{"id":17135,"date":"2022-05-18T15:28:02","date_gmt":"2022-05-18T15:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/?p=17135"},"modified":"2022-05-18T15:28:02","modified_gmt":"2022-05-18T15:28:02","slug":"private-prison-sues-state-for-not-having-enough-prisoners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/private-prison-sues-state-for-not-having-enough-prisoners\/","title":{"rendered":"Private Prison Sues State For Not Having Enough Prisoners"},"content":{"rendered":"

A private prison in Arizona recently sued the state<\/a>\u00a0for having a lack of prisoners. For the sake of saving over $16 million in back pay, the state settled by paying the private prison $3 million. \u00a0Arizona essentially payed a company $3 million because not enough people are committing crimes.<\/p>\n

\n

To be fair, it\u2019s a bit more complex than that. In July, 2010\u00a0three violent inmates escaped from an Arizona private prison<\/a>, which prompted officials to stop sending new inmates to the facility. I say good job to the officials for demanding better performance from Management & Training Corp.,\u00a0the company that runs the prison. Unfortunately, a line in the company\u2019s contract with the state guarantees that the prison is at least 97% full at all times.\u00a0 They sued on grounds that the breach of contract caused a dramatic loss in revenue.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Surprisingly, this type of contractual agreement is the norm. A\u00a0review from In the Public Interest<\/a>\u00a0revealed that out of 60 analyzed contracts between state\/local governments and private prisons, 65% contained language mentioning\u00a0prisoner quotas<\/a>. This means that state officials have absolutely guaranteed private prisons a profit. And who finances that guarantee? The taxpayers, of course!\u00a0
\n<\/a><\/p>\n

The prison bed guarantees range between minimums of 70 percent occupancy in a California prison to\u00a0100 percent occupancy requirements at some Arizona prisons<\/strong>. Most of the contracts had language mandating that at least 90 percent of prison beds be filled.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Did you catch that? Some private prisons are guaranteed 100% occupancy, and if they don\u2019t get 100% of the beds filled they still receive a grand payday via our collective paychecks.<\/p>\n

In an interview in 2010,\u00a0former Arizona Attorney General\u00a0Terry Goddard<\/a>\u00a0pointed out a crucial issue regarding private prisons, saying<\/p>\n

I believe a big part of our problem is that the very violent inmates, like the three that escaped, ended up getting reclassified [as a lower risk] quickly and sent to private prisons that were just not up to the job.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>A bit skewed, no? www.businessinsider.com<\/a>This is incredibly irresponsible and dangerous behavior, especially since\u00a0many private prisons are under-equipped and poorly run<\/a>. \u00a0They contain inadequate patrols and prisoner movement, excessive false alarms, a lax culture, and inconsistencies in visitor screening procedures.<\/p>\n

According to\u00a0Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer and criminal justice expert at the University of Texas School of Public Affairs,<\/p>\n

It\u2019s really shortsighted public policy to do anything that ties the hands of the state. If there are these incentives to keep the private prisons full, then it is reducing the likelihood that states will adopt strategies to reduce prison costs by keeping more people out. When the beds are there, you don\u2019t want to leave them empty.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In summation, we are putting unnecessary contractual agreements with a private corporation above the safety and well being of citizens.\u00a0A 2011\u00a0report by the\u00a0American Civil Liberties Union<\/a>\u00a0pointed out that<\/p>\n

private prisons are more costly, more violent and less accountable than public prisons, and are actually a major contributor to\u00a0increased mass incarceration.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is most apparent in\u00a0Louisiana, which is the prison capitol of the world<\/a>\u00a0and houses a large amount of its prisoners in private prisons.\u00a0 So, why do we have private prisons anyway?<\/p>\n

Why Do We Use Private Prisons?<\/p>\n

The initial use of private prisons is directly linked to the utter\u00a0failure that is the War on Drugs<\/a>. In\u00a01970 Nixon<\/a>\u00a0began, and all subsequent presidents continued, to became intensely serious about the\u00a0war on drugs<\/a>\u00a0and started punishing non-violent, hard working Americans for ingesting substances\u00a0responsibly and safely. From 1960 to 1980 the number of\u00a0total arrests nationwide rose by 28% while the number of drug related offenses rose by more than 127%<\/a>, with the number continuing to rise exponentially.<\/p>\n

