November, 02 2011, 12:35pm EDT
New ACLU Report Documents Destructive Impact of Prison Privatization
Private Prison Industry Feeds on Nation’s Crippling Addiction to Incarceration While Reaping Multi-Billion Dollar Revenues
WASHINGTON
The American Civil Liberties Union today released a new report providing the first comprehensive analysis of the destructive impact of prison privatization.
The report, "Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration," traces the rise of the for-profit prison industry over the past three decades and shows how private prison companies have capitalized on the nation's addiction to incarceration to achieve gigantic profits. All the while, the report shows, mass incarceration wreaks havoc on communities by unnecessarily depriving individuals of their liberty, draining government resources and bringing little or no benefit to public safety.
"Our nation's reliance on mass incarceration has bankrupted government budgets, torn families and communities apart, disproportionately impacted people of color, and provided no benefit to public safety," said David Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project and the author of the report. "But it has been a bonanza for the private prison industry, which rakes in billions of dollars a year and dishes out multi-million dollar compensation packages to its top executives. For-profit prison companies are a barrier to the kind of criminal justice reform that is desperately needed in America."
Spurred by criminal laws that impose needlessly steep sentences - especially for low-level, non-violent offenders - and curtail rehabilitation opportunities, the United States today imprisons more people than any other nation in the world. The crippling cost of incarcerating increasing numbers of Americans has saddled government budgets with rising debt and exacerbated the current fiscal crisis confronting states across the nation. Yet the two largest private prison companies alone obtained nearly $3 billion in revenue in 2010.
While evidence that privatization saves taxpayers money is mixed at best, for-profit prison advocates continue to trot out privatization schemes as a supposed answer to budgetary woes confronting state governments.
* Arizona has announced plans to award 5,000 additional prison beds to private contractors despite a recent statement by the state's auditor general that for-profit imprisonment in Arizona may cost more than incarceration in publicly operated facilities.
* Florida has attempted to increase its reliance on private prisons in a misguided attempt to reign in prisons costs despite concerns that doing so could impede more serious and fundamental changes, such as sentencing reform.
* The Louisiana legislature last year narrowly defeated a proposal pushed by Gov. Bobby Jindal to sell off three state prisons to private companies after state legislators expressed deep concerns about doing so.
* Immigration and Customs Enforcement intends to create a new network of massive immigration detention centers, managed largely by private companies, even as allegations of sexual abuse in private facilities continue to surface. In August 2011, a security officer employed by a private prison company pled guilty to sexual abuse of a female detainee; in the following month another employee of a private prison company pled guilty to similar crimes.
Empirical studies may also show a heightened level of violence against prisoners in privately run institutions, a possible reflection of the higher rate of staff turnover in private prisons, which can result in inexperienced guards walking the tiers.
But despite serious questions about the wisdom of privatizing prison systems, some members of the for-profit prison industry are using shrewd tactics, including extensive lobbying, lavish campaign contributions and efforts to control information, to garner more and more government contracts and lock up ever-increasing numbers of people.
"It is imperative that we halt the expansion of for-profit incarceration," said Shapiro. "The private prison industry helped create, and continues to feed off, the social ill of mass incarceration. Private prisons cannot be part of the solution - economic or ethical - to our nation's addiction to incarceration."
A copy of the report is available online at: www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/banking-bondage-private-prisons-and-mass-incarceration
The American Civil Liberties Union was founded in 1920 and is our nation's guardian of liberty. The ACLU works in the courts, legislatures and communities to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to all people in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States.
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Amid Spying Fight, House Passes Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act
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While applauding the U.S. House of Representatives' bipartisan passage of a bill to ensure that "law enforcement and intelligence agencies can't do an end-run around the Constitution by buying information from data brokers" on Wednesday, privacy advocates highlighted that Congress is trying to extend and expand a long-abused government spying program.
