Human Trafficking in America's Private Prisons

Conservatives, NAACP Say States Send Too Many People to Jail

April 8, 2011

The Lookout - The NAACP unveiled a new report [PDF] urging states to lock away fewer prisoners for drug offenses, and to redirect some of the massive amount of money that goes to jails to schools. The reporte picked up endorsements from a few politically strange bedfellows: former GOP Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist, the conservative activist who founded Americans for Tax Reform.

"You have Tea Party activists and NAACP activists pushing the same bills," the civil rights group's president Ben Jealous said during a PBS NewsHour report on the prison reform movement in Texas.

This alliance is perhaps even more surprising given that only last July, the NAACP was accusing the tea party of racism, prompting one of a tea party leader to write an offensive letter to Jealous in the voice of Abraham Lincoln. Apparently the animosity has been buried as conservatives target the growing prison system (thanks to years of "tough on crime" policies) as part of their crusade against big government.

The report says more than a quarter of the 2.3 million American prisoners are jailed for drug offenses, and points out that America has just 5 percent of the world's population but 25 percent of its prison population. State prisons eat up $50 billion a year, and growth in prison spending has outpaced higher education spending by 600 percent over the past 20 years. Even as state education spending dried up in the past two years due to the recession, 33 states managed to up their 'contributions' to their prisons, the report says.

How to fix that? The NAACP recommends shorter sentences for young offenders, allowing prisoners to leave jail early if they engage in rehab or vocational programs, and eliminating mandatory minimum jail sentences for drug offenses.

Eliminating mandatory minimums in particular has picked up a following among conservatives lately. In December, conservative Christian talk show host Pat Robertson endorsed faith-based drug rehabilitation programs instead of jail time for drug use on his show "The 700 Club," and even appeared to advocate for legalizing marijuana.

"I'm not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong," he said. "I just believe that criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot--that kind of thing--it's costing us a fortune and it's ruining young people."

Robertson also promoted the work of the conservative group "Right on Crime," a Texas-based conservative group who have spurred the introduction of over a dozen prison system reform bills this year in the state's legislature. In 2005, Texas began reforming drug sentencing and shifting money to drug rehabilitation and prevention programs, which has saved the state billions and reduced crime, according to The Washington Post. Lawmakers in Georgia and Florida are debating following suit.

But not everyone is happy with the NAACP's recommendations.

"To suggest that there should be no consequences or reduced consequences for hurting other people or taking their property is nonsensical," James Pasco, executive director of the Legislative Advocacy Center of the Fraternal Order of Police, told The Christian Science Monitor.

He also said the report misses that many people who are in jail for minor crimes pleaded down from more serious ones, thus painting the nation's prison population as more benign than it actually is.

And Norquist, who appeared alongside Jealous on PBS to endorse the report, was careful not to comment on the civil rights group's conclusion that more federal and state education spending could prevent America's young people from becoming prisoners.

The NAACP is also spotlighting stories of people who became entangled in the prison system and have since reformed, like Marlo Hargrove, who began selling drugs at age 10. Hargrove begged to be let into a drug rehabilitation program rather than serve two years in jail, and then co-founded a support group for ex-prisoners called F.A.C.E. (Freedom Advocates Celebrating Ex-Offenders).

Rising Prison Population Is 'Good News' for Stocks

November 1, 2010

CNBC - Privatized prison stocks have seen a modest gain in the past three months, so is there room to run from here?

T.C. Robillard, analyst at Signal Hill, discussed his insights.

“You’ve seen prison populations pretty consistently over the last three decades move up a couple percent a year…and from a business model perspective, it’s clearly good news,” Robillard told CNBC.

Robillard has a “buy” rating on The Geo Group and a “hold” rating on Corrections Corporation of America.

“What you see in a recession is that states end up overcrowding their own prisons in an effort to save money,” he explained.

“And as budgets start to flatten out and improve, the first things you’re going to see them turn to is the private sector to help alleviate some of that overcrowding, because the states [still] will not have the funding necessary to build new prison beds.”

Corrections, a Film by Ashley Hunt

CORRECTIONS is a story of justice turned to profit, where the war on crime has found new investors: VENTURE CAPITAL and FOR-PROFIT PRISONS, a story of how PRIVATE PRISONS have come back.

