Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders

[Brewman_Jax]

http://www.alternet.org/story/155199/pri...e_traders/

From the article:

Quote:The nation’s largest private prison company, the Corrections Corporation of America, is on a buying spree. With a war chest of $250 million, the corporation, which is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, earlier this year sent letters to 48 states, offering to buy their prisons outright. To ensure their profitability, the corporation insists that it be guaranteed that the prisons be kept at least 90 percent full. Plus, the corporate jailers demand a 20-year management contract, on top of the profits they expect to extract by spending less money per prisoner.

For the last two years, the number of inmates held in state prisons has declined slightly, largely because the states are short on money. Crime, of course, has declined dramatically in the last 20 years, but that has never dampened the states’ appetites for warehousing ever more Black and brown bodies, and the federal prison system is still growing. However, the Corrections Corporation of America believes the economic crisis has created an historic opportunity to become the landlord, as well as the manager, of a big chunk of the American prison gulag.

The attempted prison grab is also defensive in nature. If private companies can gain both ownership and management of enough prisons, they can set the prices without open-bid competition for prison services, creating a guaranteed cost-plus monopoly like that which exists between the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex.

...

The other great danger to life and liberty in the USA--the prison-industrial complex. One of the main, if not THE main, reason for government to have and oversee certain public functions is the objective and not-for-profit nature of government. It will be disastrous for government to become a subsidiary of Big Corp because money will trump law and legal rights. There is a word for that--oligachy. One of its meanings (from Merriam-Webster dictionary): a government in which a small group exercises control especially for corrupt and selfish purposes; also : a group exercising such control.

[jaxx]

For profit prisons. The whole idea of it stinks. This is the repubs wanting to privatize the government, they are doing it in many areas. Roads that taxpayers have paid for are now privatized, toll roads rising because the corps want more money from their ventures. Schools. It needs to be stopped for all of them.

[Fire1]

(04-30-2012 07:59 AM)jaxx Wrote:  For profit prisons. The whole idea of it stinks. This is the repubs wanting to privatize the government, they are doing it in many areas. Roads that taxpayers have paid for are now privatized, toll roads rising because the corps want more money from their ventures. Schools. It needs to be stopped for all of them.

Absolutely! Most minorities are incarcerated on bs charges like parole violations, DUIs, petty drug charges and trumped up charges. There are Blacks and Whites still working the fields on corporate owned plantations to this day! Blacks are just flat out slaves but Whites are considered indentured servants who can eventually buy their freedom.

[suzie]

There are many areas that Republicans seek to privatize which turn out in the end to be more costly than the government employees replaced.

But private prisons aren't among that group. They're a whole other absolutely disastrous and terrible, awful, no good thing because of the laws that must be enacted to imprison enough people to make them profitable, or to continue their profit-making ability.

If the citizenry gets upset at toll roads, that can be undone.

But undoing laws that have been lobbied for by a group that seeks to incarcerate more people, simply because it lines their pockets, is very, very difficult.

Not disagreeing with you, jaxx, that privatization is generally a bad thing. But private prisons are a truly horrendous thing.

[jaxx]

Yes, suzie, I realize that. Thank you so much for pointing out the obvious.

[suzie]

If I expressed that in a way that was offensive, I genuinely apologize, jaxx. That was not my intention.

I wasn't disagreeing with you, or trying to point out the obvious. Perhaps because I've worked in the criminal justice area and done some stuff with prisons, I'm just really horrified by the mushrooming of privatized prisons, more so than some other privatized areas.

I find it a very, very scary thing and was trying to say so.

One of the more depressing experiences of my life was trying to get reform legislation that would alleviate prison overcrowding through a state legislature. And that was before there were private prison companies on the other side, agitating against releasing prisoners. Or making sensible programs that treat non-violent drug offenders rather than locking them up.

Or starting with just eliminating almost all women's prisons in the country.