Why Prisons Should Never Be Privatized

There are some things that government–not the private sector–simply must do.

As I have written many times before, whether it makes sense to “contract out” the provision of government services is not an either-or question. The decision will depend upon a number of considerations: is this a core government responsibility? is it important to maintain institutional competence? does the government agency have the ability to adequately monitor contractors?

And especially–what are the negative consequences we might anticipate from a decision to grant governmental authority to private, for-profit enterprises?

The Justice Policy Institute has just released a report confirming a major concern voiced by critics of private prisons: the likelihood that those who profit from incarceration will lobby for harsher criminal justice penalties and seek to derail needed justice system reforms.

According to the report,  private prison companies actively engage in lobbying intended to protect and grow their profits, by working for harsh policies and longer sentences.

The authors report that while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people held in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent, respectively. As ThinkProgress reports,

Government spending on corrections has soared since 1997 by 72 percent, up to $74 billion in 2007. And the private prison industry has raked in tremendous profits. Last year the two largest private prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — made over $2.9 billion in revenue.

JPI claims the private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.

According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking. The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts. CCA has spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent anywhere from $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span this year. Meanwhile, “the relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” notes the report. The cofounder of CCA himself used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.

One of the primary reasons governments exist is to provide for the public safety. Decisions about the most effective ways to accomplish that should be made on the basis of evidence, by disinterested policymakers carefully considering what the research tells us about the efficacy of various approaches.

The private prison industry is spending millions of dollars opposing efforts to reform the nation’s drug laws–reforms based upon years of research demonstrating that the Drug War has been a costly failure, and that imprisoning thousands of low-level offenders has been counter-productive.

Americans spend millions of dollars on the criminal justice system. Those dollars are supposed to make us safer–not make private interests richer.

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“Strict Constructionists” and the Supreme Court Vacancy

I’ve posted previously about the absolutely stunning refusal of the Senate GOP leadership to do its job and hold hearings on President Obama’s nominee for the vacant Supreme Court seat.

I know I’m being repetitive, but I can’t stop thinking about the degree to which that intransigence symbolizes an ominous breakdown of governance in this country.

It isn’t that we haven’t gone through dangerous times before. We had a civil war, and the 60s certainly weren’t all Woodstock. The Gilded Age, the Depression–we can all come up with examples from history. (Or maybe not, since so few people seem to have studied history–but the examples are there.) What I don’t remember is a similar degree of hypocrisy and flat-out lying by people in public office who are so transparently following their own immediate self-interest to the detriment of their constitutional duty and the common good.

These are the people who constantly tell us how devoted they are to the Constitution–at the same time they are refusing to follow its prescriptions. These are the people who piously invoke tradition, then lie about the history of Supreme Court appointments during election years. (Not to mention plucking and parroting a single sentence from a speech by then-Senator Biden–a speech that in its totality said something very different than their chosen sound-bite would suggest.)

These are the people who accuse the President of being “divisive” when he discharges his clear duty under the Constitution–at the same time that they are politicizing the Court by refusing to discharge theirs.

Do they think no one notices? Worse, is it possible that they’re right, and most people don’t?

In a scathing column in the Huffington Post, constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone was blunt:

It is time for the Senate Republicans to back off and to act like responsible grownups who recognize that they have a solemn obligation to act according to the rule of law. If they don’t like that, then perhaps they should just resign their positions and let the nation get on with its business. If they move forward with their cynical and hypocritical plan, they will be guilty of a coup d’état of epic proportions.

How did we get to this point? How did these people get elected? What toxic mix of civic ignorance and apathy, political money, gerrymandering and raw racism has brought us to a place where a fascist buffoon is likely to be the Presidential candidate of a major party, and the legislative leadership of that party insists on elevating its partisan interests above the both the law and the national good?

How did a once-great party become so small, and how did the rest of us allow it to happen? And what does this unprecedented obstruction mean for the future of the American experiment?

I don’t know about the rest of you, but those are the questions that are keeping me up at night.

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Pence’s ‘Rap Sheet’

Yesterday’s quiz was evidently a big hit, so I thought I’d try another one. For this one, however, Hoosiers will have a big advantage.

The fact that I am no fan of Indiana Governor Mike Pence will hardly come as a surprise to readers of this blog. (I have this old-fashioned notion that people running for political office should have an interest in governing and an acquaintance with the Constitution….).

If my Facebook feed is any indication, I have a lot of company. The other day, I came across several posts identifying the various reasons Pence does not deserve re-election, and I thought it might be interesting to compile them into what I will call the Governor’s “rap sheet.”

