The More Things Change...

On the one-year anniversary of the Obama administration's pledge to reform the immigration detention system, little has changed for the nearly 400,000 immigrants detained here every day. And despite charging hundreds of millions of dollars per year to incarcerate these immigrants, the private prisons that house them still inflict needless suffering by depriving immigrants of medical and mental health care. There are more detentions and deportations under Obama than there were under Bush; all he has done is extend Bush's policies towards immigrants, yet the conservative right is all riled up about him not deporting more people.

The system is overcrowded and run largely by private corporations that are far more concerned with their bottom line than providing things like medical care or a humane living environment. Oversight of these contractors is poor at best; a sexual assault occurred in one of these facilities while they had government agents on duty. It is foolish for America to continue giving taxpayer money to these companies, to continue on this track of incarcerating ever more immigrants, ever more people. As the prison market has grown increasingly privatized the corporations who profit most directly from it have become more effective at circumventing oversight, maximizing profit by denying needed services, and molding political relationships that ensure they retain business despite the fact that they do nothing right or moral or even efficient.

Earnings Time

It's Why I Hate CCA's favorite time of the year (well one of four at least).  It's quarterly earnings report time, where we find out how much the private prison companies raped the American taxpayers for in the past couple months.  I just love hearing about the absurd amounts of profit to be made in the private incarceration business.

CCA posted a 12.3% increase in earning in the second quarter of 2010, making a whopping $36.6 million in profit on revenue of nearly $420 million, all for providing sub-standard detention "services."

Cornell thankfully is down compared to the same quarter of 2009, earning only $16.5 million in profit (compared to $19.6 million in 09), on a little over $103 million in revenue.

I haven't seen GEO's report yet but I'll try to get it posted when I do

CCA Guards Admit the Staff is Poorly Trained

The title link goes to the personal account of a CCA employee who details a lot of the problems that seem to be inherent to their hiring and staffing processes.  CCA fails to conduct adequate background checks on their employees (which often results in them hiring ex-felons), they don't test incoming guards for their capacity to handle such a high-stress job, and they don't train their guards nearly as much as governments do.  This resulted in poorly-prepared COs that smuggled in contraband, compromising the security of the facility, had inappropriate sexual relations with prisoners, and bragged about having spent time in prison for aiding human smugglers.  As the author himself says, "I worked with officers who had no business being officers because of physical limitations or an extreme lack of intelligence. Such facilities [private prisons] are not safe, neither for officers or staff."

But this is no isolated incident; I have spoken with guards who worked for all different private prison companies, in different states, and all the stories sound very similar to this one.  Check out the comments section on this article for a private prison guard named Pedro who discusses why he thinks privatization of prisons is "horrible for the overall well-being of the criminal justice system."

What a Stupid Waste of Money

US Customs and Border Protection stops illegal immigrants from trying to leave the country, yes leave it. Instead of just allowing them to cross the border to Mexico, they are ordered to stop and arrest them, then force them through formal deportation proceedings. Which not only has long-term consequences for the immigrants due to the repercussions of being arrested, it's a huge waste of money and resources.

Murderers Escaped From a Private Prison? No Reason to Worry

3 convicted murderers escaped from a medium-security prison privately managed by MTC, Management and Training Corporation, which is based in Utah.  But that won't deter Rep. John Kavanaugh (R) from his enthusiastic support of private prisons because well, they save money (except they don't), and that's the end-all, be-all in his opinion.  In fact, he wants to further expand the privatization of his state's prisons (AZ currently has a request for proposal for 5,000 private prison beds) and the services provided therein, despite the fact that it took officials at the prison more than an hour to notify the government of the escape.

But of course Mr. Kavanaugh, conservative that he is, doesn't question his opinions on whether the private prison industry can provide effective services (they can't.), rather he questions why these prisoners wound up in a medium-security facility.  As a government employee, heck as an even half-educated citizen of your state, you should realize that medium-security facilities can house these types of prisoners because an inmate's classification is determined by a lot of factors, not just his/her sentence.  But this distracts his audience from the real point (which seems to happen a lot in politics and mainstream media): that the private market isn't always the best solution to a problem, especially not private prisons.  Sometimes the profit motive is exploited for personal gain at the expense of those who invest in an industry, like the Arizona taxpayers who invest their money in private prisons.

