Media Advisory: September 19, 2013
Contact: Richard Allen Smith / rasmith@inthepublicinterest.org / (202) 327-8435
** MEDIA ADVISORY **
New Report: Shocking 65 PERCENT of For-Profit Prison Contracts Include “Lockup Quotas” and “Low-Crime Taxes” to Guarantee Profits
In the Public Interest report will expose contract language guaranteeing 80-100 percent prison occupancy and forcing taxpayers to pay a penalty for empty beds.
(Washington, DC) – On Thursday, Sept. 19 at 1 p.m. EDT, In the Public Interest (ITPI) will host a tele-briefing to unveil a new report titled “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and Low-Crime Taxes Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations.” The study will document the shocking prevalence of contract language between private prison companies and state and local governments that either guarantee prison occupancy rates (“lockup quotas”) or force taxpayers to pay for empty beds if the prison population falls due to lower crime rates or other factors (“low-crime taxes”).
Major findings of the ITPI study include:
Of the 62 private prison contracts ITPI received and analyzed, nearly two-thirds (65 percent) include occupancy guarantees and force taxpayers to pay for empty prison beds if the lockup quota is not met.
Lockup quotas in private prison contracts range between 80 and 100 percent; 90 percent is the most frequent occupancy guarantee requirement.
Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Virginia have the highest occupancy guarantee requirements, with quotas requiring between 95 and 100 percent occupancy.
WHAT: Tele-briefing to unveil “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations”
WHO: Shar Habibi, Research and Policy Director, In the Public Interest
Justin Jones, Former Director, Oklahoma Department of Corrections
Alex Friedman, Managing Editor of Prison Legal News, a project of the Human Rights Defense Center
Reverend Michael McBride, Director, Urban Strategies and Lifelines to Healing, PICO National Network
WHEN: Thursday, Sept. 19, 2013 – 1 p.m. EDT
DIAL: 866-952-1907
Conference ID is “PRISONS”
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In the Public Interest is a comprehensive resource center on outsourcing and responsible contracting. It is committed to equipping citizens, public officials, advocacy groups, and researchers with the information, ideas, and other resources they need to ensure that public contracts with private entities are transparent, fair, well-managed, and effectively monitored, and that those contracts meet the long-term needs of communities.
In the Public Interest, 1825 K St. NW, Suite 210, Washington, DC 20006
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Disturbing, as some schools are pipelines to prison for students of color and students with disabilities….
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Ah, yes, the wonders of privatization, at least the wonder$$$ for a few, eh!
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And we thought our 75 year privatized parking meter and 99 year privatized parking garage deals were horrible in Chicago. Prices immediately skyrocketed. We have “true-ups” here, which are the equivalent of “low-crime taxes,” for everything from disabled parking, to when meters are broken, to whenever parking is not permitted due to street cleaning, etc.
But “lock-up quotas” are crazy scary.
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Great report: School to Jail Pipeline. Google this. OY!
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The criminals are the ones running the prisons and the politicians who vote to continue mandatory sentencing and tour insane drug laws, which have, together, given us the “distinction” of being the world leader in percentage of population behind bars and on parole. By this metric, ours is the most oppressive government on earth. That’s shameful.
Our drug laws, in particular, are a jobs program for drug cartels and a training program for turning petty offenders into major, lifelong criminals. We need decriminalization now. And we need for-profit prisons to be abolished, for they incentivize all the wrong stuff. Drugs need to be treated as a health problem not as a criminal justice problem. It’s very interesting to have a look at who owns the for-profit prisons. Interesting and shocking.
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Have a look at the consequences of decriminalization in Portugal. Massive decreases in violent crime, more treatment, less incarceration, and LESS DRUG USE. But, hey, our politicians have never let the facts get in the way. They know who’s writing the big checks.
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Well, yeah, less violent crime and all, but where’s the profit in that??? Silly Portuguese.
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And as for the young people shunted from closing school to closing school, or those refused admission by charter schools? All potential profit centers for privatized prisons.
Fear for a society whose rulers seek to fatten off the most vulnerable and downtrodden – the very young and old, the sick, the pariahs – for their avarice will come back and consume them.
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“As you do unto the least of these, my brethren….” said someone allegedly revered by many of these privatizers, at least the right-leaning ones.
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As you do unto the least of these
exactly
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Unfortunately, this is very old news for those who work the criminal justice world. The average is about 90% guarantee of filled beds and revenue or the state makes up the difference. So to make sure the beds are filled here is what happens. Our friends over at ALEC design new laws to lower what it takes to sentence you to jail in higher numbers and they do not care who it is as this is business and we pass the costs and our profits off to the public with a guaranteed profit forever. Good deal. No. Our taxes go up to pay for this and society goes down for corporate profits for a few select friends at everyone else’s loss.
