A Texas prisoner accused of killing 22 older women over two years, preying on them so he could steal jewelry and other valuables, was slain Tuesday by his cellmate while serving a life sentence, prison officials said.
Billy Chemirmir, 50, who was convicted last year in the slayings of two women, was found dead in his cell at a prison in rural East Texas, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesperson Hannah Haney said. He was killed by his cellmate who was also serving a prison sentence for murder, according to Haney.
Chemirmir’s death comes about two weeks after Texas’ 100 prisons were placed on a rare statewide lockdown because of a rise in the number of killings inside the facilities, which prisons officials have said were related to drugs.
Haney did not release the name of the cellmate, how Chemirmir was killed or what may have led to the slaying.
Given the culture that surrounds prisoners, this isn’t surprising at all.
The prisons themselves are just for profit with zero interest in rehabilitation or otherwise turning those in their custody into productive members of society. Yes, there are programs to teach skills or education to prisoners available, but in almost all cases these are either operated by outside organizations and thus don’t cost the prison any money, or completing the program lets the prison take advantage of any certification or qualification earned, generating more revenue for the prison.
Prisons intentionally make people live in the lowest quality of life possible by law, and would reduce the conditions further to save money were there not laws to prevent that. They justify this because prisoners are being punished, even when that mentality is proven wrong time and time again, specifically in how wealthy or influential prisoners are allowed to make improvements to their own personal living conditions, rather than having to live like the general (poorer) population of the system.
Don’t ever fool yourself into thinking US prisoners care one bit about a prisoner’s security or safety, they would put all the prisoners into medicated comas and hang them up on meat racks if the law allowed it and it was cheaper than shoving them in cells. As long as they get paid for every day they hold a prisoner they don’t care about any other aspect that doesn’t cost them money to ignore. They only care about prisoners killing other prisoners because the state won’t pay them to hold a dead body.
As a non American, what is the concept of for profit prisons?
Same thing as for profit healthcare.
Taking a service of a civilized society, gutting it od everything that gives it value and charging obsense amounts of money for it.
Privatized anything just ende up being some corporation making somethint worse for money
Even worst… For profit prison companies go to poor towns, and promise jobs. And you need prisoners to have security jobs.
So you have this feedback loop where police arrest people and the courts give them prison sentences because well, we got a nice fancy empty prison and the town needs those jobs.
They exist to generate profit from suffering. That’s it.
The lemmy circle jerk is real when it comes to law enforcement and capitalism hate.
The idea is that rather than the government running prisons at a loss, private companies run the prisons, and the jobs the prisoners do make a profit for the prison’s owners. The imprisonment itself just constitutes an expense.
It kind of makes sense on paper (“well they broke the law why are we paying all this money to support their lives!??”), but it’s a bad idea in practice as it creates the wrong incentives. You end up with entities that desire more people in prisons because that’s how they grow their profit margins… and that obviously comes with some sketchy implications (e.g. lobbying for more non-violent offenders to get jail time, longer sentences, etc).