CHECK IT-Author Shows Compelling Connection: Companies that Promote Violent Music Also Own Private Prisons

Author Shows Compelling Connection: Companies that Promote Violent Music Also Own Private Prisons

When you listen to hip-hop music on the radio, you are likely to hear a message that promotes criminal behavior. The artist might glorify a life of selling drugs, then talk about doing drugs. After that, he might talk about robbing, killing and quite a few other things that can land a young person in prison. Young black kids idolize hip-hop artists, who are often the only black media figures that they see besides athletes.

By the time some of these lost youth hit their teenage years, they may have been taken in by the culture. The boys are sagging their pants, maybe where corn rows like their favorite artist. Their slang matches and changes with the artists on the radio, and some of them even carry weapons or sell drugs just like their idols. Pretty soon, many of them are carted off to prison.

On the site, RapRehab.com, the author draws a very interesting connection between the companies that make prisons and those that make music. The author first speaks about a deal that the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) offere to 48 states. The company said that they would buy their prisons with one requirement: That there be a 90% guaranteed occupancy rate. This means that states were going to be expected to do whatever is necessary to ensure that their prisons remain full.

He also points to an anonymous email was sent out to various members of the music and publishing industries where an alleged former executive spoke to a plan in the early 1990s to mass produce violent music to encourage criminal behavior among young black men. While this meeting can’t be confirmed, the music on the radio seems to match the exact influences that the author mentioned in the letter. What also might add some credibility to the author’s assertion is the interesting overlap of ownership between prison companies and media companies.

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 ofEntertainment 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.
Here is where the author makes an even more compelling connection. He then explains that companies like Vanguard Group own major stakes of prison companies and media companies at the same time. Vanguard, for example, is the largest stakeholder in the Corrections Corporation of America, and also holds massive stakes media giants as well. According to the author (who cites Bloomberg), Vanguard is the third largest shareholder in both Viacom and Time Warner. Finally, Vanguard is the third-largest shareholder in the GEO group, the second largest prison holding company to CCA.

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.
Adding fuel to the fire, the author notes that the CCA and GEO have long lobbied Congressmen to push for stricter laws in order to fill their prisons. They’ve pushed for the “Truth in Sentencing” and “Three-strikes” laws, as well as other initiatives that have led to longer periods of incarceration for inmates.

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.”
The connections made by the author cannot be ignored. If you’d like to read more on this matter, check out this link.

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