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Topic: Private prisons=more people of color imprisoned

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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Higher Profits Explain Why There Are More People of Color in Private Prisons
February 7, 2014

by Joshua Holland



In a frame grab from video obtained by The Associated Press, an inmate attacks fellow inmate Hanni Elabed at the privately-run Idaho Correctional Center just south of Boise, Idaho. Elabed suffered brain damage and persistent short-term memory loss after he was beaten by inmate James Haver while multiple guards watched at the Idaho prison operated by Corrections Corporation of America. (AP Photo)
In a frame grab from video obtained by The Associated Press, an inmate attacks fellow inmate Hanni Elabed at the privately-run Idaho Correctional Center just south of Boise, Idaho. Elabed suffered brain damage and persistent short-term memory loss after he was beaten by inmate James Haver while multiple guards watched at the Idaho prison operated by Corrections Corporation of America. (AP Photo)

It’s well known that people of color are overrepresented in America’s prisons relative to their share of the population. But a recent study finds that they make up an even larger share of the populations of private, for-profit prisons than publicly run institutions.

According to Christopher Petrella, a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley who conducted the study, this is not an accident — it’s about private firms selecting the least expensive prisoners to manage and leaving costlier populations in the hands of state correction systems.

Why would African American and Latino prisoners be cheaper to incarcerate than whites? Because older prisoners are significantly more expensive than younger ones. “Based on historical sentencing patterns, if you are a prisoner today, and you are over 50 years old, there is a greater likelihood that you are white,” Petrella explained to BillMoyers.com. “If you are under 50 years old — particularly if you’re closer to 30 years old — you’re more likely to be a person of color.” He cited a 2012 report by the ACLU which found that it costs $34,135 per year to house a non-geriatric prisoner, compared with $68,270 for a prisoner age 50 or older.

“I came to find out that through explicit and implicit exemptions written into contracts between these private prison management companies and state departments of correction, many of these privates — namely GEO and CCA, the two largest private, for-profit prison companies — write exemptions for certain types of prisoners into their contracts,” Petrella said. “And, as you can guess, the prisoners they like to house are low-cost prisoners… Those prisoners tend to be younger, and they tend to be much healthier.”

But why are older prisoners more likely to be white? Petrella explains that “up until the mid-1960s or so, two-thirds of the US prison population was what the Census Bureau would consider non-Hispanic white. Today, that’s totally inverted — about a third of all prisoners around the country are white and around two-thirds are people of color. And the chief explanation for that trend is the so-called drug war, which disproportionately impacts people of color.“

Petrella looked at the nine states with private prison populations large enough to yield reliable data. In four — California, Georgia, Oklahoma and Texas — people of color’s share of the private prison population was at least ten percentage points greater than in state-run facilities. The disparity was evident not only in the states included in the study but in 30 of the 32 states that contract with private corrections companies.

Health care is a big part of why older prisoners cost so much more to house than younger ones. But Petrella found the same trend even in those states that provide their prison populations with health care directly and only use private companies to house inmates. “Those assigned to monitor geriatric and/or chronically ill prisoners often require special training, and they often benefit from higher pay grades,” Petrella explained.

The private prison industry has come under criticism for spending millions lobbying for harsh sentences that would put more people in jail. Contracts that require minimum occupancy rates — and force states to pay for unused beds — have also come under fire.

Privatization is sold to the public as a way to save money, but various studies have found that they either end up costing more, or save states just a few dollars per prisoner. According to an American Friends Service Committee study of private prisons in Arizona — a state that’s led the privatization trend — they turn a profit by paying corrections officers less and cutting corners when it comes to security and health care.

Chris Petrella’s study shows that they also pick and choose their prisoners in order to maximize their bottom lines. But somebody has to pay the price.

“One of the reasons I think the study’s important,” Petrella said, “is that it continues to show how laws — and even contractual stipulations — that are, on the surface, race-neutral, continue to have a disproportionate and negative impact on communities of color.”



Joshua Holland is a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter or drop him an email at hollandj [at] moyersmedia [dot] com.
Post Wed Oct 01, 2014 6:34 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Political MoJo Mother Jones


This Is How Private Prison Companies Make Millions Even When Crime Rates Fall

—By Andy Kroll

| Thu Sep. 19, 2013 1:43 PM EDT


We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.

Occupancy requirements, as it turns out, are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full. (The report was funded by grants from the Open Society Institute and Public Welfare, according to a spokesman.)

All the big private prison companies—CCA, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation—try to include occupancy requirements in their contracts, according to the report. States with the highest occupancy requirements include Arizona (three prison contracts with 100 percent occupancy guarantees), Oklahoma (three contracts with 98 percent occupancy guarantees), and Virginia (one contract with a 95 percent occupancy guarantee). At the same time, private prison companies have supported and helped write "three-strike" and "truth-in-sentencing" laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.

