Category Archives: History

Human rights and war on drugs incompatible —LEAP

While the local CCA private prison contract expired (yay!), the U.S. still has 5% of the world’s population and 25% of the world’s prisoners, which is seven times our incarceration rate of 40 years ago, while the crime rate is about the same, and Georgia has 1 in 13 adults in the prison system (jail, prison, probation, or parole. We can’t afford that. The money we waste locking people up could be sending people to college or paying teachers. And the root cause is still the failed war on drugs, which is also one of the biggest problems with human rights around the world.

LEAP wrote 16 March 2012, Human Rights is a Foreign Concept in the UN’s “War on Drugs”

“Fundamentally, the three UN prohibitionist treaties are incompatible to human rights. We can have human rights or drug war, but not both,” said Maria Lucia Karam, a retired judge from Brazil and a board member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP).

Richard Van Wickler, currently a jail superintendent in New Hampshire, adds, “I suppose it’s not shocking that within the context of a century-long bloody ‘war on drugs’ the idea of human rights is a foreign concept. Our global drug prohibition regime puts handcuffs on millions of people every year while even the harshest of prohibitionist countries say that drug abuse is a health issue. What other medical problems do we try to solve with imprisonment and an abandonment of human rights?”

Good point.

We don’t lock up people for drinking. We only lock them up for endangering other people while drinking. And we tax alcohol sales and generate revenue for the state. Let’s do the same with drugs: legalize, regulate, and tax. That’s what we did with alcohol in 1933, and it’s time to do the same with other drugs.

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Missouri has defeated CWIP: so can Georgia

A veteran of the original No Nukes movement calls Plant Vogtle and CWIP like he sees it.

Harvey Wasserman wrote Friday for EcoWatch, Nuclear Power’s Green Mountain Grassroots Demise,

The accelerating revolution in renewables has allowed solar, wind and other green sources to outstrip atomic reactors in cost, time to build, ecological impact and safety. As billions pour into Solartopian sources, private investment in atomic energy has all but disappeared—except where there are massive taxpayer subsidies.

Even that’s not enough. In 2011, President Obama handed $8.33 billion in federal loan guarantees to the builders of two reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle. But Peach State ratepayers are already being soaked for billions more in pre-payments, and the cost of the project is soaring. A parallel financial disaster looms at the Robinson site in neighboring South Carolina. Though the industry assumes these four reactors will eventually be finished, economic realities may say otherwise.

Cost estimates for new nukes have been soaring even before construction begins. Even with federal money, the builders still demand that state ratepayers foot the bill as the process proceeds, meaning consumers are on the hook for multiple billions even if the reactors never open. Pitched battles over this Construction Work in Progress scam have already been won by consumers in Missouri and are being fought in Iowa and elsewhere. As the years of building drag on, costs will escalate while renewables continue to become cheaper. Sooner or later, construction is likely to stop, as it did at numerous projects in the 1970s and 1980s which were never finished.

We can end CWIP in Georgia. It will benefit Georgia Power and the EMCs as well as all the rest of us when we stop wasting tax and customer dollars on boondoggles like Plant Vogtle or biomass or private prisons and get on with clean, profitable, job-creating renewable energy in Georgia: wind off the coast and sun inland.

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Industrial Authority still pushing “benefits” of scrapped private prison

The Industrial Authority appears to have learned nothing from the reams of information about the CCA private prison found for them by members of the public. They’re still pushing the “benefits” while saying nothing about the numerous cons (pun intended), the biggest of which is that the state and federal prison population is already decreasing, meaning we don’t need any more prisons, and if we built one here, it would be likely to close. So it’s not just a bad idea, it’s bad business. But here they go again….

Eames Yates wrote for WCTV Friday, Plans For New Prison Scrapped,

Schruijer went on to say “It would have been a huge economic impact. There were about 400 jobs associated with the project with approximately $150 million dollars in capital investment.”

Those four hundred jobs that the prison would have created, on average, would have payed between $40,000 and $50,000 dollars eah.

To people who mostly don’t live here now and mostly wouldn’t want to live here then, while driving away better businesses; she didn’t mention any of that, or the other problems with the whole private prison bad business.

That picture of Ms. Schruijer is hosted on the LAKE website, by the way. The VLCIA website is still broken, a week after I first pointed it out. Is this how the Industrial Authority plans to do PR, still promoting yet another failed Brad Lofton boondoggle while not making anything positive available on their own website?

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CCA private prison project shelved —VDT

According to this morning’s paper VDT, the contract between private prison company CCA and the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority has expired. The land owner could sell the land to CCA anyway, but that would be without a state or federal customer for the prison and without $5 or $6 million in economic incentives VLCIA was going to arrange, including without water and sewer.

