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….
-jsq
Standard & Poor’s lowered Southern Company’s rating from stable to negative
because of the risks of Kemper Coal in Mississippi, and SO’s stock price plummetted.
This was immediately after
activists grilled SO on that and other topics
at the
SO stockholder meeting.
Wait ’till S&P catches on to the risks of SO’s
19-months-late and $1 billion-over-budget nukes at Plant Vogtle in Georgia!
Or SO’s non-action so far on
the challenge of distributed solar.