The House voted 219-199 for Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act (FANFSA), which won support from 96 Democrats and 123 Republicans, including the lead sponsor, Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio). Named for the constitutional amendment that protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, H.R. 4639 would close what campaigners call the data broker loophole.
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Wednesday's vote followed the House sending the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act to the Senate. H.R. 7888 would reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which allows for warrantless spying on noncitizens abroad but also sweeps up Americans' data.
The House notably included an amendment forcing a wide range of individuals and businesses to cooperate with government spying operations but rejected an amendment that would have added a warrant requirement to the bill, which the Senate could vote on as soon as Thursday.
Noting those decisions on the FISA reauthorization legislation, Ruddock stressed that "today's vote is a victory but follows a recent loss and ongoing threat as that Section 702 bill moves to the Senate this week too."
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Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's Project on Surveillance Oversight, also praised the House's FANFSA passage on Wednesday.
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Kia Hamadanchy, senior policy counsel at ACLU, similarly said Wednesday that "the bipartisan passage of this bill is a flashing warning sign to the government that if it wants our data, it must get a warrant."
Hamadanchy added that "we hope this vote puts a fire under the Senate to protect their constituents and rein in the government's warrantless surveillance of Americans, once and for all."
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While claiming that President Joe Biden backs "Palestinian aspirations for statehood," one of the cables asserts that "it remains the U.S. view that the most expeditious path toward a political horizon for the Palestinian people is in the context of a normalization agreement between Israel and its neighbors."
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The U.S. argument essentially is that the U.N. should not create an independent Palestinian state by fiat—even though that's precisely how the world body voted in 1947 to establish the modern state of Israel.
The renewed push for Palestine's U.N. membership comes as Israel wages a genocidal war on the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian Authority, which hasn't controlled Gaza for nearly two decades, rejected the Biden administration's requests to hold off on seeking full membership.
"We wanted the U.S. to provide a substantive alternative to U.N. recognition. They didn't," one unnamed Palestinian official toldAxios on Wednesday. "We believe full membership in the U.N. for Palestine is way overdue. We have waited more than 12 years since our initial request."
As The Intercept's Ken Klippenstein and Daniel Boguslaw noted:
Since 2011, the U.N. Security Council has rejected the Palestinian Authority's request for full member status. On April 2, the Palestinian Observer Mission to the U.N. requested that the council once again take up consideration of its membership application. According to the first State Department cable, U.N. meetings since the beginning of April suggest that Algeria, China, Guyana, Mozambique, Russia, Slovenia, Sierra Leone, and Malta support granting Palestine full membership to the U.N. It also says that France, Japan, and Korea are undecided, while the United Kingdom will likely abstain from a vote.
Along with the United States, China, France, Russia, and the United Kingdom are permanent members of the UNSC, so they also have veto power.
Ahead of Thursday's planned vote, Spain has been doing its own lobbying in Europe to build greater support for Palestinian statehood. At a joint Tuesday press conference with Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, Slovenian Prime Minister Robert Golob said the question is "when, not if, but when is the best moment to recognize Palestine."
Belgium—which is seeking economic sanctions against Israel in response to its genocidal war on Gaza—is expected to join Spain's push for Palestinian statehood after the country's European Union presidency expires in June.
Currently, 139 of the U.N.'s 193 member states recognize Palestine as an independent state.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who has also claimed to support a so-called "two-state solution"—has alternately boasted about thwarting Palestinian statehood.
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PI calls it an "illicit network undermining democracy around the world."
"Today is a mask-off moment for the Reactionary International and the parties, politicians, judges, journalists, foundations, think tanks, tech platforms, NGOs, activists, financiers, and entrepreneurs that comprise it," PI said.
"After a year of preparation, we finally open the doors to our new research consortium, exposing the global network of reactionary forces that corrode our democracies, destroy our planet, and drive us closer to world war," the group added.
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Yanis Varoufakis, a PI member and secretary-general of the left-wing Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, called the database "a treasure chest of well-researched reports on how the reactionaries of the world unite."
PI invites the public to contribute to the database.
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