Category Archives: Incarceration

Time to divest from private prison companies

It’s time to stop private prison profiteering by refusing to take their profit: divest private prison company stock from personal, pension, and church funds.

There’s no need to speculate that private prison companies have incentive to keep more people locked up: CCA says so. Kanya D’Almeida wrote for IPS 24 August 2011, ‘Profiteers of Misery’: The U.S. Private Prison Industrial Complex:

CCA’s 2010 annual report states categorically that, “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws — for instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

CCA continues, “Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could lower minimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and make more inmates eligible for early release based on good behaviour, (while) sentencing alternatives under consideration could put some offenders on probation who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly, reductions in crime rates or resources dedicated to prevent and enforce crime could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.”

What’s this got to do with Georgia? Continue reading →

Anyone attending the CUEE meeting expecting a plan … left disappointed. —VDT

While many other people, such as Friends of Valdosta City Schools (FVCS), are trying to prevent the damage to education CUEE is trying to cause through its “unification” referendum, CUEE had a meeting of its educational committee yesterday.

Sharah Denton wrote for the VDT, CUEE focuses on academics:

Anyone attending the CUEE meeting expecting a plan for how unification of the city and county school systems would work left disappointed. Instead of discussing how the school systems might merge if CUEE’s campaign to dissolve the Valdosta school charter succeeds during the Nov. 8 election referendum, the Education Planning Task Force focused on its primary objective: improving academics for area students.
So they have no plan, and of course they also have no control over academics. If “unification” passes, that control would lie with Continue reading →

Private prisons considered harmful —Gretchen Quarterman to Jack Kingston

Gretchen Quarterman
3338 Country Club Road #L336
Valdosta GA 31605
26 August 2011
PDF
 
Hon. Jack Kingston
Member of Congress
First District of Georgia
 
Dear Mr. Kingston,

You asked me last week in Tifton to provide you with evidence that private prisons have fewer guards per prisoner than public prisons.

Here is an example:

“The largest juvenile prison in the nation, Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility houses 1,200 boys and young men, between the ages of 13 and 22, and is run by a private contractor, the GEO Group based in Boca Raton, FL. … State audits over the last several years had already indicated the burgeoning problem. While it is recommended at youth facilities to have an inmate-to-guard ratio of 10:1 or 12:1, Walnut Grove had a ratio of 60:1.”
“When the Wolves Guard the Sheep,” by Mariah Adin in Kids and Crime, 28 March 2011
It’s not just less staff, it’s less qualified staff: Continue reading →

NAACP on MLK on War on Drugs

I hate to repeat a preacher, but it’s Sunday, and Robert Rooks wrote for NAACP 24 August 2011 U.S. Approach to War on Drugs Ignores Dr. King’s Lessons on Justice, Compassion.
After forty years of the war on drugs, America continues to have laws that stratify society based on race and class and continues to ignore Dr. King’s lessons on justice, compassion and love.

My favorite quote from Dr. King speaks to the heart of the problem with America’s criminal justice system. “Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

America’s criminal justice system is reckless and discriminate. America has five percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Blacks are incarcerated at four to five times the rate of whites for drug crimes, even though the majority of those who use and sell drugs are white. The majority of those incarcerated are people who have a history with mental health and substance abuse.

Not only does incarceration impact individuals but it undermines families,

Continue reading →

Medical issues at McRae warrant closing CCA private prison —ACLU

Azadeh Shahshahani wrote for Huffpost 18 August 2011, License to Abuse? Time for Bureau of Prisons to Sever Ties With CCA
Last week, the ACLU of Georgia submitted comments to the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to ask that the agency not renew its contract with Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) for operation of the McRae Correctional Facility.

McRae is located in Telfair County, Georgia. The prison is owned by CCA, which purchased it in 2000. McRae currently houses a population of low security, adult male, primarily non-citizen prisoners. The contract between CCA and the BOP is set to expire in November 2012.

Why? Lack of medical treatment for prisoners, among other reasons. For example: Continue reading →

Private prisons unaccountable —ACLU

Found on the ACLU blog of rights.

