in shooting deaths for some, and “hundreds of shootings,” not to mention fight-related injuries for others) is “BAD,” then why isn’t also Federal (PRWORA-based) and State (Family Courts) Policy with similarly staged, high-stakes conflicts — rigged for intended outcomes, and obviously potentially lethal for the combatants and, periodically, bystanders — on a far larger stage (national, and in some high-profile cases, international), also involving known criminally violent** fathers and their children’s mothers, AND young children of all ages?  [Published Dec. 17, 2017]

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The “parent post” also dealt in part with guns and groups seeking to reduce death by gun violence. I guess they just weren’t thinking in terms of, “of prisoners, by prison guards…” Its title:

The Money Maze: Following Multi-State, Multi-Candidate PACs + Super-PACs through Rapid Formation and NameChanges. (Giffords, ARS PAC + Lawyer Steve ‘Hurricane’ Mostyn (1971-Nov. 2017). (Case-sensitive, WordPress-generated shortlink ends “-87w”)  (Started Dec. 4, 2017 as a follow-up to my Dec. 3 “NRA (not) on the Record”**  preface to upcoming “Robin Hood Foundation” (or “RHF”) *** posts)

This is a short (ca. 6,700 words or so) aside to that post, and a link to return to the parent post above is provided again at the bottom. There may be some repetition as I added documentation and examples to the text before publishing.

[Post-publication: An extended footnote adds about 4,000 words referencing BWJP, the Wellstone promotion of supervised visitation (both quotes and news articles, as is well-known this progressive Senator, his wife, his daughter, three staff and two pilots were killed suddenly — about 15 years ago — during a small plane crash.  He’d been on the way to debate his opponent for an anticipated competitive fight for his third term.  However, an identifiable incorporation of acceptance for continued, but modified (i.e. “supervised”) exchanges in passive acceptance (and silent assent to AFCC policies while presenting at their 2000 conference on alienation, access and attachment with special emphasis on the first issues) effectively “headed off at the pass: any open, informed discussion on another possibility which better preserved safety — NO forced contact where abuse has been identified. By separating dangerous from not-dangerous parenting situations, this also would clear the path for fairer handling of non-abusive fathers’ issues.]

It originates in making references of these topics as analogies for the situation I am most deeply concerned about, the macro-economic, system-wide practice of the same power blocs setting up artificial, high-stakes and sometimes life-and-death conflicts especially between men and women overall, and between individual men and women who are mothers and fathers of children in common, while demanding the public fund both sides (the public as taxpayers and through other service consumption of governmental business enterprises, including accessing the courts, registering vehicles yearly, marriage licenses even, continues to pay “up front”)

Many men and women can handle themselves without hurting or destroying each other economically or physically, and not all men and women, on divorcing, use their children as pawns or take them as hostages.  But WHEN some do, it seems to be “game time” for others. It’s “show time.”  All can be manipulated, and the longer the conflict goes on, the higher the bills,  the more civil and legal rights concessions are demanded of them (and the larger public), the higher the stakes and the greater the risks of those personally involved — yet these concessions are often described as the intended methodologies to change the outcome.


But doing so directly is contrary to our self-impressions of the country and view that we have a possibly functional system of laws and courts.  The influences are from the sidelines, from outside specific jurisdiction of family courts involved, and these influences come from Congress and the White House (which expends funding allocated to it by Congress, i.e., that budget) and are applied through, as the title above says, a real “money maze” — sometimes direct to the states, sometimes direct to nonprofits within the state but involved in the courts, and sometimes otherwise.


That’s why I say the game is “rigged.”  It’s not a level playing field, and its rules can be altered year to year, and situation to situation — and that’s the way some people like it.  Rather than SETTLING the standards by the law, with a preference throughout of NOT prioritizing privilege for violators of penal codes when there are two parents and one is a violator and the other, not.

Rather than just having fair laws and enforcing them fairly.

