National Public Service Council To Abolish Private Prisons: ICE

Vision Without Action Is A Daydream. Action Without Vision A Nightmare.

The National Public Service Council To Abolish Private Prisons made a concerted effort when choosing its name to erase any possibility of ambiguity regarding who we are and our mission statement. It is our unwavering organizational belief that as long as our government permits Private Prisons For Profit to operate as legal businesses, the American Criminal Justice System, in particular, will never have the capacity to develop -in theory or otherwise- a credibility that the people of this great nation can respect and feel morally comfortable with. This is not a complicated matter. In spite of the endless assortment of political debates and the countless number of discussions among independent committees appointed to research and examine the economic pros and cons of privatization, and in spite of all the "other" arguments created by design, to distract, divide, frighten and confuse the citizens of this country and prevent them from using humane common sense, one cannot ignore or pretend not to see the flashing red flag draped around the philosophical question standing at attention in the middle of the room. Arguably, the criminal justice system is not designed to be a "moral compass." However, it cannot ignore or deny the inherent components at the core of its foundation: equality, fairness, and the humane practice of justice. These are more than lofty concepts to be arbitrarily applied when convenience allows. Our justice system must offer unequivocal, resplendent and reliable standards of "right and wrong" ..."just and unjust" because the people cannot respect or pledge an allegiance to a justice system that fails to demonstrate the difference between "right and wrong" in its own application. The inherent and most fundamental responsibility of the criminal justice system cannot be shirked, avoided, taken lightly or "jobbed out." Like it or not, when an institution is the definitive symbol representing authority and judicial proceeding, your function must reflect a fundamental fairness, and above all else, it must be accountable to all of its citizens. If ever there was a reason for second guessing the process or the ability of the United States Government (Federal & State) to perform its duty when addressing the important task of corrections and rehabilitation in the criminal justice system, the cornerstone of that uncertainty sits squarely upon the shoulders that permit private prisons for profit to operate in the United States of America. Clearly, this immoral profit driven system is without parallel in its resemblance to the most heinous institution to ever exist upon American soil. Slavery.

Aristotle wrote, "It is the peculiarity of man, in comparison with the rest of the animal world that he alone possesses a perception of good and evil, of the just and the unjust"

INCARCERATING PEOPLE FOR PROFIT IS IN A WORD WRONG

All law emanates from the people, so that, when the laws thus enacted are not executed, the power returns to the people, and is theirs whenever they may choose to exercise it.

We are mindful that the Supreme Court is the final interpreter of the constitution...we are also mindful that the federal and state correctional facilities originate from government design and, therefore, must be regulated and maintained by the government.

We must restore the principles and the vacated promise of our judicial system. Our government cannot continue to "job-out" its obligation and neglect its duty to the individuals confined in the corrections and rehabilitation facilities throughout this nation, nor can it ignore the will of the people that it was designed to serve and protect.

There is urgent need for the good people of this country to emerge from the shadows of indifference, apathy, cynicism, fear, and those other dark places that we migrate to when we are overwhelmed by frustration and the loss of hope.

My hope is that you will support the NPSCTAPP with a show of solidarity by signing our petition to send one million signatures to congress expressing the will of the people to abolish the private prison for profit industry. Ahma Daeus

Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit

By IAN URBINA and SEAN D. HAMILL
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

For years, youth advocacy groups complained that Judge Ciavarella was unusually harsh. He sent a quarter of his juvenile defendants to detention centers from 2002 to 2006, compared with a state rate of 1 in 10. He also routinely ignored requests for leniency made by prosecutors and probation officers.

“The juvenile system, by design, is intended to be a less punitive system than the adult system, and yet here were scores of children with very minor infractions having their lives ruined,” said Marsha Levick, a lawyer with the Philadelphia-based Juvenile Law Center.

“There was a culture of intimidation surrounding this judge and no one was willing to speak up about the sentences he was handing down.”

