National Public Service Council To Abolish Private Prisons: 01/01/2010

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.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger Wants to Outsource California's Prison System

The L Magazine
The Measure
By: Robert Tumas

Pa. prosecutor won't retry dozens of tainted cases

By: Michael Rubinkam
The Associated Press

Wilkes Barre, PA. A northeastern Pennsylvania prosecutor has dropped her effort to retry as many as 46 youths who appeared before a judge charged in a corruption scandal, bringing an end to a legal saga that involved an estimated 5,000 tainted juvenile convictions.
The agreement between defense lawyers and Luzerne County District Attorney Jackie Musto Carroll means that none of the thousands of youths who appeared before disgraced former judge Mark Ciavella Jr. between 2003 and 2008 will face retrial, and all will have their juvenile records wiped clean.

Freedom Forum CEO Tied to For-Profit Prisons

By: Beau Hodai
Charles Overby has a foot planted firmly in two very different worlds. In one, he is a champion of the free press. In the other, he is part of a group at the helm of a corporation that has worked hard to limit freedom of information and the ability of the press to inform the public. In one world, Overby is chief executive officer of the Freedom Forum, a foundation created by former USA Today publisher Al Neuharth, and its Newseum-located on Pennsylvania Avenue, blocks from the Smithsonian and the Capitol, and which literally has the First Amendment etched onto its 75-foot marble edifice. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning editor and reporter, former vice president of news and communications for Gannett, the largest U.S. newspaper chain, and former management committee member of both Gannett and its flagshi paper USA Today.

What Overby's Freedom Forum biography does not disclose is that since 20o1, he's been a director of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) This omission is easy to understand when you juxtapose the Freedom Forum's guiding principles- "free speech, free press and free spirit" -against CCA'S recent actions and attitudes toward the press and freedom of information.
CCA, the nations's largest private jailer (holding more than 70,000 prisoners in over 60 facilities, and taking in $1.6 billion in revenue for 2008) spent millions of dollars from 2007 to 2009 successfully lobbying against two bills: the Public Safety Act of 2007 (which would outlaw private prisons) and the Private Prison Information Act of 2007. As no hearing was ever held on the Public Safety Act, it's likely that the bulk of these resources went to suppress the PPIA.

Schwarzenegger's budget plan puts unions in the cross-hairs

Los Angeles Times
By Shane Goldmacher
Reporting From Sacramento
His proposal to privatize prisons, curtail teachers' seniority protections and reduce the number of in home care workers would be major blows to powerful labor interests. They're girding for a fight.

Public still waiting for ex-county judges’ court date

TimesLeader.Com
By: Terrie Morgan-Besecker
Law & Order Reporter
Laurene Transue is looking forward to the day when former Luzerne County Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan appear in court to face charges related to the juvenile justice scandal that ensnared her daughter and thousands of other youths.

Children Drop Out And Into Prison Industrial Complex

Black Star News
New Yorks Leading Investigative Newspaper
By: Marian Wright Edelman
Youths who drop out of school represent a colossal loss to our communities and nation. And many dropouts are condemned to the social and economic fringes of our society and live less fulfilled lives than their peers who graduate from high school. Today, more than half of all young adult dropouts are jobless. And dropouts are at greater risk of being incarcerated and having poorer physical and mental health than those who graduate.

Acts of cruelty to immigrants

Analysis By: Eric Ruder
A New York Times Investigation that has uncovered horrific abuses of immigrant detainees in privately run U.S. detention centers.
Boubacar Bah, a 52 year old Guinean tailor living in New York, received permission from immigration authorities to travel outside the U.S. in the Spring of 2006 while his immigration case was pending, and for the first time in nearly a decade, he was able to visit his family. A year later, Bah died in custody of U.S. immigration authorities at a privately run immigrant detention center in Elizabeth, N.J.
Bah is one of more than 107 immigrants who have died in such detention centers since October 2003.

State considers private prisons

San Bernadino Sun
By: Sandra Emerson, Staff Writer
Changes could be expected to California's prisons in 2010 as Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger aims to reduce prison costs. Schwarzenegger's proposal to allow private prisons to compete with public prisons could add billions of dollars to the general fund a year, he said. That money could then be funneled into the education system.
Although official plans have yet to be decided, the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has been looking into various models to adhere to the governor's goals.

Crime does pay in New Jersey with exploitation of inmates

Commentary By: Joe Amato
Since we were old enough to understand right from wrong we were all taught a very important life lesson, which is that "crime doesn't pay" but for some very cunning and self serving people who have formed an unholy bond between government and the private prison industry, the premise that crime doesn't pay has been lost in a sea of profit driven politics and corporate greed.

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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

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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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Links In Other Lands

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