That survey plat was included in EXCEL (CCA) Title-Survey Objections (Reno-Cavanaugh) of 19 November 2010. That’s one of a group of files returned by VLCIA in response to an open records request by Matt Flumerfelt.
We now have some idea of what the prison would look like, due to this plan: Continue reading
Adam Gopnik wrote for the New Yorker dated 30 January 2012, The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?
More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma goto prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then.
In Georgia,
1 in 13 of all adults is in jail, prison, probation,
or parole: highest in the country (1 in 31 nationwide).
Georgia is only number 4 in adults in prison, but we’re continuing
to lock more people up, so we may get to number 1 on that, too.
And we can’t afford that, especially not when we’re cutting school budgets. That graph of education vs. incarceration spending is for California. Somebody should do a similar graph for Georgia.Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about
two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.
The article does get into why we lock up so many people: Continue reading
David Crary wrote for AP today,
At a time of tight state budgets, it’s a trend posing difficult
dilemmas for policymakers. They must address soaring medical costs
for these older inmates and ponder whether some can be safely
released before their sentences expire.
The latest available figures from 2010 show that 8 percent of the
prison population — 124,400 inmates — was 55 or older,
compared to 3
percent in 1995, according to a report being released Friday by
Human Rights Watch. This oldest segment grew at six times the rate
of the overall prison population between 1995 and 2010, the report
says.
“Prisons were never designed to be geriatric facilities,” said Jamie
Fellner, a Human Rights Watch special adviser who wrote the report.
“Yet U.S. corrections officials now operate old age homes behind
bars.”
Look at this sob story:
Continue reading
No, they were designed to be profit centers for prison profiteers.
This comes from the ACLU’s Prison Voices, Episode 1: Private Prisons: Continue readingIn my view, the worst thing is that they have normalized the notion of incarcerating people for profit. Basically commodifying people, seeing them as nothing more than a revenue stream….
If you incarcerate more people and you put more people in your private prisons you make more money. Which provides perverse incentives against reforming our justice system.
And increasing the number of people we’re putting in prison, whether they need to be there or not, just to generate corporate profit. I think that’s incredibly immoral and unethical, I think that’s the worst aspect of our private prison industry.
M. Alex Johnson of msnbc.com and Bill Lambdin of WNYT-TV wrote yesterday for MSNBC, Inside the secret industry of inmate-staffed call centers,
When you call a company or government agency for help, there’s agood chance the person on the other end of the line is a prison inmate.
The federal government calls it “the best-kept secret in outsourcing” — providing inmates to staff call centers and other services in both the private and public sectors.
The U.S. government, through a 75-year-old program called Federal Prison Industries, makes about $750 million a year providing prison labor, federal records show. The great majority of those contracts are with other federal agencies for services as diverse as laundry, construction, data conversion and manufacture of emergency equipment.
We’ve heard of Prison Industries before.
The
Georgia prisoners who struck back in January 2011
work for Prison Industries, allegedly for no pay.
But the program also markets itself to businesses under a different name, Unicor, providing commercial market and product-related services. Unicor made about $10 million from “other agencies and customers” in the first six months of fiscal year 2011 (the most recent period for which official figures are available), according to an msnbc.com analysis of its sales records.Continue readingThe Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons don’t
Knoxville News editorial of 14 March 2010, Chalk two up for open government
So eventually CCA will have to surrender at least some of the records, although there is still haggling in court over which exceptions CCA can use for which records. (And there’s always the old “we didn’t keep them that long” trick.)CAA[sic] maintained it wasn’t the functional equivalent of a government agency, but the Appeals Court rejected that claim and the Supreme Court refused even to hear it.
“With all due respect to CAA[sic],” Appeals Court Judge D. Michael Swiney wrote in his opinion on Friedman’s case, “this Court is at a loss as to how operating a state prison could be considered anything less than a governmental function.”
The Tennessee Supreme Court had already ruled about government contractors:
“When a private entity’s relationship with the government is so extensive that the entity serves as the functional equivalent of a governmental agency, the accountability created by public oversight should be preserved.”I wonder if Georgia will accept a Tennessee precedent?
-jsq
But someone has composed this google map that gives the big picture. I don’t know if this map is current or accurate, but the spot checks I’ve made show markers for real prisons. Did you know there were so many?
Apparently,
Prisons are
bad economics, producing no longterm improvement in employment, and risking closure, leaving communities with expensive white elephants.
We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.
Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.
Follow
this link
to petition the Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority.
-jsq
Keith McCants posted Wednesday in Peanut Politics,
Prisons as Economic Development: Boom or Bust for Rural Georgia?
In Georgia today there are more prisoners than farmers. And while
most prisoners in Georgia are from urban communities, most prisons
are now in rural areas with high levels of poverty & a unskilled,
uneducated workforce. During the last two decades, the large-scale
use of incarceration to solve social problems has combined with the
fall-out of globalization to produce an ominous trend: prisons have
become a “growth industry” in rural Georgia, in fact Rural America.
Communities in isolated regions of the state began suffering from declines in farming, mining, timber-work and manufacturing are now begging for prisons to be built in their backyards. The economic restructuring that began in the troubled decade of the 1980s has had dramatic social and economic consequences for rural communities and small towns. Together the farm crises, factory closings, corporate downsizing, shift to service sector employment and the substitution of major regional and national chains for local, main-street businesses have triggered profound change in these areas. So, many rural areas have bought into prisons as a growth industry.
Some consequences are pretty obvious:
Many small rural towns have become dependent on an industry which itself is dependent on the continuation of crime-producing conditions.Others may take more time to see: Continue reading
Visiting CCA HQ in Nashville, Tennessee the other day, Gretchen said:
Here we are at CCA, Corrections Corporation of America. They think that they’re patriotic; they have a U.S. flag. And they have a Corrections Corporation of America flag and it says Excellence in Corrections. We don’t think too much of private prisons.Here’s the video.No private prisons.
No CCA.
You can help stop CCA right here at home.
We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.
Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.
Follow
this link
to petition the Industrial Authority.
-jsq
Here’s another example David Donnelly wrote for Huffpo 17 Nov 2011, Private Prisons Industry: Increasing Incarcerations, Maximizing Profits and Corrupting Our Democracy,Yet the reality is that private prison lobbyists regularly buy influence with state and federal officials, not only to win lucrative contracts, but also to change or preserve policies that increase the number of people behind bars. Private companies have made huge profits off the mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders, and are now turning their attention to increasing the detention of Latino immigrants—the newest profit center for the prison industrial complex. Ultimately there is no way to reverse the costly trend toward mass incarceration without reducing the influence of these companies and their money in our democracy.
Earlier this year in Louisiana, a plan by Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-LA) to privatize prisons narrowly failed in a legislative committee by a vote of 13 to 12. The 12 members of the House Appropriations Committee who voted to approve the prison privatization plan have received more than three times more money from private prison donors than the 13 members who voted against the plan, according to an analysis of data from the Louisiana Ethics Administration and the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Gov. Jindal himself has taken nearly $30,000 from the private prison industry.And of course in Georgia there’s HB 87, which isn’t really about excluding immigrants; Continue reading