Azadeh Shahshahani wrote for the AJC 11 June 2009, Private prisons for immigrants lack accountability, oversight

On March 11, a 39-year-old man held in detention at the Stewart Detention Center, a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in southwest Georgia, died at a hospital in Columbus.
That’s in Lumpkin, west of Americus, south of Columbus.
To this day, the immediate cause of Roberto Martinez Medina’s death remains unclear (a press release pronounced the cause of death as “apparent natural causes”).

Last month, Leonard Odom, 37, died at the Wheeler County Correctional Facility in south-central Georgia.

That’s in Alamo, GA, between Macon, Tifton, and Savannah.
Both facilities are operated by Corrections Corp. of America, which has a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to operate the Stewart center and one with the Georgia Department of Corrections to operate the one in Wheeler County.
So, what happened? Continue reading →

30 jail deaths since 1994 to 2009 —George Boston Rhynes

Received today on Alabama bishops criticize ALEC’s immigration law -jsq
Churches and pastors need to view this video and see about these animals. That is since we read so much information about the Animal Shelter in our area about abused animals. What about these animals and the thirty deaths that no elected official, church, human being or orgnzations seem to care about.

Did you know that Valdosta-Lowndes County Jail is leading the State of Georgia in Jail Deaths for whatever reason. Yet, no one is talking about these people many of whom are military veterans that served their nation. So where is the humanity to man?

Yes, we have had 30 jail deaths since 1994 to 2009 and not the Lowndes County Attorney has put it in a letter in so many words

Continue reading →

Alabama bishops criticize ALEC’s immigration law

Some churches actually speak in public on what they profess to believe.

Campbell Robertson wrote for the New York Times 13 August 2011, Bishops Criticize Tough Alabama Immigration Law


Josh Anderson for the New York Times
CULLMAN, Ala. —On a sofa in the hallway of his office here, Mitchell Williams, the pastor of First United Methodist Church, announced that he was going to break the law. He is not the only church leader making such a declaration these days.

Since June, when Gov. Robert Bentley, a Republican, signed an immigration enforcement law called the toughest in the country by critics and supporters alike, the opposition has been vocal and unceasing.

Thousands of protesters have marched. Anxious farmers

Continue reading →

NAACP paradigm shift

Why does it matter that the NAACP wants an end to the War on Drugs?

Leonard Pitts Jr. wrote for the Miami Herald 30 July 2011, NAACP’s paradigm shift on ending the Drug War

Here’s why this matters. Or, more to the point, why it matters more than if such a statement came from Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. The NAACP is not just the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization. It is also its most conservative.
Conservative as in:
…denoting a propensity toward caution and a distrust of the bold, the risky, the new. And that’s the NAACP all over.

…there has always been something determinedly middle class and cautious about the NAACP. This is the group whose then-leader, Roy Wilkins, famously detested Martin Luther King for his street theatrics.

For that group, then, to demand an end to the Drug War represents a monumental sea change.

How monumental? Continue reading →

NAACP calls for end to War on Drugs

Nafari Vanaski, wrote for Gateway newspapers 18 August 2011, NAACP calling for truce in nation’s drug war
If you grew up at the same time that I did, you’ll remember the “Just Say No” anti-drug campaign that became popular in the mid-1980s and early 1990s.

It manifested itself in many ways, from the posters and talks in class to the “very special episodes” of shows such as “Blossom” and “The Facts of Life,” where a character encounters a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who is pressuring him or her to try drugs. Inevitably, good prevailed and the druggie turned out to be from a broken family and needed only a good face-to-face with Nancy Reagan, the driving force behind the campaign, to overcome his addiction. (She appeared on “Diff’rent Strokes,” and considering the real-life histories of Gary Coleman, Todd Bridges and Dana Plato, she probably should have stuck around for a five-episode story arc.)

“Just Say No” was part of the larger war on drugs the Nixon administration declared in 1971. For grown-ups, that war symbolized a lot more than sappy primetime television. Especially for black adults. For them, it meant stricter laws for those found buying, selling and distributing illegal drugs.

To that end, the NAACP took an interesting step at its national convention last month. It approved a resolution to end the war on drugs because of its devastating effect on the black community.

Interesting how the headline writer watered that down: NAACP called Continue reading →