Here, in no particular order, are the grievances I noted:

  •  In 2012, Glenda Ritz was elected Superintendent of Public Instruction with more votes than Pence received. Subsequently, the Governor has done everything in his power to obstruct Ritz, to eviscerate her authority, and (not so incidentally), to make war on public education in Indiana, by–among other things–diverting desperately needed resources to the most extensive voucher program in the country.
  • When citizens posted objections to the Governor’s priorities to his Facebook site, the negative comments mysteriously disappeared.
  •  RFRA (need I elaborate?) This bit of homophobia has cost the Indiana economy millions and has made “Hoosier Hospitality” a punch line.
  • Pence and his legislative super-majority have waged a sustained attack on women’s right to choose, and on Planned Parenthood. Tax dollars have been diverted to “pro-life” organizations, and Indiana recently passed the most draconian and offensive anti-abortion bill in the country.
  • There was the ill-fated effort to create Indiana’s very own Pravda. 
  • The Pence administration has been an enthusiastic supporter of  “privatized prisons.”
  • The Governor ignored the drug and HIV/AIDS epidemic in Scott County until it was a full-blown crisis, and even then was unwilling to respond with a comprehensive approach.
  • He refused to apply for a federal grant that would have supported pre-school expansion for low-income children.
  • He refused to expand Medicaid under the terms of the Affordable Care Act, despite the fact that the federal government would have paid the entire cost for 3 years and 90% thereafter; his substitute program–which became effective after a significant  delay–provides more limited healthcare to fewer Hoosiers than would otherwise have been the case.
  • He has directed Indiana’s Attorney General to spend time and money on a number of lost-cause cases: anti-LGBT efforts, resistance to environmental regulations; to rejecting refugees.

So here’s the quiz question: What have I missed?

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What Do You Know?

A friend sent me this link to a quiz developed by Pew research. Twelve questions, virtually all of which should be easily answered by anyone who regularly follows national news.

The results, which are pretty appalling, may give us a clue to the ascendance of Donald Trump, not to mention the pathetic state of American politics today. After all, if you have no context within which to judge whether candidates’ positions are reasonable, or based upon an understanding of the issues involved, your vote is likely to fall into that category titled “uninformed.”

Here is the invitation to take the quiz. I particularly agree with the last line:

NEWS IQ TEST
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This is a terrific test. And it shows results in a number of ways. It surely indicates that the majority of Americans don’t know what’s going on.

It’s astonishing that so many people got less than half right. The results say that 80% of the (voting) public doesn’t have a clue, and that’s pretty scary.

There are no tricks here — just a simple test to see if you are current on your information.
This is quite a good quiz and the results are somewhat shocking.

Test your knowledge with the challenge of 13 questions, then be ready to shudder when you see how others did:

If you get less than half correct, please cancel your voter registration.

My sense is that visitors to this blog are considerably more aware of what’s going on than the average American. Take the quiz and let me know if my intuition is correct.

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UnAmerican Activities–War on Women Edition

Several readers have asked me why I haven’t written anything about Indiana’s horrific House Bill 1337.

To be honest, words fail. Once again, national news outlets are using Indiana as an example of right-wing extremism untempered by even a hint of compassion or common sense.

As Salon noted, if it is somehow upheld, this measure–on Mike Pence’s desk for a signature that is a foregone conclusion–will end virtually all abortions in the state.

The legislation authorizes an entire menu of grotesquely unconstitutional anti-choice TRAP(Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws, as well as new forms of authoritarian, misogynistic devilry, each of which could be defined as reproductive Jim Crow laws. Put another way, the new Indiana bill is in keeping with a series of laws that don’t outright ban abortion, but which makes it really, really difficult to have a safe and legal abortion.

The bill is a mashup of grisly, gratuitous measures having no purpose whatsoever other than to punish women who choose to exercise their constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy.

The bill itself is an abortion. It requires burial of the fetus–a funeral for what in most cases is little more than a microscopic clump of undifferentiated cells. It mandates fetal ultrasounds. It requires the woman to listen to the fetal heartbeat (despite the fact that, in many if not most cases, the procedure occurs too early to allow detection of a heartbeat).

The fetal heartbeat screening and the ultrasound procedure have to be conducted 18 hours prior to having an abortion. What makes this waiting period particularly vile is that previous TRAP laws have closed most of Indiana’s abortion clinics, leaving just four counties out of 92 with abortion facilities. In other words, if you choose to terminate, you’ll likely have to travel not-insignificant distances in order to find a clinic. From there, you’ll have to bed down at a hotel or elsewhere while your 18 hour waiting period winds down. Yet another expense on top of the abortion itself.

There’s much more, but by far the most offensive provision–in a bill filled with offensive provisions–requires a woman to carry a pregnancy to term if the motive for the abortion is that the fetus is deformed or disabled.

Think about that. The men at Indiana’s General Assembly have decided that they know best whether a woman who finds herself pregnant with a profoundly damaged fetus has the financial and/or emotional resources to spend the rest of her life caring for a disabled child. These legislators know better than the woman and her husband–who may have desperately wanted the pregnancy–the emotional toll of giving birth to a child who cannot live more than a few hours or weeks after birth.

And don’t get me started down the legal rabbit-hole of determining a pregnant woman’s “real” motive for aborting.

As one ob/gyn observes, this bill is just another assault in social conservatives’ dogged and persistent war on women’s autonomy. It is all about control. There is nothing medical about it.

The truth is, these legislative fights over reproductive choice aren’t really fights about the decision to abort. They are fights about who gets to make the decision. 

Giving government the right to decide whether an individual woman should carry a pregnancy to term is no less dangerous than giving government the right to dictate her reading material or religious affiliation. The Bill of Rights rests on the Founders’ belief that—although individuals may certainly make bad or dangerous choices—empowering government to make those choices for us is far more dangerous.

The government that can prohibit abortion today can require it tomorrow. Ask the Chinese.

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