Private Prison Company to Demand 90% Occupancy By Noel Brinkerhoff and David Wallechinsky, AllGov 19 February 12
[excerpted] The nation's largest private prison company is offering cash-strapped state governments to buy up their penitentiaries and manage convicted criminals at a cost-savings. But there's a catch…the states must guarantee that are there are enough prisoners to ensure that the venture is profitable to the company.
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has reached out to 48 states as part of a $250 million plan to own existing prisons and manage their operations. But in return CCA wants a 20-year contract and assurances that the state will keep the prisons at least 90% full..."
Read the article at the link above.
Private corrections create incentives for incarceration and there are documented cases where judges have incarcerated young people because of kickbacks from the detention centers. Private prisons are less transparent than public facilities, thereby allowing more abuses to occur.
Here are my thoughts about the US penal system, taken from my book on childhood, Governing Childhood: Biopolitical Strategies of....
Once children
enter the juvenile court system, particularly, minority and poor children, they
are in danger of being sentenced to the total institutions of juvenile
“boot-camps.” Juvenile offenders often are secured in privatized facilities
such as “boot-camps” where they are subject to remediation, often through
strict disciplines and corporeal punishment, as illustrated by the recent beating
death of a Florida boy at the hands of his bootcamp “instructors” (Goddard). In
2007 the following New York Times
article described conditions within a Texas juvenile detention center:
AUSTIN, Tex. — Juvenile detainees as young as 13 years old slept on
filthy mats in dormitories with broken, overflowing toilets and feces smeared
on the walls. Denied outside recreation for weeks at a time, they ate
bug-infested food, did school work that consisted of little more than crossword
puzzles and defecated in bags. After months of
glowing state reports, the squalid conditions were disclosed on Oct. 1 by state
inspectors at the Coke
County Juvenile
Justice Center
in Bronte. They are another sign of the deep disarray of the Texas Youth
Commission, the nation’s second-largest, after Florida’s, and most troubled juvenile
corrections agency. (Moore
“Troubles Mount”)
As illustrated by this article,
bootcamps re-invent the abusive horrors of earlier nineteenth and early
twentieth century detention institutions for young people.
Society
contains its contradictions through incarceration. As Orlando Patterson reports
America has
more than two million citizens behind bars, the highest absolute and per capita
rate of incarceration in the world. Black Americans, a mere 13 percent of the
population, constitute half of this country’s prisoners. A tenth of all Black
men between ages 20 and 35 are in jail or prison; Blacks are incarcerated at over
eight times the white rate.
The public white imagination,
conditioned by at least two centuries of racist propaganda, conceives this
tragedy as deriving from either the inborn deficiencies or the culture of
poverty (supposedly) afflicting Black America.
The role of
political economy (e.g., high unemployment and poverty) in driving criminality,
criminalization, and sentencing is swept aside by the compelling economic
incentives of the prison-industrial complex as an entire nexus of private and
public apparatuses have converged to exploit the bodies and labor of incarcerated
prisoners. Dissent exists, as illustrated by a 2007 report by the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund, which describes a school-to-prison pipeline that
begins with underfunded and neglected schools but also includes “overzealous”
discipline policies that remove students from school and rely on police
officers to dispense punishment through the criminal justice system, blurring
discipline and punishment (J. Johnson). “No tolerance,” “zero tolerance”
“public safety” campaigns have profited privatized juvenile detention
facilities, overwhelming dissenting voices.
Privately owned
and operated institutions have vested economic interests in juvenile
incarceration as do privately run prisons for adult populations. Poor rural
areas rely on these institutions to provide work for otherwise unemployed
citizens, dampening public outrage against the institutionalization of children
in for-profit punishment centers. In 2009 the U.S. media began publicizing
reports that approximately 2,000 juveniles had been sentenced to detention
centers by judges who received “kickbacks” exceeding $2.6 million (Pilkington).
The pervasiveness of fraudulent decision-making in the juvenile justice system
has not yet been investigated. Still, media publicity of the sickeningly
abusive environments of juvenile detention centers and bootcamps may eventually
encourage states to adopt more pastoral approaches toward their “risky”
children (e.g., see Moore “Missouri System”).
Ironically, the
cultural preoccupation with disadvantaged youths, gang violence, and street
crimes obscures the crimes that most adversely impact the economic vitality of
the nation. Just as the biopolitical statistics on bullying elide the less
overt (i.e., physical) forms of bullying found among affluent students, so also
do the biopolitical representations of the precursors of adult crimes in
disadvantaged youths obscure the impact of white collar crime. In 1949 Edwin
Sutherland defined white collar crime as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status
in the course of his occupation" (9). White collar crimes range from
outright fraud and embezzlement to heath and environmental crimes
perpetrated by businesses and corporate entities. The Savings and Loan disasters
of the 1980s, Enron and Waste Management accounting scandals in the 1990s, and
the recent Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme illustrate white collar crimes as does
Peanut Corporation of America’s
knowing distribution of peanut products contaminated with salmonella. An entire
genre of research documents that white collar crimes destroy more lives and
produce more economic costs to the nation than street crime, yet media outrage
occurs only in the immediate aftermath of publicity about some recent instance.
Yet, in contrast with street crime, no widespread efforts are made to reduce
white collar crime by governing the social morality and business ethics of
American’s affluent children in k-12 education...
I actually like the idea of juvenile boot camps. It's more effective and productive alternative to prison, because they teach juvenile offenders discipline and various skills that will be useful for them in future.. This is much better than going to jail.
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