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lucy tiven internet identity
get @ me on twitter, facebook,
or email Lucy.Tiven@gmail.com • this is where you say something to me
fun facts
get @ me on twitter, facebook,
or email Lucy.Tiven@gmail.com • this is where you say something to me
fun facts
Who’s Getting Rich Off the Prison-Industrial Complex?
You likely already know how overcrowded and abusive the US prison system is, and you probably are also aware that the US has more people in prison than even China or Russia. In this age of privatization, of course, it’s also not surprising that many of the detention centers are not actually operated by the government, but by for-profit companies. So clearly, some people are making lots and lots of money off the booming business of keeping human beings in cages.
But who are these people?
Using NASDAQ data, I looked through the long list of investors in Corrections Corporation of America andGEO Group, the two biggest corporations that operate detention centers in the US, to find out who was cashing in the most on prisons. When we say “prison-industrial complex,” this is who we’re talking about.
Henri Wedell
The individual who’s invested the most in private prisons is Henri Wedell, who started serving on CCA’s board of directors in 2000, when the company was struggling with scandals related to prisoner abuse and mismanagement. He now owns more than 650,000 shares in the company, which is far more successful these days. Those shares are worth more than $25 million.I called Wedell to ask him what it was like to make a fortune from the incarceration of others, and whether it bothered him to profit off a system that puts more people in prison than any other country in the world.
“America is the freest country in the world,” he told me. “America allows more freedom than any other country in the world, much more than Russia and a whole lot more than Scandinavia, where they really aren’t free. So offering all this freedom to society, there’ll be a certain number of people, more in this country than elsewhere, who take advantage of that freedom, abuse it, and end up in prison. That happens because we are so free in this country.”
Presumably, when he’s referring to all the freedom Americans have, he’s not including the 80,000 inmates in 60 prisons operated by CCA.
Anonymous asked: you occupy some cool spot between comedy and femininity. its not that every one of your poems is both funny and delicate or one is funny and the other is delicate. sometimes they make me lol and break my heart at the same time.... thats the best. I think you are absolutely brave
thank you! thats really wonderful of you to say. i’m trying being very honest all the time
its not really an easy thing but i think it’s important
person
it is possible to be a person. to be a person is to walk in the dark with other people, sometimes holding them and other times not, and sometimes you are seeing a passing taxi. not everyone sees it but some people. it is okay to talk about it but dont talk about it too much. and maybe you see taxis passing intermittently all your life or maybe you never see a taxi or think about taxis.
or maybe you never see one but you are always looking. but some people never even think about taxis and you shouldnt try to show them too hard i think. and some people see one taxi and spend the rest of their life thinking about that taxi and trying to catch up with it. but i think what you are supposed to do is just watch the taxis as carefully as you can when they are passing by you, look into them. they are filled with soft light and they are all a bit different. some of them move slowly like a horse with a bad leg. some of them are small. and each time one passes you don’t ignore it but when it goes it goes and you let it go. at least i think thats what you should do. if you should do anything at all
I felt inspired by reading microscenes and other short prose but ended up just writing this sort of self-obsessed diary entry.
My first friend lived in an apartment at the other end of the second floor. They were more Jewish than us and my parents said he screamed a lot during his briss. They shook their heads disapprovingly the year he dressed up as a homeless man for Halloween, wheeling a shopping cart down the hall. Before I knew about my mother’s mastectomy or thought hard about the way her breast looked when she got out of the shower, he told me there was a woman in our building with three nipples. He told me I had become surprisingly attractive when he friended me on the Internet last year. Those were not his words, which I forget and deleted because I found them embarrassing. I am conscious of my own vanity and insecure about different parts of my face and body than I used to be. With or without trying to, I sometimes slightly suck in my cheeks when someone is taking a picture. I used to have big breasts but I don’t anymore, and I feel positively about my nose. If I had a more well defined waist, I would feel more comfortable with the ideal of an “hourglass” figure, thinking of someone like Bettie Page, whose weight I googled once and got 128. This is a similar weight I tell people about myself and is probably a lie. Ryan has become much larger than he was as a child, but in a way that I am sure is acceptable to many regular women. I remember when his sister came home once with a tongue ring. Then, and for a long time after, she was the oldest person I knew who wasn’t an adult. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I run a shallow bath and sit down picking at the scabs and lacerations on my legs until they become open wounds again. Sometimes I think about the car that paused in front of my house once. “Is this a safe neighborhood?” The man asked twice, rolling down the top of his convertible. I ran inside. It was two am. He seemed very bad. I wonder if he wanted to kill me or what would have happened. I feel self-conscious about using amphetamines to enjoy myself, produce art, feel positively towards other people and execute various mechanisms of daily life that I find otherwise taxing. I feel self-conscious about almost every aspect of my life, of which that is only one, but does everyone? Outside, it is partly warm. It is the person I used to love’s twenty-forth birthday. This may be very boring. I am thinking about the way other peoples lives come loose from your own: how sometimes it is very abrupt but usually it is just what happens gradually, even imperceptibly over time. I like how when Kenneth Koch says the word “time” it never sounds ridiculous or falls flat, though I am often scared by his poems, which are filled with so many people and kinds of life that I do not know how to pursue or replicate in my own.
All I want for my birthday is the last laugh
I think about dressing like a Pre-Raphaelite in secret each morning
Had a dream last night about “going ham” with a tattoo gun and awoke relieved
Earlier this week, I spilled beer on my laptop and it turned off for fifteen minutes and then came back to life
At dinner I wrote a poem about James
Here is the poem
“We both are afraid of peas”
The poem is called “James”
Nick tried to steal the poem but he didn’t remember all the words
I love imagining, all of the time, that I just awoke relieved
Can you do that? What do you remember?
I remember a pea I saw in the road once
and thought about death
Here is how to feel better. I am feeling better already
