According to testimony by a nonpartisan research institute:
“The biggest source of Ohio’s budget problem is not overspending or compenstation for public employees. It is a reduction in revenue.According to a recent poll, the people of Ohio think this is unfair and don’t believe the governor can fix the budget without raising taxes.
…
The tax changes also were weighted to high-income Ohioans. More than 40 percent of the income-tax cuts are going to the five percent of families with income of $135,000 or more a year. Meanwhile, the bottom three-fifths of Ohio families will receive just 13 percent of the total tax cut.
There are other reasons selling off prisons to private prison companies such as CCA is a bad idea.
Mark Niquette wrote for Bloomberg 29 June 2011,
Kasich Tries to Avoid Arizona’s Mistakes in Ohio Prison Selloff:
Still, Democratic lawmakers, including Representative Matt Lundy of Elyria, question whether Ohio is making a wise move.
“The buyer wins and the taxpayers lose when we sell in the middle of a recession,” Lundy said during press conference last month, calling the move “a yard sale.”
Selling assets for “one-time” money is a mistake, Louisiana Treasurer John Kennedy said. He opposed a plan by Republican Governor Bobby Jindal to sell three prisons to raise $90 million, a proposal the Legislature didn’t approve.
“A junkie can sell his TV or his stereo or his iPod and generate money for his next fix,” Kennedy, also a Republican, said in a telephone interview from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “But if he’s going to ever get well, he needs to face his addiction.”
An even better quote in that story comes from CCA’s own Steve Owen:
“If we don’t operate safe, secure facilities, and we don’t provide the cost savings that are expected, there’s no reason for government to continue to partner with our industry,”Well, private prisons don’t save money, don’t improve local unemployment,, and attempt to get cost cutting by cutting corners, making them less safe.
The real reason prisons get privatized is private prison companies spend millions lobbying to get prisons privatized. The revolving door has now simply can’t afford to lock so many people up, privatizing the lockups doesn’t change that; it just puts local Ohio may be falling for that scam, but Georgia doesn’t have to.
It’s time for Georgia to face its addiction to locking people up, the worst in the country, with 1 in 13 adults in the prison system. The biggest source of convictions is the failed war on drugs, which fuels drug gangs with money and then makes drug violence even worse by prosecuting them, while corrupting law enforcement. Georgia, like Arizona, is currently adding to the problem with the anti-immigrant law HB 87, making us a laughingstock across the country and interfering with both farm and city labor.
Portugal has shown a way out, along with other countries that have decriminalized drugs: addictions down, expenses down. U.S. public opinion is trending rapidly towards legalization. Calls for it are coming from all sorts of people in the U.S. and worldwide, from Grover Norquist and the president of the NAACP standing on the same podium to Jimmy Carter. Even the U.S. Senate finds the drug war failed. As Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP) says:
“Prohibition didn’t work in the past, and it’s not working today.”Even GA Gov. Nathan Deal wants sentence reform, especially for low-level drug offenders. That’s a first step in the direction Portugal successfully pioneered.
We can take a step right here in Lowndes County, Georgia, by refusing a private prison and spending that money on rehabilitation and education instead. Early education prevents crime and raises living standards. And education costs less than locking people up:
Georgia pays $3,800 each year to educate a child in public schools, and $18,000 every year to keep each inmate behind bars, Deal said.Let’s do something real for education in Lowndes County: let’s not waste tax money on a private prison, let’s invest in early childhood education.
-jsq
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