Showing posts with label ICE. Show all posts

U.S. to Reform Policy on Detention for Immigrants

By NINA BERNSTEIN
New York Times
Details are sketchy, and even the first steps will take months or years to complete. They include reviewing the federal government’s contracts with more than 350 local jails and private prisons, with an eye toward consolidating many detainees in places more suitable for noncriminals facing deportation — some possibly in centers built and run by the government.

A citizen's nightmare! U.S. Citizens wrongly detained, deported

By: Tyche Hendricks
SFGate
Chronicle Editorials
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say they never would knowingly detain or deport a U.S. citizen. But it happens, as staff writer Tyche Hendricks outlined Monday in a series of chilling anecdotes about citizens who were held - and even deported - by U.S. immigration authorities.What is clear in those incidents is that this nation does not have sufficient safeguards against the detention of people who lack the financial means or mental wherewithal to readily prove their citizenship. Some detainees are shipped thousands of miles from their homes, without access to an attorney.

Immigration detention center ready for inmates

By: Stephen Gurr
GAINESVILLETIMES.COM
Former county jail could house first detainees soon
Officials with the Corrections Corp. of America were purposely vague on when exactly the recently-renamed North Georgia Detention Center would begin taking in federal immigration detainees, citing security concerns.

Justice Ignored

New York Times
Editorial
In January 2007, two immigrant advocacy groups and two former immigration detainees petitioned the Department of Homeland Security to take a simple but important step. They asked it to establish legally enforceable standards for the detention system, a fast-growing network of federal centers, county jails and private prisons that has been plagued by medical neglect and abuse.

UNSTRUCTURED FINANCE "The Financing of Detention"

Posted By: Jessica Silver-Greenberg
Business Week
The private prison industry has moved its sights, from bread and butter incarceration, to the new gold rush: immigrant detention. You might have thought that a seemingly left-leaning Obama administration would shut off the spigot of government dollars flowing to private prison contractors, especially given the spotty track record many of these firms have. But Obama is actually upping the ante, by funding a newly minted project called “Secure Communities.” This immigration policy started in December is based around databases. It deputizes local law enforcement to run a federal back-ground check on any local arrests. The aim is to target immigrants with serious crimes on their record, and deport them.

Restoring Integrity to the Immigration System

TOM BARRY
Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)

Americas Program Policy Report

There is broad agreement that the immigration system is broken. But reaching a political consensus on how to fix the system has in recent years proved impossible. In the absence of a comprehensive immigration reform, the government has adopted a "get-tough" posture on immigration designed to "restore integrity to the immigration system" and "uphold the rule of law."

Immigrants are being arrested, imprisoned, and deported in record numbers. Acknowledging the short-term inability to remove all estimated 11-12 million unauthorized immigrants, the federal government has prioritized the imprisonment and removal of "criminal aliens—legal and unauthorized immigrants who have run afoul of the law." However, in the search for "criminal aliens" and "fugitive aliens," the government has cast an alarmingly wide and tightly woven net.

"War on Crime" Targets Immigrants

BY: TOM BARRY, CIP AMERICAS PROGRAM REPORT

Immigrants have reenergized the flagging "war on crime." Charges against immigrants are clogging federal courts, and new prisons and detention centers are opening to accommodate immigrants. The Obama administration is asking for more money to expand the dragnet for "criminal aliens" and to crack down on drugs and crime along the border.

Violent crime has been declining since the early 1990s, but rising fears about foreign terrorism and new immigrant flows have recharged the political pressures to ramp up the flagging "war on crime" since the mid-1990s. Republican-led legislative measures in 1996 that targeted immigrants and terrorists and the post-Sept. 11 measures linking immigration and homeland security issues have combined to put immigrants in the center of the battle against crime in America.

The National Imperative to Imprison Immigrants for Profit

Tom Barry

Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP)

There is a codependent relationship between the private prison industry and the federal government's immigration enforcement apparatus. Immigrant detention jumpstarted the two largest prison companies—Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group—in the prison industry.

The Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) contracted CCA in 1983 and GEO (then Wackenhut Services, Inc.) in 1987 to provide prison beds for detained immigrants. These INS immigrant detention centers were among the first private prisons in the United States.

