While the rest of the Senate trundles on in various experiments to see how aggressively they can institutionalize futility and vacuousness, Senator Elizabeth Warren continues to weirdly use the resources that come with being a United States senator to uncover corruption, scandal, and government neglect. This has made her very unpopular with her Republican peers, who instead appear to believe that their offices are best used for trading stocks. Go figure.
Warren's Senate office is out with another report on nationalized corruption, this time—surprise!—in the U.S. prison system. According to the report, the American Correctional Association has been acting as a "rubber stamp" willing to provide government-required accreditation to any prison willing to pay the fees, regardless of safety issues, abuse, or other behaviors. And it’s behaved as such because the prison industry and its accrediting body are so intertwined that it would be almost impossible to produce any other result.
Says Warren’s office: "The ACA's dual role as an advocate for the private prison industry and the organization responsible for overseeing conditions at facilities run by private prison companies creates an irreconcilable conflict of interest. This conflict is exacerbated by the additional financial support the ACA receives from private prison and detention companies unrelated to accreditation."
Explicitly calling the ACA's accreditation process "corrupt," the takeaway advice is that the relationship is so flawed that government agencies should, in Warren's view, end their "reliance" on ACA accreditation and conduct that oversight themselves. The ACA both acts as accreditors and as lobbyists for the prison industry—a fundamental tension, and a sure path to prioritizing prison profits over safety. The ACA is reliant on top private prison companies for the bulk of its own profits; tightening accreditation rules so as to actually catch malfeasance is, as currently designed, in the interests of exactly nobody involved.
Mother Jones has an overview of the report's conclusions, and notes that the notorious Adelanto Detention Center achieved a near-perfect accreditation score, revealed to be a cesspool of neglect and intentional abuse. Warren has repeatedly called for ending government use of private prison companies entirely, and this report is a direct attack on industry and government claims that those companies can be reformed. They cannot be reformed: Using human imprisonment as a tool for profit is inherently corrupt. It prioritizes cash returns over public safety, prisoner safety, recidivism, and justice itself.
Republicans will likely go to great lengths to ignore this report as they have others; the notion of outsourcing core government duties to for-profit corporate surrogates is a core tenet of Republicanism, because lobbyists have over the decades paid absolute bucketloads of money to make it a core tenet of Republicanism. Expect few senators to acknowledge these findings of corruption.
Except for Georgia's two Republican senators, of course, who will no doubt adjust their stock portfolios in response.
