• Yet Shi knows well the perils of speaking her mind in China, where undercover police and mercenary thugs wait to pounce. She has twice been snatched off the street, held incommunicado on the assumption that she would eventually abandon her cause and go home.
• Shi is a victim of the secretive realm of “black jails” — unlawful detention facilities that have sprung up across China to discourage persistent petitioners considered pests by government officials.
• Each year millions of rural Chinese bring their problems to functionaries in Beijing and other cities. Yet very few of their cases are ever resolved, and most end up in legal limbo, activists say.
• But the torrent of cases clogs the civil system, and puts political pressure on administrators to settle them. Activists say lower-level officials have responded with organized kidnappings in which petitioners — many plucked from the streets outside government offices — are held in clandestine jails in state-owned hotels, nursing homes and psychiatric centers.
• The theory: You can’t lodge a complaint if you don’t show up.
• “The Chinese petitioning system is completely broken,” said Phelim Kine, an Asia researcher for New York-based Human Rights Watch. “And the government is outsourcing its problems to a thuggish black industry.”
• Since 2003, the illegal jail network has grown as top Communist Party officials looked the other way, and thousands of petitioners disappeared.
• After at first denying the jails’ existence, the Chinese government recently acknowledged the problem. An article in the December issue of Outlook magazine, which is owned by the official New China News Agency, cited at least 73 black jails in Beijing alone.
• The article says an estimated 10,000 people at a time have been detained in hundreds of jails.
• The black-jail system reportedly sprang up years ago, after the government abolished another system that allowed officials to jail petitioners they considered threats.
• Under the current for-profit system, private jail operators receive $22 to $44 a day per person, increasing the incentive to prolong captivity, according to the Human Rights Watch report. The fees are paid by local officials.

(And to “save” education CA Governor Schwarzenegger wants to turn prisons from state control over to privately run institutions…setting conditions for CA and then nation-wide black jails? This is not to say things aren’t bad enough when you are in the big house.)