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Stop For-Profit Prisons
Yesterday, the ACLU released Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration, an in-depth examination of the private prison industry.The report finds that mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group – the private prison industry – even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole.
While the nation’s unprecedented rate of imprisonment deprives individuals of freedom, wrests loved ones from their families, and drains the resources of governments, communities, and taxpayers, the private prison industry is expanding at an exponential rate, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits. Private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1,600 percent between 1990 and 2009.In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion in revenue.
As detailed in the report, this year advocates of for-profit prisons trotted out privatization schemes as a supposed answer to budgetary woes in numerous states, including Arizona, Florida, Ohio, and Louisiana. But the evidence that private prisons provide savings compared to publicly operated facilities is highly questionable, and certain studies point to worse conditions in for-profit facilities.
Now is the time for serious criminal justice reform, not privatization schemes. The private prison industry feeds off the mass incarceration problem and cannot be part of the solution. The only real way to cut prison spending is to cut the number of people we keep in prison.
To learn more, listen to this new podcast with private prisons expert Alex Friedmann, then go here to read more about the ACLU’s work to end reliance on private prisons.
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11 Comments so far
Show AllI've never understood how it can be held that private prisons are not a modern way of owning slaves.
The system has needed to be reformed for a long time, even when the prisons were only run by the state they weren't doing the job they claimed they were doing. The convicted went in one end and came out worse, today they might not come out at all, but that's not a very good solution; it's a final one.
"... today they might not come out at all ..."
there have been cases of judges getting kickbacks from the corporate incarcerators for handing out longer sentences. they also get bonuses for feeding docile, easy to manage felons into the system- i.e. pot smokers, drunk drivers and petty thieves.
From the ACLU study:
"Certain private prison companies employ shrewd tactics to obtain more and more government contracts to incarcerate prisoners. In February 2011, a jury convicted former Luzerene County, Pennsylvania Judge Mark Ciavarella of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy in connection with payments received from a private prison developer."
This practice is morally reprehensible and an argument can be made that when the state incarcerates a citizen, it assumes full responsibility for the health and welfare of that citizen. I would submit that the state cannot arbitrarily relinquish that responsibility to any third party; least of all, a private 'for profit' entity.
Are you really trying to be serious here? "Full responsibility for the health and welfare of that citizen?" Honestly, I don't think you have a clue what happens to people once that door's locked, health and welfare is a joke. No, I've never been to one but I know the jailers that work at them and I've seen the sickness they have and know what they'll allow one person to do to another, just so they can watch...it helps to keep them from being bored. We in the U S Krooked States incarcerates more of our population than any other while we let real criminals go loose and brag about it on TV for the world to see....health and welfare my ass! The people running Corrections Corporation of America and all their counterparts, should be locked up in their own jails by their own jailers and cast out to sea, never to be heard of again.
Are you really trying to be serious here? "Full responsibility for the health and welfare of that citizen?" Honestly, I don't think you have a clue what happens to people once that door's locked, health and welfare is a joke. No, I've never been to one but I know the jailers that work at them and I've seen the sickness they have and know what they'll allow one person to do to another, just so they can watch...it helps to keep them from being bored. We in the U S Krooked States incarcerates more of our population than any other while we let real criminals go loose and brag about it on TV for the world to see....health and welfare my ass! The people running Corrections Corporation of America and all their counterparts, should be locked up in their own jails by their own jailers and cast out to sea, never to be heard of again.
Somewhere I heard, or read the other day about cops talking about arresting people and having to "meet their quota." Does anyone know how these prisons are run? I know it takes a lot of money to run a prison, and so much a year per prisoner. Do they have share holders, or what? I only learned about prisons being privatized this year sometime and was really shocked by it.
What's truly perverse is that it creates a monetary incentive among corporate owners _ and legislators they support _ to have ~more~ crime, thus making society less safe. There's your free market.
Everything is wrong about privatising prisons. In a public prison the motivation is to rehabilitate and return the detainee to useful status. In a private prison, the motivation is to maximise profit. Therefore the system tends to maximise convictions and minimize releases. Plus cheaping up on food, medical care and educational programs. We've seen this at work recently, where a juvenile home was caught bribing a judge to convict nonviolent "offenders', many of them innocuous, detaining them for indefinite terms inside.
It's a growth industry. This past year ICE was given a quota of 400,000 undocumented aliens to fill their own gulag system-- which was the same approach used by Joe Stalin when he commanded the NKVD to detain a set number of supposed "kulaks" in the 1930s. Bad then, and bad now. But ICE was able to fulfill their quota.
With a proper business plan for expansion, we should be able to create Prison Planet right here in the US of A. And make a pretty penny while we're at it.
Another brilliant idea. We could farm out the detainees as convict labor to corporations. They're not subject to labor laws or minimum wages, and can replace paid labor in our fields and factories.
All nice and legal... as soon as we get another law or two passed. BTW state prison systems already employ inmates in labor programs, often paying well under a dollar an hour. And they're relatively benign.