UPDATE: It turns out MTC also failed to notify the mother and wife of two of the victims of one of these guys for 19 hours after the escape.  She was supposed to be notified right away but nearly an entire day passed before a family member saw it on the news in another state and reported it to her. And it has also been revealed that the men escaped by having one of their girlfriends walk up to the prison fence and toss wire cutters over to them.  Great job securing that prison there, MTC.

What's All the Commotion?

Immigration prosecutions under President Obama are at the same levels they were under the Bush administration.  Both ICE and CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) have been prosecuting thousands of immigration violations, so I cannot understand why Governor Rick Perry of Texas, like so many conservatives (politicians, pundits, whoever), is so hell-bent on criticizing the Obama administration for not enforcing our country's immigration laws.  All these prosecutions are clogging up court systems throughout the country, but most notably in the southwest; in fact, more than half of ALL federal prosecutions are immigration-related; nearly 95% of the cases public defenders in Texas are dealing with concern civil immigration violations (as opposed to criminal cases), with them handling up to 180 cases every day.  This obviously incapacitates the public defender from mounting any sort of substantial defense for his clients, which completely undermines the mission of the office.

What bothers me most of all is that the conservative rhetoric surrounding immigration doesn't seem to be at all concerned with facts or statistics so much as emotional appeals, especially to people in immigrant-heavy areas.  Senator John Cornyn blasted Obama's record on prosecuting immigrants, while he actually oversaw more than 21,000 MORE removals in his first year in office for criminal activity than in 2008.  Cornyn however complains about the drop in non-criminal removals, which of course fires up the right and gets his voting base agitated against Obama and the Democrats.  But frankly non-criminal aliens should be of far less concern to the government than criminal ones, but as I said, conservative discourse tends to ignore important and relevant figures to blow partially-relevant issues way out of proportion.  When you have people like Lou Dobbs, now Glenn Beck and other fauxnews blowhards spouting off about how our borders aren't secure and immigrants are stealing all our jobs in the face of evidence that shows this administration is even more harsh on immigration than its predecesor, and in light of the fact that the number of immigrants dropped by its largest margin in the past 3 decades over the past year, the discussion tends to move away from the rational to the irrationality you see in today's media (here is the LA times article that mentions the drop in immigrants, along with some other very interesting numbers regarding immigration and its prosecution).  By ramping up the anti-immigrant rhetoric, conservative pundits have been able to practically paint immigrants as an alien occuping force that needs some sort of militaristic response, and we wind up with absurd, overtly-racist laws like Arizona's SB1070, which was passed despite the fact that Arizona ranked first and second, respectively, in ICE and CBP prosecutions (meanwhile all the discussion from conservatives in favor of the bill was about how the Obama administration doesn't prosecute enough immigration violators in their state). 

All we have done by increasing the amount of immigrants we lock up and prosecute is increase the amount of money spent on ineffective programs.  We spend billions every year to incarcerate and prosecute people for civil violations, spending literally hundreds of dollars per prisoner per day to keep them locked up.  Our country needs to realize that the immigration detention system we currently have is designed for nothing more than to enhance the wealth and power of the private prison industry giants, many of whom are supported, directly or indirectly, by our government, both democrat and republican alike.  And with all the money that CCA, GEO, and every other private prison contractor spends to ensure it will continue to get new contracts, despite repeated abuses of human rights, its no wonder they are able to continue to fleece American taxpayers into allowing them to exploit our broken system for their own financial gain.

I'll Say It Again: CCA Has Pretty Low Standards

A CO at a CCA prison in Indiana was just arrested for criminal gang activity, fighting with police, and resisting arrest. All with her 16-year-old son. I'm sure she is perfectly qualified to be guarding prisoners.