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“. . . goes down for corporate profits . . . ”
That’s what she said!
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Diane, thank you, for quietly opening the lens to the broader spectrum of lies and hypocrisy in America 2013, linking it to our own education piece of the big picture. Thank you for creating this forum of greater awareness for the betterment of our society.
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PS So what we gonna do about it? Hmmm?
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Advocate to give prisoners the right to vote and we should always try to remember that no person is the worst thing they have done and all are worthy of love.
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“The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid.”
–The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
From Wikipedia:
“The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. At year-end 2009, it was 743 adults incarcerated per 100,000 population.
“According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons, and county jails at year-end 2011 – about 0.7% of adults in the U.S. resident population. Additionally, 4,814,200 adults at year-end 2011 were on probation or on parole. In total, 6,977,700 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2011 – about 2.9% of adults in the U.S. resident population.”
2.9 percent of the population!!!!! Three out of every hundred U.S. citizens.
Welcome to the land of the free.
The land of private prisons; the world’s highest incarceration rate; indefinite detention; assassination of citizens; warrantless searches; secret courts; immunity from judicial review; massive collocation centers for permanent storage of citizens’ private data; ubiquitous security cameras; extraordinary rendition; invariant, mandated “state” standards; a centralized national database of student records.
With freedom and liberty for all (TM)
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I meant on a society level. The society that has created this funneling of public, taxpayer generated funds to corporate pockets is twisted. The lack of meaningful intrinsic value ascribed to our citizens, other than what we represent as a source of income, is the driving force overiding all policies in the United States.
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The frog is being boiled. People of GOOD WILLl, and people of ILL WILL, are taking tiny steps–many, many tiny steps–to create a government under which the people will have, in time, NO WILL.
“This will be on your permanent record,” teachers and APs used to tell the kids.
“He sees you when you’re sleeping; he knows when you’re awake,” the children’s song went.
How many people remember that the first president Bush attacked healthcare costs by creating a single national database of health records to which all insurers had access? Welcome to the exclusion of the “pre-existing condition” that became such an issue with regard to Romneycare, uh, Obamacare, uh The Affordable Care Act.
Invariant national standards, tests, evaluation systems, and lesson plan formats from the Gates-funded Literacy Design Collaborative. A single national database of student responses and scores, inBloom. And next the continual affective monitoring devices described in the U.S. Department of Education report on building Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance in the 21st Century Workforce.
Orwell’s telescreens from 1984 are becoming a reality, his 1984 a playbook. DARPA is pouring a lot of funding into data mining and ubiquitous computing and miniaturizing of drones. Tens of thousands of U.S. police departments have applied to the FAA for drone licenses. The city of St. Petersburg, Florida, police dept. just bought an armored mobile surveillance unit with infrared cameras and fancy microphones capable of seeing and listening through walls. The Small Arms Journal recently carried a story about how the police departments of the U.S. were becoming hugely militarized. CATO reports that there were 43,000 home invasions by police SWAT teams in the U.S. in 2010.
How many times a day are you being recorded by a security camera? You know, of course, that your emails at work belong to your employer. Your Supreme Court has ruled that your employer can put video cameras in its bathrooms to keep an eye on you in there.
Your Congress passed a law requiring that all cell phones have GPS devices in them that allow their owners to be tracked. There was, of course, no public discussion of this. It was simply done. All you need is a person’s phone number and you can find out exactly where, at this moment, he or she is.
For a few bucks, I anyone can run a report on anyone. I can run a report on you that will contain stuff you don’t even know about yourself. Pages and pages and pages of stuff. There’s quite an industry, now, of such reporting.
Welcome to the Panopticon.
And yet it is all happening by slow degrees, and to express any concern about any step in the process is to be considered a flake, a member of some lunatic fringe, someone who is overreacting.
The former professor of Constitutional law Barry Obama and his predecessors Bush I and Bush II put into place mechanisms that Orwell’s Ingsoc could only have dreamed of. And these will be in the hands of ANY future government of the country, in any circumstances.
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An no, I am not a reader of the Small Arms Journal. A friend recommended the piece to me.
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In related news, a new Oxford Martin School study reports that half of U.S. jobs could be eliminated by computerization:
http://www.futuretech.ox.ac.uk/news-release-oxford-martin-school-study-shows-nearly-half-us-jobs-could-be-risk-computerisation
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