Tag Archives: prison

Prisoner call centers

Prisoners answering the telephone for your government? Yes, apparently.

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 a good 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.

The Justice Department and the U.S. Bureau of Prisons don’t

Continue reading →

Map of prisons in Georgia

The Georgia Department of Corrections (GDOC) does not provide a map of prisons in Georgia; at least not that I’ve been able to find. CCA does not provide a map of its private prisons, either. This omission seems odd for an industry that brags about how good it is economically.

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,

  • the reddish circles are county prisons;
  • the red arrows are state prisons for men like Valdosta State Prison;
  • the yellow arrows are state prisons for women (Pulaski) or juveniles (Arrendale), except Washington State Prison appears to be back to housing men;
  • the blue arrows are Regional Youth Detention Centers (RYDC);
  • and the green arrows are at least some of CCA’s private prisons,

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

Rural prisons: economic bane or bust?

Some interesting points about prisons from a Georgia blogger.

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 →

Private prison profits buying more laws to lock people up

Another report about money and private prisons (in addition to the ACLU’s Banking on Bondage), this one Public Campaign and PICO National Network, Unholy Alliance: How the Private Prison Industry is Corrupting Our Democracy and Promoting Mass Incarceration. It establishes that the “kids for cash” scandal, in which two judges accepted kickbacks in exchange for locking up juveniles, was just the tip of the iceberg.
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.
Here’s another example David Donnelly wrote for Huffpo 17 Nov 2011, Private Prisons Industry: Increasing Incarcerations, Maximizing Profits and Corrupting 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 →

The private prison game: Banking on Bondage

Rania Khalek wrote for AlterNet 29 November 2011, The Shocking Ways the Corporate Prison Industry Games the System
Just a decade ago, private prisons were a dying industry awash in corruption and mired in lawsuits, particularly Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s largest private prison operator. Today, these companies are booming once again, yet the lawsuits and scandals continue to pile up. Meanwhile, more and more evidence shows that compared to publicly run prisons, private jails are filthier, more violent, less accountable, and contrary to what privatization advocates peddle as truth, do not save money. In fact, more recent findings suggest that private prisons could be more costly.

So why are they still in business?

In a recently published report, “Banking on Bondage: Mass Incarceration and Private Prisons,” the American Civil Liberties Union examines the history of prison privatization and finds that private prison companies owe their continued and prosperous existence to skyrocketing immigration detention post September 11 as well as the firm hold they have gained over elected and appointed officials.

We’d already heard from Bloomberg that Continue reading →

No Private Prison Petition

Most people I talk to about the proposed private prison in Lowndes County Georgia have never heard of it, and many of them want to know where they can find out more. Linked from the front page of the LAKE website is the letter to the Industrial Authority people are signing, which in turn has links to an online petition and a large amount of background material.

Feel free to use any of this as pointers to research for writing your own letter, of course.

We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia. Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.

-jsq

Private prisons —Matt Flumerfelt

Received yesterday. -jsq
Dear Andrea, We spoke not long ago by phone. I just want to let you know that plans to bring in a private prison here are not going to sit well with many of us. In fact, it will most likely bring about a repeat of the recent Biomass issue. I don’t mean we are opposed to it. I mean we are vehemently opposed to it. It seems that Allen Ricketts and the other Board members don’t understand that Valdosta’s citizens don’t want to be informed of, for example, what finished products and raw materials will be stored in the distribution center slated to locate in Valdosta AFTER the contract has been signed. We have a right to know beforehand what kind of facility it is and what will be stored there. Informing us after the fact is not transparency. This is an issue that will continue to be revisited as long as the VLCIA continues to act unilaterally without considering the wishes of those who live here. We don’t want to be presented with a fait accompli. Also, the VLCIA is really not doing due diligence when it continues to court businesses that raise concerns over the ethical standards of the Board itself. Thanks. Matt Flumerfelt

Opposed to a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia. —John S. Quarterman, et al.

A private prison in Lowndes County would be a bad business decision: it would not increase employment, it would be likely to close because of lack of “customers”, and it would drive away knowledge-based workers. The letter I read to the Industrial Authority Board and Staff Tuesday on behalf of some members of the community sumarizes appended documentation of all those and other points.

If you’d also like to sign, I’m still collecting signatures, and will periodically drop off more signed copies. Or, even better, write your own letter and send it to the Industrial Authority. Submit it to this blog and we’ll probably publish it.

Here’s the video:


Opposed to a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia. —John S. Quarterman
Regular Meeting, Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority (VLCIA),
Norman Bennett, Tom Call, Roy Copeland chairman, Mary Gooding, Jerry Jennett,
Andrea Schruijer Executive Director, J. Stephen Gupton attorney, Allan Ricketts Project Manager,
Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 18 October 2011.
Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.

Text of the letter is appended; follow the link for the documentation. Continue reading →

Some U.K. folks having doubts about catching up with U.S. in prisons

Will Self wrote 7 October 2011 for the BBC, A Point of View: Prisons don’t work
It was Dostoevsky who said: “The degree of civilisation in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.” But in contemporary Britain you don’t even need to do this, you can simply stand on a street corner and wait for the ghosts to come flitting past in order to appreciate its parlous condition.

We now have the highest prison population in Europe by a considerable measure, and following the recent riots there is no likelihood of it decreasing.

Of course, we aren’t quite at the levels enjoyed by our closest allies, those prime exponents of the civilising mission the United States, whose extensive gulag now houses, it is estimated, more African American men than were enslaved immediately prior to their Civil War – but we’re getting there.

Why the second thoughts? Continue reading →

$1 of 17 GA tax dollars spent on prisons

Carrie Teegardin wrote for the AJC 4 April 2010, Georgia prison population, costs on rise
Georgia operates the fifth-largest prison system in the nation, at a cost of $1 billion a year. The job of overseeing 60,000 inmates and 150,000 felons on probation consumes 1 of every 17 state dollars.
Above owed to Farrah D. Reed, who also commented on Gov. Deal: the bad, prison slave labor competing with free labor:
Maybe if our tax dollars were spent on education and rehabilitation we wouldn’t have so many folks locked up in the first place!

-jsq