by Monica Davis

Private prison atrocities continue to generate record profits for companies and negligable savings for states, after they pay for all of the lawsuits. As a for-profit entity, a private prison firm is more interested in generating profits than anything else. That includes medical care for inmates, education, and even security, a policy which is in direct opposition to the principles of freedom and justice, which we purportedly stand for as a nation.

Private prison abominations–abuse, neglect, fraud and outright manslaughter are cropping up nationwide. In Idaho, the Corrections Corporation of America has lost four prison contracts. One for allegely allowing inmates to run a fight program called “Gladiator School.”  

Complaints of abuse, neglect and fraud in the way Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) handles issues within America’s prison system has caused them to lose four prison contracts recently.

According to reports, CCA has turned Idaho’s largest state prison into what has been referred to by inmates as “Gladiator School.”

The state of Idaho has now cut ties with CCA after reports of understaffing at its prison and the use of gangs to control other inmates. MOREHERE

According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the for profit prision industry depends on a business model which is in opposition to the American concepts of liberty and constitutional rights. In essence, the private prison business model depends on an ever increasing number of revenue sources–people to lock up. 3The industry’s own reports admit to a need for a continued supply prisoners. 

They even work against leniency, sentencing and parole standards in order to keep a free-flowing supply of prisoners coming to their facilities:

… in a 2010 Annual Report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) stated: “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by . . . leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices . . . .” As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits...MOREHERE

Another report says American mass incarceration of prisoners has turned the US prison population into a giant money machine for the for profit prison industry.

mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group — the private prison industry — even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole. While the nation’s unprecedented rate of imprisonment deprives individuals of freedom, wrests loved ones from their families, and drains the resources of governments, communities, and taxpayers, the private prison industry reaps lucrative rewards. As the public good suffers from mass incarceration, private prison companies obtain more and more government dollars, and private prison executives at the leading companies rake in enormous compensation packages, in some cases totaling millions of dollars. MOREHERE

For profit prison lobbyists are buying our government officials, even as civil rights groups sue them to smitherenes:

Two civil rights groups have sued the state of Mississippi for alleged human rights abuses at one of the state’s for-profit prisons.

A class-action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes how a “perpetual state of crisis at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility puts inmates at a “grave risk of death and loss of limbs.”

The lawsuits asserts that prison officials have been aware of the conditions for years at the facility operated by the Management and Training Corporation, but have not corrected the problems MOREHERE

The Seatlle Free Press reports that the for-profit prison industry is spending a lo

If you’re looking for one of the reasons why the United States imprisons more people — by miles — than any other nation, you can look to the development of private prisons as a means of making some people rich. Those people spend millions of dollars to lobby elected officials to do two things: Convert government-run prisons to private prisons, and lock up more people for longer periods of time. Because that makes them even richer. MOREHERE

 

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