Exploiting Desperate Communities

CCA just jacked up their rate on Chattanooga County, TN.  They are now charging the county $809,000 more than they did last year to run the county workhouse, which unfortunately is pretty typical of private prison companies. They often lowball the rate they'll house prisoners for when initially signing a contract, then jack up the rate every year after that, essentially holding small communities, who have no real viable option other than the private company to operate the facility, so they wind up paying them significantly more than they initially agreed to to house prisoners.  It's a bait-and-switch operation endemic of the industry.

Chuck Coughlin is a Walking Conflict of Interest

Despite CCA's and Governor Jan Brewer's repeated claims to the contrary, CCA has been wiedling its influence on the governor in subtle ways for quite some time, including when she was debating whether or not to sign the "breathing while brown" bill. Chuck Coughlin, who runs High Ground Consulting, which CCA has used for over a year to lobby for them in Arizona, also happens to be an advisor to, and campaign manager for, governor Brewer. By Coughlin's own admission, he advised the governor on the bill while he was receiving payment from CCA as their lobbyist. And so while CCA can claim that they technically didn't lobby on the bill, I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that the man they hired to lobby for them might have just possibly helped nudge along one of the most controversial laws I've ever seen, one that stands to directly benefit CCA in a big way.

An Ominous Prediction from the Past

A decade ago, Jerome Miller coined the term "Gulag State" to describe what he saw as an increasing trend towards privatization in corrections, and how the profit motive that underrides that push would continue to supercede any concerns for human rights or abuses within private prisons.  He feared that the drive for profit in corrections would lead to extremely strict sentencing laws that disproportionately affect the poor and minorities, creating a systematic method of social control cheaper to maintain and seemingly more benign than slavery.  The title link goes to a reposting of an old article that describes how the major private prison companies of today have come into such great success, despite an already-failed venture into the industry during the 19th century and the modern players' failure to operate facilities up to the same standards as government-run institutions.  But mostly it demonstrates how our political and economic system is geared towards profiting the already super-wealthy and empowered at the great expense of the large majority of society. 

So today, I hate all of you who have profited so dramatically from human pain and suffering, the founders and executives of not only the private prison companies that are destroying countless millions of lives, but the companies like American Express and GE who invest in them, the private contractors and vendors who exploit the tax dollars being pumped into this black hole, the private transport companies and weapons manufacturers that thrust our society perpetually deeper into a militaristic police state.  But most of all, I hate the politicians and their lobbying cronies who, in the face of dramatic evidence demonstrating unimaginable abuses and reports showing that the promised costs savings of privatization rarely if ever materialize, continue on with their political games and BS, extending old contracts and signing new ones with companies that, were they in any other industry, would have been so overwhelmed with complaints and lawsuits that they couldn't possibly survive, but because they happen to house prisoners have the luxury of an apathetic American public they carry on, so that they can continue to exploit the American people in more ways than they could ever possibly imagine.

Report Questions Contract Compliance, Financial Reporting of Private Prisons in Texas

A report by the State Auditor's Office in Texas uncovered a significant amount of issues in the state's ability to monitor its contracts with private prisons, due largely to inconsistencies in the contracts and what they require.  The Auditor found that all 7 of the private prison contracts it randomly reviewed had no set of financial reporting requirements, and many contracts did not inclued performance standards with which to measure compliance.  It also found that the agency charged with monitoring private prisons failed to clearly delegate its work, allowed some private substance abuse treatment centers to perform their own backgrounds checks independent of government oversight, and worst of all, failed to even justify WHY they would renew the states millions of dollars worth of contracts with private prison operators.  Basically, the private prison industry and the agency meant to monitor it in Texas are a huge mess of buearacracy that lacks any real means of measuring or enforcing compliance with contracts that cost taxpayers millions upon millions of dollars.

Sheisty

CCA is trying to take everything they can grab on their way out of the Hernando County, FL jail, without even waiting to determine whether or not they properly own it.  Using some talking points, their PR person denied any wrongdoing, but they're trying to take some major appliances and security implements out of the facility, including an industrial dishwasher, computers, cameras, and even the razor wire around the facility (click here for details on that).  And they only want to give the county until Wednesday to contest any decision to take something, despite the fact that the city council has asked them to hold off on removing the items until it can be determined who actually owns them.  Quit trying to steal from Hernando County, CCA.