Immigration detention center considered for L.A. area

By Anna Gorman
The federal government is looking for contractors to build a possible detention center in the Los Angeles area that would hold up to 2,200 illegal immigrants and others suspected of violating immigration laws.

Private Prison Personnel Could Walk Off Job

Reported by: Aubrey Mika Chancellor
PEARSALL -- News 4 WOAI has learned guards could go on strike at a detention center in our area. Negotiations over a pay raise have stalled and it could end up costing you money. The South Texas Detention Complex in Pearsall is where illegal immigrants are held while waiting to be deported. But soon those detainees may have no one to guard them. The union’s chief negotiator Howard Johannssen says, “This employer refuses to give them a pay raise of any sort.”

Sojourners are there for detainees

By HELEN O'NEILL
AP Special Correspondent
"H-26," the guard yelled. "You have a visitor."
Locked in a windowless warehouse for three months, Ibrahim Cisse had long given up hope of anyone finding him. Now, his mind raced. How could he possibly have a visitor when no one in this country knew his name?

Detention system criticized as cruel

The Associated Press
"We are a country that cares about people but first we care about our own people and that they know who is here and why," said ICE spokeswoman Pat Reilly.
But a broad coalition of human rights groups criticize a system that indefinitely incarcerates people who have committed no crimes, and the groups argue, inflicts lasting psychological damage on top of traumas many have already experienced. They also raise questions about the legality of some ICE policies and the accountability of programs that cost billions of taxpayer dollars and affect millions of lives.

Immigrant center draws criticism

By JESSICA VESS
KVUE News
Inside a former prison in Taylor, surrounded by chain link fences, sit nearly 400 immigrants.
"The people who are being housed there are not criminals," said former Mayor of Georgetown, Mary Ellen Kersch.

Leaning on Jail, City of Immigrants Fills Cells With Its Own

By NINA BERNSTEIN
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored. Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse

Immigrants fuel one economic growth sector: Prisons

by Tom Barry
At a time when most other industries are reporting slackening consumer demand and plunging revenues, the executives of the major private companies providing prison services attribute their fortunes to the sorry fate of America's immigrant population. That's not likely to change any time soon.

The Profit Of Detention

JOSH WHITE & NICK MIROFF
Washington Post Staff Writers Unveil The Private $21 Million (1,040 bed) Detention Facility Created to Aid Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

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BOSTON LEGAL'S "GUARDIANS AND GATEKEEPERS"

Ahma Daeus' Favorite Quotes

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable" JOHN F. KENNEDY
"We must be the change we want to see in the world".........GANDHI
"We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies".... M.L. KING JR.
"Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty, the obedient must be slaves"
"The law will never make a man free; it is men who have got to make the law free"..... HENRY DAVID THOREAU
"The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear" ................AUNG SAN SUU KYI
"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, it becomes less & less important whether I am afraid"................... AUDRE LORDE
"The function of freedom Is to free someone else".............TONI MORRISON

The Select Few Are Cashing In: Shocking Corruption at The Washington Post

http://www.alternet.org/politics/141258
ALTERNET
Bill Moyers & Michael Winship
This Is The Level Of Corruption We Constantly Face!
If you want to know what really matters in Washington, don't go to Capitol Hill for one of those hearings, or pay attention to those staged White House "town meetings." They're just for show. What really happens -- the serious business of Washington -- happens in the shadows, out of sight, off the record. Only occasionally -- and usually only because someone high up stumbles -- do we get a glimpse of just how pervasive the corruption has become.

The Business of Detention: Cracking Down On Immigration & Locking Up Profits

http://www.businessofdetention.com/?p=74
In a business park aptly named Export Plaza, Corrections Corporation of America runs a complex of concrete buildings surrounded by razor wire. It’s here where immigrants, like Sergia Santibanez, are locked up until they agree to leave the country. Private detention centers – most of which are operated by CCA – are key to the federal government’s goal of “ensuring the departure from the United States of all removable aliens,” which are estimated to total about 12 million.

