A story today on CNN explains one common approach to local economic stimulus. The town of Hardin, Montana borrowed $27 million to build a prison. It opened two years ago but they still don't have anybody to lock up there. So now that the prisoners who have been detained at Guantanamo Bay for the past 7 years are potentially going to be moved to prisons within US territory, the town council of Hardin is lobbying strongly to bring them to Montana.
The debate in the article is around whether it is a good idea to bring these "potential terrorists" into the state. The sides are set between "it will bring jobs" versus "don't bring those people here".
No one seems to be asking if building prisons to stimulate job growth is at all a decent idea in the first place.
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.
As some of you might remember, a few months ago I wrote a post on prison policy which mentioned the short, troubled life and eventual suicide of Sarah Campbell. What I neglected to mention in that post was that whilst her death was a preventable tragedy, the greater outrage for prison reformers was that it was just one of six suicides to occur at Styal prison in the space of 12 months.
Spooked by the amount of self-harm among women prisoners, the government commissioned Baroness Jean Corston to conduct a review and suggest ways that our criminal justice system might be changed to stop creating more casualties.
MIAMI (AP) — Demonstrations at three Florida prisons where more than 40 children were shocked with stun guns have led to the dismissal of three employees and the resignation of two others, the Department of Corrections said.
The incidents took place on April 23, national Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day. As part of demonstrations at two prisons, children held hands in a circle, and one was shocked with the stun gun, passing the shock around the circle. At another prison, children were shocked individually.
Most counties that hire private companies to run their jails find they have the same problems, but less control with the same accountability, a team of three experts told Curry County commissioners on Tuesday.
Manny Romero with the New Mexico Association of Counties shared a “snapshot” of pros and cons with commissioners at a special meeting.
Romero said it has been his experience that most counties that try privatization end up dissatisfied or have significant difficulties and retake control of their jails.
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.
I have been a state employee for 22 years and have watched the legislative process on a daily basis for several years now. I thought I had seen everything in politics until this legislative session.
I will be affected by the recent pay cut for state employees passed by the Legislature. Although I am concerned about my family making ends meet, I am more upset about what took priority over the hard-working people of Florida.
I find it unconscionable that during these tough times of cutting the pay of state workers and the budgets of state agencies providing safety, security, education and healthcare to Floridians that this Legislature would give a corporate bailout to one group -- the private-prison industry.
With what was called a cost-of-living increase in a Senate hearing, billion-dollar private-prison companies will share a windfall of $9 million while programs for our elderly and children were cut.
At a time when every sector of Florida's economy is struggling to do more with less or even stay afloat, this process just gave away $9 million to corporate giants for one reason: corporate greed.
I call on Gov. Crist to veto this bad legislation.
JAMES T. BAIARDI, Miami
State Parole Board officials say it's the first of its kind in the nation.
"We have to take full credit for this one," said Director of Community Programs Lenny Ward. "This is a New Jersey initiative."
The idea is to take technical parole violators -- people who haven't committed a new crime but may have failed a drug test or missed a meeting -- and house them for 15 to 30 days at secure facilities run by a private company, Community Education Centers, in Newark or Trenton.
Officials hope the program, which can house 45 parole violators at a time, will help the state avoid $14 million in incarceration costs in the coming budget year.
Are the 305 million people living in the United States the most evil in the world? Is this the reason why the U.S., with 5 percent of the world’s population, has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners and an incarceration rate five times as high as the rest of the world?
Or is it a matter of a criminal justice system that has gone dramatically wrong, swamping the prison system with drug offenders?
That rhetorical question, asked on the floor of the U.S. Senate by Virginia Senator Jim Webb, fits into what looks like an accelerating shift in public sentiment on the way that a long parade of administrations has been dealing with illegal drugs.
Corrections Corporation of America’s earnings were down slightly in the first quarter of 2009 compared to the same period a year ago, but its optimistic outlook sent the private prison operator’s stock up 19 percent Thursday.
The Nashville-based company (NYSE:CXW) reported income of $34.6 million, or 29 cents per share, in the quarter ended March 31, compared to $35 million, or 28 cents per share, in the year-ago period.
Revenue came in at $404.2 million for the quarter, up 6.5 percent from the previous year's quarter.
Amongst the interesting statistics in the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee's interim report on private prisons (PDF), was the shocking statistic that TDCJ-contracted private prisons have a 90% annual staff turnover rate. The report also presented numbers on differences in guard pay between public and private facilities.
"The wages and benefits paid to employees of private contractors are generally lower than that paid to employees of state-operated facilities... Correctional officer salaries in the private prisons vary among facilities, with the highest peaking at slightly more than $24,000 annually."
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