You cannot miss knowing about this. Take a minute.
On November 9, 2016, in a bit of a daze, I browsed the news and did a quick survey of the financial situation. One piece of immediate standout news I clearly remember: Private prison stocks were surging. ($$$)
Hmmm.
It took a just over a month in office for the new administration to drop the hammer. On Thursday February 23, 2017, while nothing else /snark was going on, this happened:
The U.S. Justice Department has reversed an order by the Obama administration to phase out the use of private contractors to run federal prisons.
In a memo made public on Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Obama policy impaired the government's ability to meet the future needs of the federal prison system.
The Obama administration said in August 2016 it planned a gradual phase-out of private prisons by letting contracts expire or by scaling them back to a level consistent with recent declines in the U.S. prison population.
Reuters
I’m posting a variety of excellent resources here to help draw the big dots. You can connect them yourself.
BOP (Bureau of Prisons) currently has 12 private prison contracts that hold around 21,000 inmates. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates had said that private prisons compared “poorly” to BOP prisons. Her memo followed a damning report from the Justice Department’s inspector general which found that privately run facilities were more dangerous than those run by BOP.
HuffingtonPost
The Obama Administration’s order to phase out of the private prison industry was based on solid research.
The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?
Human rights organizations...are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.
What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?
“The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”
The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street.
Global Research
DOJ: Private prisons are more dangerous than government prisons — for inmates and guards
Privately run federal prisons suffer from safety and security issues far more than their publicly run counterparts, according to a reportreleased by the Department of Justice's Office of the Inspector General.
These "contract prisons" were first developed as a solution to alleviate overcrowding in public Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities — they typically hold adult male inmates who are undocumented immigrants and are nearing the end of their sentences.
As of December 2015, contract prisons held around 22,660 federal inmates, or roughly 12% of the BOP's total prison population.
The report compared data from 14 contract prisons to 14 BOP prisons to measure incidents per capita in eight categories: contraband, reports of incidents, lockdowns, inmate discipline, telephone monitoring, selected grievances, urinalysis drug testing, and sexual misconduct.
In all but two categories — drug tests and sexual misconduct — contract prisons had a higher number of incidents per capita.
Contract prisons also confiscated eight times as many contraband cell phones as in BOP prisons, and had higher rates of physical assaults, both by inmates on other inmates and inmates on staff.
The Department of Justice also made individual visits to three contract prisons, all of which had been cited for at least one safety or security deficiency.
In two of those prisons, inmates were being housed in units normally reserved for disciplinary segregation — when they hadn't done anything to justify it — because beds were not available in normal housing. The prisons also did not ensure that inmates were receiving adequate medical services.
Business Insider
Last Dot: In the prior week, Immigration Deportation Forces are grabbing women from hospitals and shit. Oh, and legal weed is back on the chopping block. And freedom of the press is not, after all, free for all press. And those muslims from those 7 countries, trying to come or go wrongly...and a new bill has been proposed in Arizona to make protest illegal. Where to put all those folks when they lock them up?
First Dot: Remember? $$$ Whose gonna collect? Guess whose gonna pay?