More Prisons

Keeping on the prison subject, I came across this today on Democracy Now!:

In other news, the State Department quietly announced this week it has requested $100 million dollars for Iraqi reconstruction – all of it for prisons. The Bush administration initially promised $20 billion dollars to reconstruct Iraqi infrastructure. But much of the money has been diverted to security. State Department Iraq coordinator James Jeffrey said the $100 million dollar prison project was the lone new reconstruction effort the US government will undertake over the next year.

In fact, according to the Washington Post, “roughly half of the money was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq’s criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein”.

So money originally earmarked for the rebuilding of “electrical, education, water, sewage, sanitation and oil networks” in Iraq is now being used to build prisons instead.