“Corrections over the past 25 years has become an increasingly big component of state budgets, to the point that it’s competing for funding with education and other core services,” Mauer said. “And you can’t have it both ways anymore.”
If we want knowledge-based jobs here, a private prison is not how to get them. Let’s not build a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia. Spend those tax dollars on education instead.
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The AJC has noticed
Sounds like trouble is brewing down I-75. —Jim Gallowaythat the VDT is getting serious about open records requests:
The Valdosta Daily Times’ Open Records request concerning violent incidents in the Valdosta State Prison was denied Monday.Kay Harris wrote that in the VDT today.The Department of Corrections (DOC) denied all requests in the Times’ Open Records filing, stating that, under Georgia law, the documents do not have to be released.
After receiving phone calls from concerned individuals who have knowledge of recent violent prison attacks, the Times submitted the Open Records request to Department of Corrections Commissioner Brian Owens.
Curiously,
the state doesn’t even
provide a picture of the prison.
It’s enough to make you wonder what they have to hide.
Apparently the VDT wonders: Continue reading
Susan Kinzie wrote in the Washington Post 30 May 2011, New Virginia prison sits empty, at a cost of more than $700,000 a year
This is how bad the economy is in southwestern Virginia: People are wishing they had more criminals in town.Meanwhile, the story continued, Virginia has closed 10 prisons due to budget shortfalls and lack of prisoners. And it’s not just Virginia: Continue reading
That’s because Grayson County has a brand-new state prison standing empty. No prisoners. And that means no guards, no administrators, no staff, no jobs.
“I wish they would go ahead and open it up,” said Rhonda James of Mouth of Wilson, echoing many residents there. “We really need it in the county really bad.”
Three hundred new jobs — maybe 350 — that’s what people were told when the prison was planned. With about 11 percent unemployment and no relief in sight, that sounded really good to an awful lot of people here.
But months after the commonwealth finished building the 1,024-bed medium-security prison for $105 million, it remains empty, coils of razor wire and red roofs shining in the sun, new parking lot all but deserted and a yawning warehouse waiting for supplies.
And it’s costing more than $700,000 a year to maintain.
That’s right, they leave we the taxpayers to pay more in public prisons to house the most expensive prisoners:The conviction that private prisons save money helped drive more than 30 states to turn to them for housing inmates. But Arizona shows that popular wisdom might be wrong: Data there suggest that privately operated prisons can cost more to operate than state-run prisons — even though they often steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates.
The research, by the Arizona Department of Corrections, also reveals a murky aspect of private prisons that helps them appear less expensive: They often house only relatively healthy inmates.And yet private prisons still cost more.“It’s cherry-picking,” said State Representative Chad Campbell, leader of the House Democrats. “They leave the most expensive prisoners with taxpayers and take the easy prisoners.”
Could it have something to do with their executive salaries?
Anyway, we don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County. Spend that tax money on education instead.
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Which means that California, like so many other states, including Georgia, spends more on prisons than on education.Going to a RAND Corporation study, in 1994 higher education received 12 percent of the state budget, corrections 9 percent, other services 9 percent (which included controlling environmental pollution, management of parks, fighting of brush fires, regulating insurance and other industries). By 2002 higher education took the biggest hit, along with “ other services,” both of which were virtually eliminated from the state budget. Corrections on the other hand went from 9 percent to 18 percent of the budget.
And not just public prisons anymore: Continue reading
The Guardian editorialized 15 May 2011, Drug laws: 40 years on, only a complete change of approach will do: The Misuse of Drugs Act has failed utterly and there is no political consensus about the idea of trying anything new
It is 40 years since Parliament passed the Misuse of Drugs Act, establishing the framework that, with periodic tweaks, is used for controlling substance abuse today. Actual drug use has been going on a lot longer, so it is hardly surprising that one legal instrument has failed to kill the habit.Continue readingIt is remarkable, however, how utterly the system has failed. Drugs are available to
Writes Douglas Stanglin today in USA TODAY,
According to whom?“The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world,” says the Report of the Global Commission on Drug Policy in its opening statement. “Fifty years after the initiation of the U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, and 40 years after President Nixon launched the U.S. government’s war on drugs, fundamental reforms in national and global drug control policies are urgently needed.”
The 19-member commission, a private venture chaired by ex-Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, includes George Schultz, President Reagan’s Secretary of State; Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group; former U.N. Secretary General Koffi Anna; George Papandreou, prime minister of Greece; Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, and Javier Solana,former EU foreign minister.Here’s their full report.
What do they recommend? Continue reading
And Sicilia had a stern judgment to make — as King did in his time — about the U.S. government: “Since the war was unleashed as a means to exterminate (drug trafficking), the United States, which is the grand consumer of these toxic substances, has not done anything to support us.”This was about Javier Sicilia and the war on drugs in Mexico.
MLK? Harsh? Maybe the writer is thinking about this speech, Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence:
One year later to the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead. This is what he died for: Continue readingMy third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years — especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.
Here’s his letter to the editor of the Gratiot County Herald of 12 May 2011:
Continue readingDear Governor Snyder,
In these tough economic times, schools are hurting. And yes, everyone in Michigan is hurting right now financially, but why aren’t we protecting schools? Schools are the one place on Earth that people look to to “fix” what is wrong with society by educating our youth and preparing them to take on the issues that society has created.
One solution I believe we must do is take a look at our corrections system in Michigan. We rank nationally at the top in the number of people we incarcerate. We also spend the most money per prisoner annually than any other state in the union. Now, I like to be at the top of lists, but this is one ranking that I don’t believe Michigan wants to be on top of.
Consider the life of a Michigan prisoner. They get three square meals a day. Access to free health care. Internet. Cable television. Access to a library. A weight room. Computer lab. They can earn a degree. A roof over their heads. Clothing. Everything we just listed we DO NOT provide to our school children.
This is why I’m proposing to make my school a prison.
Neal Peirce wrote a syndicated column 22 May 2011, Misguided U.S. drug policies afflict Mexico, Central America:
So what can be done? Continue readingThe war on drugs in Mexico, partially funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government assistance, has not only failed to curb the trade but intensified horrific violence, corruption and human rights abuses, writes Neal Peirce.
For most Americans, the recent news of popular demonstrations in Mexico was probably a small diversion from the daily tide of bloody global reports from such faraway hot spots as Pakistan, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and Bahrain.
Why worry, most of us likely concluded, if thousands of Mexicans are marching in the streets, protesting the horrific violence and high death toll in their nation’s raging drug war? Isn’t that their problem?
It’s true, the news reports focus less on the American role, more on growing anger with the government of President Felipe Calderón and the meager returns from the massive police and military crackdown on the drug trade he inaugurated in 2006.
Since then, more than 37,000 Mexicans have been murdered, often tortured and brutalized before their deaths, as cartels battle for control of drug smuggling routes and brazenly assassinate anyone, official or average citizen, they think is in their way.
The hard lesson is that the war on drug dealers, decreed by Calderón and partially funded by hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. government assistance, has not only failed to curb the trade but intensified horrific violence, corruption and human-rights abuses.