Prison Profiteers Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration

ALL THE MONEY YOU NEED
http://allthemoneyouneed.com/2009/05/prison-profiteers-who-makes-money-from-mass-incarceration/
Positive: With the baby boomlet demographics, we foresee increasing demand for juvenile [incarceration] services. Negative:…it is often difficult to maintain the occupancy rates required for profitability.”—from a report produced for the private prison industry by investment analysts First Analysis Securities Corporation

Locking up 2.3 million people isn’t cheap. Each year federal, state, and local governments spend over $185 billion annually in tax dollars to ensure that one out of every 137 Americans is imprisoned. Prison Profiteers looks at the private prison companies, investment banks, churches, guard unions, medical corporations, and other industries and individuals that benefit from this country’s experiment with mass imprisonment. It lets us follow the money from public to private hands and exposes how monies formerly designated for the public good are diverted to prisons and their maintenance. Find out where your tax dollars are going as you help to bankroll the biggest prison machine the world has ever seen

Doing borrowed time: The high cost of back-door prison finance

JUSTICE STRATEGIES
http://www.justicestrategies.org/node/102
The U.S. prison population doubled during the 1980s and nearly doubled again in the following decade. By the end of the 1990s the nation's prisons held more than 1.3 million prisoners while the total incarcerated population - including jails and detention centers - fell just short of two million.

Prison population growth has continued since the turn of the century but at a much slower pace. Average annual growth rates fell from nearly seven percent during the 1990s to just under two percent in the past half-decade.

Elected officials in a large majority of states responded by introducing reforms designed to cut costs and improve criminal justice outcomes. Some canceled or postponed plans for new prison construction while others cut costs by closing housing units or entire prisons. Yet despite tight budgets and growing public opposition to new prison spending, lawmakers in several states - including Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Oregon, North Carolina, and Washington - continue to pursue plans for thousands of new prison beds.

Cost of locking up Americans too high: Pew study

http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE5215TW20090302?sp=true

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - One in every 31 U.S. adults is in the corrections system, which includes jail, prison, probation and supervision, more than double the rate of a quarter century ago, according to a report released on Monday by the Pew Center on the States.

The study, which said the current rate compares to one in 77 in 1982, concluded that with declining resources, more emphasis should be put on community supervision, not jail or prison.

"Violent and career criminals need to be locked up, and for a long time. But our research shows that prisons are housing too many people who can be managed safely and held accountable in the community at far lower cost," said Adam Gelb, director of the Center's Public Safety Performance Project, which produced the report.

Hope On A Tightrope

"The Three Pillars of deep spirituality are Faith, Hope and Love - yet it is "Courage" that enables all three."

We travel through life with two inescapable companions - change and choice. To be human means choosing the courage to think, love, hope and fight for justice and freedom in the face of catastrophe.

Deep and mature spirituality is rooted in a wrestling with catastrophe. Black spirituality has been the antidote to the vicious attempts to render us so intimidated and hapless that we give up, cave in, or sell out to an unjust status quo. Our unimagined victories in the face of catastrophic conditions are majestic evidence of a rich spiritual tradition. The question is never whether catastrophes will come but rather, when they come, what choices will we make?

Spirituality gives us armor to cope with disaster. The three pillars of deep spirituality are faith, hope and love - yet it is courage that enables all three. Faith enables us to face the future - including inescapable catastrophes - with humility and generosity. Yet there is no faith without the courage to be humble. Hope empowers us to stay on the tightrope despite the winds and storms of catastrophes. Yet there is no hope without the courage to fight despair. Love enobles us to maintain a steadfast commitment to the well-being of someone or some cause greater than our own petty ego. Yet there is no love without the courage to surrender to something more priceless than yourself.

The profoundly spiritual dimension that we all face is whether we will choose to counter excessive greed, hatred and fear with courageous fairness, compassion and hope. Let us pray, push and pull for this election to transform decaying school systems, dilapidated housing, unavailable health care and child care, the many jobs without a living wage, gun violence run amok and mean spirited policies here and abroad.

