Shipping Prisoners Out of Sight

By: Matt Kelley
Change.Org
More bad news from California's prisons: the state has inked a deal with the Corrections Corporation of America to ship another 2,336 to private facilities outside of the state. California is making an enormous mistake by shipping prisoners far from their families and support networks and replacing them in crowded prisons with new bodies. Cowardly politicians are afraid to make sensible moves on sentencing and parole because they're afraid of the soft-on-crime label, and the public either follows the tough-on-crime propaganda or fails to give the issue serious thought. The result: prisoners remain invisible, prisons remain overcrowded and the system stays in crisis.

Immigrant Jail Tests U.S. View of Legal Access

New York Times
By: Nina Bernstein
A startling petition arrived at a New York City Bar Association in October 2008. Signed by 100 men, all locked up without criminal charges in the middle of Manhattan. The little-known detention center in Greenwich Village,on the fourth floor, reopened last year. Daniel Miller, a former detainee at the Varick Street Center, complained of abuses there. "These people have no rules," he said. In vivid if flawed English, it described cramped, filthy quarters where dire medical needs were ignored and hungry prisoners were put to work for $1 dollar a day.

Arizona May Put State Prisons in Private Hands

New York Times
Jennifer Steinhauer
One of the newest residents on Arizona's death row, a convicted serial killer named Dale Hausner, poked his head up from his television to look at several visitors strolling by, each of whom wore face masks and vests to protect against the sharp homemade objects that often are propelled from the cells of the condemned. It is a dangerous place to patrol, and Arizona spends $4.7 million each year to house inmates like Mr. Hausner in a super-maximum-security prison. But in a first in the criminal justice world, the state's death row inmates could become the responsibility of a private company.

Former Willacy DA Guerra files lawsuit

Valley Central.Com
By: Sergio Chapa
Former Willacy County District Attorney Juan Angel Guerra has filed a federal law suit against Texas State Senator Eddie Lucio Jr. and 28 others. The former district attorney alleges that Lucio and the others used their positions to derail investigation into private prisons in Willacy County.

Crowley County prison operator to pay $1.3 million in settling sex-harassment lawsuit

The Denver Post
By: Felisa Cardona

Private prison reaches $1.3M settlement with EEOC

Denver
Associated Press

OUR VIEW: Profit prisons die in recession

Gazette.Com
Colorado Springs, The Gazette
The economic drain of for-profit cages
The prisoner is to a private prison corporation what a broken window is to a glazier: a source of cash. What’s good for the glazier is not good for society. What’s good for the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest prison business in the country, is not good for society. Anyone involved in the criminal justice system should be in the business of reducing crime, and thus the prison population. We must reward government employees for finding ways to reduce recidivism by reforming those prisoners capable of reform. Private prison investors, however, receive no reward unless crime and recidivism flourish. Prudential Securities acknowledged this in a report to investors in the 1990s, when Corrections Corporation of America was growing aggressively: “It takes time to bring inmate population levels up to where they cover costs,” the report sated. “Low occupancy is a drag on profits... company earnings would be strong if CCA succeeded in ramping up population levels in its new facilities at an acceptable rate.”

A Missed Opportunity: Economic Recovery Should Start With the Prisons

By Zachary Norris,
Books Not Bars Director at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights
California is facing its worst fiscal crisis in decades, and a 3-judge federal panel just declared that it must reduce the prison population by nearly 50,000 people in order to provide constitutionally adequate medical care. But even with California’s prisons bursting at the seams, prison costs soaring past $10 billion dollars per year, and state coffers completely empty, most California legislators have their heads in the sand or their eyes on the next political prize.

Private prisons wrong answer for budget woes

East Valley Tribune
Commentary By: Bill Richardson
Two weeks ago, Gov. Jan Brewer signed into law House Bill 2010, which starts the bidding process to turn over Arizona Department of Corrections prisons, including maximum security facilities, to a private corporation in the name of cutting costs and generating revenue. Brewer previously vetoed the private prison bill in July. The private prison industry stands to make lots of money while the state gets some quick cash, but at what cost to us?
The pitch for private prisons is they save money. But according to a Dec. 6, 2007, Tribune commentary titled "Private jails not the answer," by Gerald Sheridan, the sheriff's office's chief of custody, "The National Council on Crime and Delinquency conducted a review of privatization and found the average cost savings was about 1 percent, usually through lower labor costs. Cost benefits of privatization have not materialized to the extent promised. Government bears the burden of administering punishment and this responsibility should not be delegated to a for-profit company."

FBI figures: One drug bust in US every 18 seconds

THE RAW STORY
By: Stephen C. Webster

America is a nation at war, overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at home.

According to the newly released Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Report for 2008 every 18 seconds someone is arrested and charged with violating drug laws. Another striking figure in the report: of the 1,702,537 drug arrests in 2008, 82.3 percent were for simple possession of a contraband substance. Nearly half, 44 percent, were for possession of marijuana.

California Passes Bill Addressing Prisons

NEW YORK TIMES
By: Solomon Moore

LOS ANGELES — California took a major step toward overhauling its overburdened prisons on Friday when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger approved changes to parole and early-release programs that could reduce the prison population by about 16,000 inmates.

Even as the governor prepared to sign the legislation into law, the United States Supreme Court rejected his appeal of a federal court order to draft a plan by next Friday to reduce the prison population by 43,000 inmates within two years.

“The application for stay presented to Justice Kennedy and by him referred to the court is denied,” the terse rejection said.

The governor said he would continue to appeal future rulings of the three-judge panel that ordered the state to draft a prison plan. The panel has found that overcrowding is the main reason California has failed to provide a constitutional level of health care to prisoners.

Private Prisons keep On Growing

By: Matt kelley
Change.Org /Criminal Justice
The GEO Group, America’s second-largest private prison operator, announced yesterday that it had acquired a smaller prison operator, Just Care Inc., and raised its expected profits for the year ahead. It’s good to see that at least somebody likes the way our criminal justice is going. GEO incarcerates 60,000 people around the world, and it's showing no signs of slowing. And GEO’s not the only one expanding as quickly as possible to profit off our crowded prisons. An analyst at Seeking Alpha recently looked at the stock of Corrections Corporation of America (the biggest in the U.S.), and found the company growing like gangbusters and its financial outlook extremely strong, writing (apparently with a straight face) that CCA is “uniquely positioned to offer governments an efficient incarceration solution.” I was glad to see some commentors on the site let the author have it. The comments come from both sides, however, and they’re worth a read for a glimpse at how both sides (at an investment website) view the morality of private prisons.