According to the letter Brad Lofton signed and VLCIA sent to CCA 12 November 2009, the total of incentives was more like $9 million dollars of tax abatements for CCA or tax-funded work, all of which the rest of us taxpayers would have to pay for one way or another. All that plus the prison itself would have been paid for with our tax dollars. Tax dollars that now can go to rehabilitation or education instead.

So the people of the community win! Congratulations to Drive Away CCA and all others who helped oppose this private prison project, and congratulations to the Industrial Authority for finally saying what is going on.

Perhaps now the Industrial Authority can get on with bringing in industry that will actually contribute to the community. How about industry that people would be proud to move next to? Industry that would employ local people? Industry that would attract knowledge-based workers and businesses? Maybe that’s what VLCIA’s Strategic Plan Process is about. If so, let’s all help the Industrial Authority achieve it.

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Private prison is like biomass —Ashley Paulk

A deep silence came from the Industrial Authority yesterday, but GDOC board member Ashley Paulk compared the private prison to the biomass project.

I asked Lowndes County Commission Chair and Georgia Department of Corrections (GDOC) board member Ashley Paulk if he had heard whether the private prison contract had been extended past yesterday’s deadline. He had not. However, he did volunteer that he had asked the GDOC board whether they had had any discussion about such a prison and they had not. Further, GDOC just last year approved a CCA prison in Jenkins County, Georgia, so why would another one be built here? Prison populations are decreasing in Georgia, Paulk said. He even said, “It’s like the biomass situation,” in that there’s no business model. It was Ashley Paulk who signaled the end of the biomass project. And he already signaled the end of the private prison project on the front page of the VDT and he told Eames Yates of WCTV 29 Feb 2012,

Until you have a customer, you won’t see a prison, and they don’t have a customer.
He said several times yesterday he did not expect the private prison to be built. And he went beyond what he had said before in explicitly likening the private prison project to the biomass project.

After last Thursday’s Valdosta City Council meeting, two different Valdosta City Council members and Mayor John Gayle all told me they had talked to various people and they didn’t expect CCA’s private prison to be built.

I hope they’re all correct about that.

But we all still wait for the Industrial Authority to tell us. They’re missing a huge potential positive PR opportunity by not holding a big press conference and taking credit for ending the private prison. They still could do that this morning.

Or they could keep claiming that community activism has no effect, even though it is activism that got both of those projects in the news and got people like Ashley Paulk to speak out. Maybe the Industrial Authority likes people to laugh at them. Me, I’d prefer an Industrial Authority that stood up for the people of this community.

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How to ban CWIP in Georgia

A one-paragraph law can do it; that’s all it took in New Hampshire to ban Construction Work in Progress (CWIP) after Three Mile Island. OK, plus a state Supreme Court ruling, but that would be easier in Georgia since the New Hampshire Supreme Court already set a precedent of upholding the NH law. After Fukushima, Georgia could ban CWIP and end the new Plant Vogtle construction. The we could get on with building solar.

Here’s the text of the NH law, taken from the NH Supreme Court ruling:

“378:30-a Public Utility Rate Base; Exclusions. Public utility rates or charges shall not in any manner be based on the cost of construction work in progress. At no time shall any rates or charges be based upon any costs associated with construction work if said construction work is not completed. All costs of construction work in progress, including, but not limited to, any costs associated with constructing, owning, maintaining or financing construction work in progress, shall not be included in a utility’s rate base nor be allowed as an expense for rate making purposes until, and not before, said construction project is actually providing service to consumers.”
Simple enough. The Georgia legislature could do it. Knowing the NH CWIP ban caused PSNH to go bankrupt on costs for the Seabrook nuclear plant, Georgia Power might back off on Plant Vogtle rather than have such a law passed.

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What we can learn from no nukes and solartopia of 30 years ago

Why were only 12% of the projected 1000 nuclear plants built in the U.S. by the year 2000? Because of the no nukes movement started in Seabrook, New Hampshire in 1977. And because New Hampshire banned CWIP. Here in Georgia in 2012 we can cut to the chase and do what they did that worked.

Harvey Wasserman wrote for The Free Press 13 May 2007, How creative mass non-violence beat a nuke and launched the global green power movement,

Thirty years ago this month, in the small seacoast town of Seabrook, New Hampshire, a force of mass non-violent green advocacy collided with the nuke establishment.

A definitive victory over corporate power was won. And the global grassroots “No Nukes” movement emerged as one of the most important and effective in human history.

It still writes the bottom line on atomic energy and global warming. All today’s green energy battles can be dated to May, 13, 1977, when 550 Clamshell Alliance protestors walked victoriously free after thirteen days of media-saturated imprisonment. Not a single US reactor ordered since that day has been completed.

How effective?
Richard Nixon had pledged to build 1000 nukes in the US by the year 2000. But the industry peaked at less than 120. Today, just over a hundred operate. No US reactor ordered since 1974 has been completed. The Seabrook demonstrations—which extended to civil disobedience actions on Wall Street—were key to keeping nearly 880 US reactors unbuilt.
The only new nukes ordered since then are the ones Georgia Power wants to build at Plant Vogtle on the Savannah River, for which Georgia Power customers are already getting billed Construction Work in Progress (CWIP).