Barack Obama's trek to the White House represents a democratic awakening of the American people. But we know that a mere Black face in a high place does not by itself yield humane results- each of us must be accountable for those who suffer. Let us hope on our tightropes that we will have the vision, courage and determination to keep our spiritual focus on the catastrophic circumstances of our society and world. Together with faith, hope and love, we can choose to plant the indestructible seeds of change. -CORNELL WEST

Criminal Justice Reform Loses a Champion

by Matt Kelley
The collapse of Bernard Madoff’s $50 billion PONZI scheme is a blow to criminal justice reform in the United States , as it has led to the closure of the JEHT Foundation, a longtime champion of criminal justice causes.
The funds of the JEHT Foundation (the acronym stands for Justice, Equality, Human dignity and Tolerance) were invested with Madoff, and the foundation announced this week that it will close in January. The group previously gave $25-$30 million a year to dozens of worthy causes around the world. Among the groups receiving part of their funding from JEHT were the Center for Constitutional Rights, the ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the Death Penalty Information Center, and the Innocence Project (my employer when I’m not blogging here). The list of progressive, important organizations goes on and on.
Today we learned that Madoff will be under house arrest while a trial is pending. It’ll be tough for him to decide which house to be under arrest in – he’s got places on Long Island and in Palm Beach , Florida . So he'll be enjoying the cushy treatment of a white-collar criminal while JEHT disappears, and the dozens of groups it supported will have to keep fighting the odds to help clients in the daily grind of the life-and-death justice system apparently reserved only for the rest of us.

The New Math Of Slavery Is Adding Up & Locking Them Down

Because of deeply flawed and discriminatory sentencing policies, our prisons hold a disproportionate number of people of color, and people with mental illness and addiction problems. At mid-year 2007, the rate at which African-American men were serving sentences was an astounding 4,618 per 100,000. The comparable rates for Hispanic males were 1,747 sentenced prisoners per 100,000 and, for white males, 773 per 100,000. This means black males were six times more likely, and Hispanic males twice as likely, to be held in custody than white males. According to the most recent report by the U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 56% of state prisoners, 45% of federal prisoners, and 64% of jail inmates in the United States suffer from mental illness.

The profound failures of the U.S. prison system defy our common values of human dignity, justice, and respect. If Fyodor Dostoevsky is correct when he argues, "A society should be judged not by how it treats its outstanding citizens but by how it treats its criminals," then Americans should truly be ashamed. Dramatic reforms to our prison system are long overdue. Ahma Daeus

"Injustice Anywhere Is A Threat To Justice Everywhere"

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Vision Without Action Is A Daydream. Action Without Vision A Nightmare.

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Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit

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Ahma Daeus' Favorite Quotes

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The Select Few Are Cashing In: Shocking Corruption at The Washington Post

The Business of Detention: Cracking Down On Immigration & Locking Up Profits

Prison Profiteers Who Makes Money from Mass Incarceration

Doing borrowed time: The high cost of back-door prison finance

Cost of locking up Americans too high: Pew study

Slavery Haunts America's Plantation Prisons

Hope On A Tightrope

Marian Wright Edelman at Morehouse

Cradle To Prison Pipeline Campaign

Criminal Justice Reform Loses a Champion

As His Inmates Grew Thinner, a Sheriff’s Wallet Grew Fatter

It's Tme For The United States To Banish "the predatory class"...

"CORRECTIONS"

Slow Train To Freedom

The New Math Of Slavery Is Adding Up & Locking Them Down

Singing the Mississippi Prison Blues

New Zealand : "The Global Role Model"

Three Strikes & Private Prisons In New Zealand (The New World Order)

Single Voice Project

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Prisons for Profit

Private Prisons: Profits of Crime!

"DOG JUSTICE"

The Prison Industry In The U.S - Big Business Or A New Form Of Slavery?

"The Prison Industrial Complex"

CORNELL CORRECTIONS EXPOSED

Why Texas Still Holds 'Em

No Place To Be Somebody

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New Reports Offer Resources For Plugging The Prison Pipeline

YALE INVESTMENT VEHICLE SELLS PRIVATE PRISON STOCK

Law Suits Raise Questions About Private Prisons