(Nearly\u00a040% of all federal and state inmates are non-violent drug offenders<\/a>. Moreover, more than\u00a0half of all drug-related arrests are entirely cannabis<\/a>\u00a0related.)<\/p>\n

These\u00a0dramatic rises in arrests left state and local governments scrambling<\/a>.\u00a0 Hiring a private company to handle the hard work was the obvious answer.<\/p>\n

With a burgeoning prison population resulting from\u00a0the \u201cwar on drugs\u201d and increased use of incarceration, prison overcrowding and rising costs\u00a0became increasingly problematic for local, state, and federal governments. In response to this\u00a0expanding criminal justice system, private business interests saw an opportunity for expansion,\u00a0and consequently, private-sector involvement in prisons moved from the simple contracting of\u00a0services to contracting for the complete management and operation of entire prisons.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The first time a private company was given the job of warden was in\u00a01984, in Hamilton County, Tennessee<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It is clear that the mere presence of private prisons has severely hampered any type of progress in reducing the amount of people behind bars. This should be a top priority for the country, since the\u00a0US has the highest rate of incarceration<\/a>\u00a0in the entire world, with\u00a0more than 1% of the entire population currently behind bars<\/a>, and an additional\u00a02% of the population on supervision, probation, or parole<\/a>. That accounts for about\u00a03% of the US population under correctional supervision<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By a large margin, the US has the largest percentage of prisoners based on population in the world. The\u00a0International\u00a0Centre for Prison Studies at King\u2019s College in London lists some startling statistics:<\/p>\n

More than 9.8 million people are held in penal institutions throughout the world, mostly as pre-trial detainees (remand prisoners) or as sentenced prisoners.\u00a0Almost half of these are in the United States (2.29m), Russia (0.89m) or China (1.57m sentenced prisoners).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This level of imprisonment is a\u00a0staggering waste of financial resources<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Taxpayers spent about $68.7 billion in 2008 to feed, clothe, and provide medical care to prisoners in county jails, state and federal prisons and facilities housing legal and illegal aliens facing possible deportation.\u00a0From 1982 to 2002, state and federal spending on corrections, not adjusted for inflation, rose by 423%, from $40 to $209 per U.S. resident.\u00a0Corrections spending, as a share of state budgets, rose faster than health care, education, and natural resources spending from 1986 to 2001.\u00a0The average cost of housing a prisoner for a year was about $24,000 in 2005, though rates vary from state to state.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That gives us some information on the prison system as a whole, but surely private prisons are saving us money. Not at all. In fact,\u00a0private prisons and jails are \u00a0a total loss of revenue<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u00a0the benefit to counties where private prisons are built and operated can be quite scant\u00a0\u2014 some receive less than $2 per prisoner per day from the private prison operator\u2026the federal government agreed to pay CCA [one of the largest private prison firms] almost $90 per day for each detained immigrant at a San Diego facility.<\/p>\n

Today,\u00a0private companies imprison roughly 130,000 prisoners\u00a0and, according to one group, 16,000 civil immigration detainees in the United States at any given time.\u00a0As states send more and more people to prison, they funnel ever greater amounts of taxpayer money to private prison operators. By 2010,\u00a0annual revenues of the two top private prison companies alone stood at nearly $3 billion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Private prisons are a total loss of revenue, profit from crime while encouraging higher incarceration rates, have no incentive to rehabilitate or reform prisoners, and have no responsibility to the well being of the American people. Maybe it\u2019s time to re-think the privatization of prisons and America\u2019s prison-industrial complex as a whole.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A private prison in Arizona recently sued the state\u00a0for having a lack of prisoners. For the sake of saving over $16 million in back pay, the state settled by paying the private prison $3 million. \u00a0Arizona essentially payed a company $3 million because not enough people are committing crimes. To be fair, it\u2019s a bit Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17137,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3,860,40,5,1],"tags":[1449],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17135"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17135"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17135\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17136,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17135\/revisions\/17136"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17137"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test.nahtnow.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}