Thirty years later, some things haven’t changed: Continue reading →

VDT picks up private prison national article: the news is not good for CCA

The VDT, after following the local private prison story, picked up a national story about CCA’s offer to 48 state governors to buy their prisons. CCA is not getting any takers.

AP wrote 10 March 2012, Firm offers states cash for prisons,

Despite a need for cash, several states immediately slammed the door on the offer, a sign that privatizing prisons might not be as popular as it once was.
Doesn’t seem very popular around here. Most people still don’t seem to have heard about the proposed local private prison, but once they do, by far most say they are against it.
Prison departments in California, Texas and Georgia all dismissed the idea. Florida’s prison system said it doesn’t have the authority to make that kind of decision and officials in CCA’s home state of Tennessee said they aren’t reviewing the proposal. The states refused to say why they were rejecting the offer.
Good for Georgia and the other states! Georgia, where the prison population is already plummeting.
“Knowing the state government, it has to have something to do with the potential political backlash,” said Jeanne Stinchcomb, a criminal justice professor at Florida Atlantic University who has written two books on the corrections industry. “Privatization has reaped some negative publicity, so I can only assume that despite the possible benefits, there would be a price to pay for supporting it.”
Do tell….

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Industrial Authority got wetlands easement from Lowndes County for private prison site

Before selling it off to a private landowner who who two years later got a contract with private prison company CCA to resell it for almost 100% profit, the Industrial Authority acquired a road easement through county-owned wetlands from Lowndes County:
Further, Grantor hereby conveys a Non-Exclusive Ingress and Egress Easement in that certain 0.685 acre tract or parcel of land situate, lying and being in Land Lot 153 of th 11th Land District of Lowndes County, Georgia. Said 0.685 acre tract being designated as “0.685 acres — Ingress/Egress Easement reserved for future right-of-way extension” as depicted on that certain map or survey “Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority” dated September 8, 2004 and recorded September 9, 2004 in Plat Cabinet A, Page 2659, Lowndes County records, to which map and survey is hereby referred in further aid of description.
An easement that a private landowner might have more difficulty getting from the county. Isn’t that convenient?

This is the wetland that has not yet been approved for that purpose by the Army Corps of Engineers, according to Ashley Paulk.

By the way, that wetland easement in 2004 was before Brad Lofton was hired in 2006 to be executive director of VLCIA, so the very peculiar history of this bit of land can’t all be blamed on him. The appointed Industrial Authority board and the elected Lowndes County Commission and Valdosta City Council are all also involved.

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Crony capitalism corruption, a non-partisan enemy —Barbara Stratton

Received yesterday on VSU Health Sciences: much better than a private prison. -jsq
You know my main argument against the private prison is I don’t like public/private partnerships and the sweetheart deals they encourage. Also, when I requested CCA to provide me with information that supports private prisons so I could research both sides they did not respond. This led me to believe they have no concern for community opinion even when citizens are open minded and seeking honest information. They seem to prefer back room deals with local politicians that escape community detection unless citizens are aggressively observant like LAKE members.

However, we are not on the same page about what I consider simplistic solutions for reducing the prison population. Education and good drug treatment programs are definitely positives, but they are not the silver bullet liberals proclaim them to be. Criminals evolve from complex heredity and environmental mediums that don’t magically dissolve via education or intervention protocols. Certainly these are to be encouraged because they do help some, but they will never totally replace the need for legal intervention and penal institutions. In addition to educational and medical institutions not being a magical replacement solution for crime, these very institutions often encourage crony capitalism corruption, which we agree to be a non-partisan enemy.

In summary, I support our criminal justice system which includes prisons, but I do not support any mixing of government and business. Public/private partnerships are crony capitalism playgrounds that undermine free enterprise and citizen control. Unfortunately our trusted elected legislators have already filled our GA Codes and State Constitution with government consolidation and multi county regional partnership initiatives. At present, they are pushing SB 284, already passed by the senate, and in the house, which will further enhance Land Bank Authority powers and partnerships. As citizens we all need to remember that increasing unelected bureaucratic authorities equals minimized citizen control. We also need to ask our local, state and federal elected representatives why they are listening to special interest groups that encourage authorities and public/private partnerships instead of protecting their constituents.

-Barbara Stratton Commenter

We don’t have to agree on every point to oppose (private prison) or support (government transparency) the same things. Indeed, there will always be criminals, but we don’t need to lock up more than any other country on the planet. The big change in the environment that has produced seven times more criminals now than in the 1960s is the War on Drugs. Time to end that failed experiment in prohibition. Meanwhile, indeed crony capitalism corruption is our non-partisan enemy.

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