You might be wondering: What happens when crime drops and prison populations dwindle in states that agreed to keep their private prisons 80 percent or 90 percent full? Consider Colorado. The state's crime rate has sunk by a third in the past decade, and since 2009, five state-run prisons have shuttered because they weren't needed. Many more prison beds remain empty in other state facilities. Yet the state chose not to fill those beds because Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper and CCA cut a deal to instead send 3,330 prisoners to CCA's three Colorado prisons. Colorado taxpayers foot the bill for leaving those state-run prisons underused. In March, Christie Donner, executive director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition, estimated that the state wasted at least $2 million in taxpayer money using CCA's prisons instead of its own.

That's just one example of how private prison companies keep the dollars rolling in, whether crime is rising or waning. Not surprisingly, In the Public Interest's report calls on local and state governments to refuse to include occupancy requirements and even ban such requirements with new legislation. "With governmental priorities pulling public funds in so many different directions, it makes no financial sense for taxpayers to fund empty prison beds," the report says.
Post Wed Oct 01, 2014 6:39 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and "Low-Crime Taxes ...


www.inthepublicinterest.org/article/criminal-how-lockup-quotas-and...

... How Lockup Quotas and "Low-Crime Taxes" Guarantee Profits for Private Prison ... guarantees undermine criminal justice ... Public Interest ...
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Private Prisons and Public Money | In the Public Interest


www.inthepublicinterest.org/article/private-prisons-and-public-money

Private Prisons and Public Money. ... Colorado Criminal Justice Reform ... This paper reviews the available literature concerning private prison performance and ...
Post Wed Oct 01, 2014 6:42 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

CNN Justice


Former judge gets 28 years for scheme to unjustly jail youth


By the CNN Wire Staff

August 12, 2011 6:29 a.m. EDT

In addition to the 28-year sentence, Mark Ciavarella was also ordered to pay about $1 million in restitution.

In addition to the 28-year sentence, Mark Ciavarella was also ordered to pay about $1 million in restitution.



(CNN) -- A former Pennsylvania juvenile judge was sentenced to 28 years in prison Thursday after being convicted for a scheme to make millions off unjustly incarcerating young people, court officials said.

Former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella was also ordered by a federal judge in Pennsylvania to pay about $1 million in restitution.

The sentence was four times the 87 months sentence that Ciavarella and federal prosecutors had agreed to when he pleaded guilty to charges in 2009.

But that plea deal was thrown out by a federal judge and the case went to trial.


Ciavarella was found guilty in February of 12 of 39 racketeering and fraud charges for accepting millions of dollars in bribes from friends who owned detention centers to which he sent juveniles.

The case made national headlines when Ciavarella was confronted by a distraught mother outside a courtroom after his conviction.

Sandy Fonzo's 17-year-old son, Edward Kenzakowski, spent six months in a detention center after Ciavarella sentenced him for possession of drug paraphernalia.

According to Fonzo, her son, who had no prior record, was never able to recover and eventually took his own life.

"He (Ciavarella) killed his spirit," Fonzo said at the time, "He crushed him, and he didn't help him." Fonzo said her son was full of resentment and pent-up anger after being sent to the detention center.

"He was just never the same," Fonzo said.

She said in February she came to the courthouse believing Ciavarella would be taken straight to jail. But when she found out he was going home and would not be sentenced until later, she was shocked and angered, and began shouting at Ciavarella.

Fonzo's confrontation was captured by television cameras.

"Do you remember me?" Fonzo screamed lunging toward Ciavarella, "Do you remember my son?" she screamed again. "He's gone," she cried, "He shot himself in the heart, you scumbag!"
Post Wed Oct 01, 2014 6:50 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

Was Aramark a first step to private prison's?
Post Wed Oct 01, 2014 7:20 am 
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twotap
F L I N T O I D

Committing more criminal acts explains why their are more people of color in prison but don't let that fact skew your silly posts on the topic. Rolling Eyes

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Post Wed Oct 01, 2014 8:25 am 
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo

When It Comes To Illegal Drug Use, White America Does The ...




When It Comes To Illegal Drug Use, White America Does The Crime, Black America Gets The Time
www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/racial-disparity-drug-use_n...

Sep 17, 2013 · Crack is more popular among blacks than whites, ... Still, blacks are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites…
..

Prescription and nonprescription drug use among black and ...


www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › NCBI › Literature

Factors predicting change in prescription and nonprescription drug use in a community-residing black and white elderly population. J Clin Epidemiol. 1996 May; 49(5 ...
.

Teen Drug And Alcohol Use Lowest Among Blacks, Asians


www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/08/teen-drug-and-alcohol-use_n...

Nov 08, 2011 · ... Native American teens had the highest level of drug use, ... researchers analyzed survey results on use of alcohol and drugs ... lower among blacks.
.

Study: Black teens less likely to use drugs than whites ...


thegrio.com/.../11/07/black-teens-less-likely-to-use-drugs-than-whites

Nov 07, 2011 · A new study examining alcohol and drug use among teens has revealed that African-American adolescents are less likely abuse drugs than teens from other ...
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Teen drug use lower among blacks and Asians than whites ...
Post Thu Oct 02, 2014 8:19 am 
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