Source: Global ResearchSherwood Ross
The latest report by the American Civil Liberties
Union(ACLU) is not likely to inspire politicians to shut down our
private prisons when prison operators are pouring millions of dollars
into their campaign coffers.
Jobbing out the incarceration business, said lawyer David
Shapiro of the ACLU Prison Project “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.”
And those top executives, in turn, between 1998 and 2000,
for example, wrote over $1.2-million in checks to political candidates
and political parties. And why not, when their firms have received such
huge public subsidies as $68 billion in tax-free bonds to help them
build?
Since the 1980s Reagan era shift to privatization, more
than 150 private facilities—detention centers, jails, and prisons—-with a
capacity of about 120,000 have been opened, and 7% of all U.S. adults
inmates have been dumped in them.
“Abuse of prisoners, escapes, prison violence including
prisoner-on-prisoner, prisoner-on-guard and vice versa, restricted and
malfeasant health care, providing rotten food, and other prison
management problems are characteristic of the private prison industry,”
writes sociologist Margaret Rosenthal in “The Long Term View,” a journal
published by the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover. Rosenthal is
Professor Emerita, School of Social Work, Salem State College, Mass.
“One study found 49% more prisoner-on-staff and 65% higher
prisoner-on-prisoner assaults in private medium and minimum security
prisons than in public ones,” Rosenthal writes. Example: at the
Northeast Ohio Correction Center in Youngstown, operated by industry
leader Corrections Corporation of America(CCA), in a period of just 14
months there were 13 stabbings, two murders and six escapes that ended
in violence. Rosenthal said other sociologists have documented “many
other examples of brutality and incompetence perpetrated in CCA-run
facilities.”
Since private prisons prosper in proportion to the number
of prisoners they house, “the suspicion remains that they may hold on to
prisoners, particularly ones who are not troublesome as a means to earn
extra money,” Rosenthal writes. Even when operators do not directly
control discharge decisions, she notes, “by controlling record-keeping
about prisoners’ behavior they can have a determining role in
establishing when a prisoner is to be released or paroled.”
The ACLU report, titled, “Banking on Bondage: Private
Prisons and Mass Incarcerations,” was released Nov. 2 and traces the
rise of the for-profit prison companies that have “capitalized on the
nation’s addiction to incarceration (2.4-million behind bars) to achieve
gigantic profits.”
“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,” an ACLU news release states.
“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,” the ACLU statement said.
It noted that Arizona is seeking to add 5,000 more private
beds despite its own Auditor General’s finding that for-profit
imprisonment may cost more than jailing them in public facilities.
The ACLU report asserts that mass incarceration “wreaks
havoc on communities by depriving individuals of their liberty, draining
government resources and bringing little or no benefit to public
safety.” The biggest losers in the privatization fiasco, apart from the
taxpayers, are members of the Afro-American and Hispanic communities
whose harsh sentences for minor crimes are filling many prison beds.
Many marijuana prisoners are doing harder time than white collar
criminals.
“It is imperative that we halt the expansion of for-profit
incarceration,” Shapiro said, as “The private prison industry helped
create, and continues to feed off, the social ill of mass
incarceration.” He concludes, “Private prisons cannot be part of the
solution—economic or ethical—to our nation’s addiction to
incarceration.”
To “halt the expansion” of private prisons is an urgent
first step—as long as it is quickly followed up by closing every one of
them now in operation. This would be a fine project for church groups
and civic associations. And one way to find beds for private inmates
would be to set free the hundreds of thousands of prisoners doing time
for victimless crimes such as marijuana possession and to transfer
others who rightfully belong in mental institutions, not behind bars. #
Sherwood Ross is a Miami-based public relations
consultant who writes on political and military topics. He formerly
reported for the Chicago Daily News and contributed regular news columns
to wire services. Reach him at sherwoodross10@gmail.com