At a time when the U.S. has achieved the highest rate of imprisonment in the world, at a cost of $55 billion a year, and with statistics that tell us:

• 1-in-4 Black men are in prison, on parole or probation, 10% stripped of their right to vote;
• Unprecedented numbers of children are locked up, many sentenced into their adult lives;
• Native Americans have the highest percentage of their population in prison;
• Latinos and women are the fastest growing populations in the prison system;
• New prisons are being forced upon rural communities to revive their "economies";
• 70% of prisoners are locked up for crimes that did not involve violence;
• Immigrants are now subject to separate laws, many disappeared and detained indefinitely;
• All giving the U.S. the highest incarceration rate in the entire world...

The U.S. public is witnessing an unfolding crisis of MASS IMPRISONMENT, more and more visible to us each day.

Yet, this crisis has meant booming profits for a growing number of politicians, corporations, government agencies and unions, while we find increasing political and economic pressure to push the crisis further -- far beyond what ideas of "safety" and "justice" would seem to demand.

CORRECTIONS is a story of profits and mass imprisonment: how the histories of racial and economic inequality in the U.S. are emerging today from the walls of its prisons, and how this crisis has formed the incentive, profit and resource base for an entire industry.

Where the "Tough-on-Crime" movement meets the ending of welfare, globalization, finance capital and neo-liberal policy, and today, the "war on terrorism."**

CORRECTIONS explores how prisons have fast become the accepted solution to unemployment and housing crises, crumbled schools, livable wages without credit and the undoing of the Western Social Contract, set within the scene of collapsed rural economies and the "urban decay" of potentially expensive neighborhoods.

CORRECTIONS takes you to:

• A prison trade show & the corporate headquarters of leading prison corporations;
• A poverty stricken community enticed to host a new prison for "economic development";
• A timeline of the Tough-on-Crime movement, following its emergence during the Civil Rights Movement, people's movements, the War on Drugs and into political "common sense";
• A Southern African American community alive with the memory of for-profit prisons, and still struggling for justice today;
• A juvenile prison where violent defiance of human rights law are perpetrated upon children as young as thirteen years old...

Featuring stories of the leading correctional corporations, testimony from the world's leading experts and the lives of ordinary people, CORRECTIONS takes audiences behind the walls of the prison system that Wall Street has called a "growth industry."

** CORRECTIONS was made before September 11th, 2001, to which the state's response of increasing detentions has not changed but rather grown and exacerbated what this film describes.

Private Prisons That Fight to Lock Up America’s Children

Juvenile detention centres in the US have even bribed judges to imprison young offenders

March 12, 2009

The First Post - Every year, two million young people are arrested in the United States, and half-a-million spend time in detention centres. In Pennsylvania, two judges thought they could make some money out of this repulsively strict juvenile justice system. Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan received more than $2.6 million in bribes for sentencing children to time in privately-run juvenile detention centres. Now they're spending the next seven years in jail themselves.

In one case, 15-year-old Hillary Transue was sent to a detention centre for making a fake MySpace page which belittled the deputy headmaster at her school. In another, 14-year-old Phillip Swartley was packed off to reformatory school for petty theft. It wasn't easy.

"Sometimes they'd have you standing there for hours with the staff yelling in your face. They expect you not to make any facial expressions, not to look away or look down", Swartley recounted.

"Once he got released home", his mother said, "every time I'd try to get him to go to school he'd curl up in a ball and become physically sick."

Jamie Bryk was sent to court after she got into a fist fight with another girl after an argument over a boy at a bowling alley. It was her first offence, and her parents assumed that she'd get a slap on the wrists, so they didn't think they'd need an attorney. As it was, the hearing with Ciavarella lasted all of 60 seconds, and Jamie left in handcuffs. She was locked up for 10 months in total at a detention centre. Then, whilst at an institution run by Vision Quest, her mother says Jamie learnt to self-harm:

"Prior to her cutting herself she told me of how kids there were cutting themselves and then, lo and behold, she started cutting herself."

Detention centres are promoted as part summer camp, part motivational seminar

The places these kids were sent to are all privately-run. So like any other business, they have to make money. Generally, this means they recruit cheap, inexperienced, and hastily-trained staff, and, by monitoring the inmates with state-of-the-art CCTV systems and getting architects to design buildings that reduce the need for wardens, keep the number of people that they have to pay to a minimum.

The push for profit also means, as it would in a hotel, filling beds, which is where Ciavarella and Conahan, the two disgraced judges, had the chance to earn their money.

And to get business, private prisons have to promote themselves to the judges, probation departments, defence attorneys and social workers who decide where to place the children. The very idea may seem distasteful, but the Mid-Atlantic Youth Services Corp (MAYS), the parent company of two institutions involved in the Pennsylvanian scandal, has a website which promotes it as a cross between summer camp and a motivational seminar.

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