Chris Hedges: The Business of Mass Incarceration - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Prisoners often work inside jails and prisons for nothing or at most earn a dollar an hour. The court system has been gutted to deny the poor adequate legal representation. Draconian drug laws send nonviolent offenders to jail for staggering periods of time. Our prisons routinely use solitary confinement, forms of humiliation and physical abuse to keep prisoners broken and compliant, methods that international human rights organizations have long defined as torture. Individuals and corporations that profit from prisons in the United States perpetuate a form of neoslavery.

Chris Hedges: The Business of Mass Incarceration - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Chris Hedges: Mind Rape and the Christian Right - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Noel Lyons, a member of the U.S. Ski Team from 1976 to 1981 and once one of the country’s top professional skiers, found herself in a Vail, Colo., hospital in the spring of 2010 after another round of binge drinking. “I had given up on myself,” she would say later. Her boyfriend and sister decided she needed rehabilitative help. Because their resources were limited, they turned to the free Total Freedom Program, a Florida ministry for women and men that identifies itself as Christian.

Chris Hedges: Mind Rape and the Christian Right - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Chris Hedges: Locking Out the Voices of Dissent - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

The security and surveillance state, after crushing the Occupy movement and eradicating its encampments, has mounted a relentless and largely clandestine campaign to deny public space to any group or movement that might spawn another popular uprising. The legal system has been grotesquely deformed in most cities to, in essence, shut public space to protesters, eradicating our right to free speech and peaceful assembly.


Chris Hedges: Locking Out the Voices of Dissent - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

Chris Hedges: We Are All Aboard the Pequod - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig

The most prescient portrait of the American character and our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick.” Melville makes our murderous obsessions, our hubris, violent impulses, moral weakness and inevitable self-destruction visible in his chronicle of a whaling voyage. He is our foremost oracle. He is to us what William Shakespeare was to Elizabethan England or Fyodor Dostoyevsky to czarist Russia.

Chris Hedges: We Are All Aboard the Pequod - Chris Hedges' Columns - Truthdig