We (so to speak) also already exploit at least federal prisoners for slave labor, through FPI (Federal Prison Industries) a.k.a.  Unicor (and have since the 1930s), which is also referenced here near the bottom, but not in this post’s title, which reads:

QUESTION:  What’s bad when found to have occurred in secret, in confined and closed quarters from which combatants cannot escape, and involving animals (whether dogs or roosters with spurs) or when it happens in prisons with caged men, and in ALL of the above resulting in serious injury and sometimes death, not to mention being “exploitation, defined,” ….

LA times 4/24/2000, by Staff writer Max Arax, “Guards on Trial in Corcoran Shootings blame Prisoners

…Pointing the finger at a vast group of prisoners with no faces or voices in the federal courtroom, the defense is using the government’s own witnesses to put Corcoran’s violent culture on trial. Sounding at times like prosecutors themselves, attorneys for the eight guards are also blaming official state policy handed down from Sacramento for the thousands of fights between inmates and the hundreds of shootings by guards during a six-year reign of terror at the San Joaquin Valley prison.

Beginning in 1989, defense attorneys contend, the state’s integrated yard and shooting policies required guards to mix rival inmates from different street gangs and then to fire at them with deadly force if they refused to stop fighting.

why is the same basic routine under  “family-friendly policy,” and when the forced interaction with known dangerous persons frequently happens WITHOUT armed guards or trained personnel nearby but WITH women and children, boys or girls nearby — in fact sometimes without even any authority supervising the exchange, but the exchange is still court-ordered, forced after reasons for separation or requested protection are on record as domestic violence or child abuse somehow justified as moral, ethical, and as “American” as (well, what should we say, truthfully — as American as slavery? or as indentured servitude based, this season, meaning, this past half-century minimum, on parent gender?)?
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Chicago/Princeton/Harvard Economics Smart (Professor Edward Glaeser), but with an Unfortunately Large Blind Spot

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A recent comment on this post (not actually on the main subject matter, but nevertheless…) got me looking at it again.  Now I have a temporary problem, called one post, and 16,000 words.

About a year and a half ago (as of this 2014 update), in October, 2012, I wrote:

From Oxford to Harvard, to D.C. — Healing, Fueling, Feeding (and Vaccinating) the World

I’ve become more and more interested in corporate influence on government agencies, such as HHS and HUD (and DOJ) after coming to better understand the court system, and the nonprofit factors.  You can only look at things for so long before the lights start to go on, with or without university exposure and indoctrination in how to.  The difference between doing this individually and the university experience is, obviously, connections, associations, and the dynamic of group momentum which comes from simply rubbing shoulders with leadership.

On the other hand, we now have a problem where leadereship isn’t very interested in rubbing shoulders with followers.  I’m wondering at what point did the concept of participatory and representative government take an exit stage-left?  That answer may be never found precisely — but I WILL say it was many decades ago and that it was, sheds light on whether we should lock-step (with occasional and periodic “Disruptive innovations”) continue marching towards the future unaware of whether its values systems are leading away from or towards things, historically, we are supposed to consider unethical and bad:  Slavery, #1, and Genocide, #2.


Essentially I am talking back to the habit of hero worship of capitalist adventures (such as cities represent) and the Harvard Global Model of Governance (Harvard has of course Oxford Connections, and both institutions tend to mirror each others practices, as well as share professors and personnel). I also have a lot to say bout the concept of “Innovations” when it displays itself in innovative justice programs whose backers just happen to be some of THE major foundations influencing American government today. I want people to consider (REconsider) just how DID the federal government become so powerful, and at what point did we consent to becoming its resource, and not it, individual state’s servant, with citizens/residents of those states being able to actually deal with their state-jurisdiction political leaders and expect to be heard past the many public/private innovation, real estate development, court-transformation, and elite university think-tank models of ….how the world should be?

At any rate, this got out of hand, turning a July 2013 post into a March 2014 monstrosity which, however, does have the material for a new post along my current lines of understanding.


I haven’t had success at turning published posts back into “Draft” so (embarrassing as it is), this is now a post in transition, whose middle needs to be extracted and turned into a new post.  However, if you’re still up for it, the material is good, and good to know about.

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