b sanders wants to deprivatise - Page 1

For good reason.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/how-for-profit-prisons-have-become-the-biggest-lobby-no-one-is-talking-about/

This outlook runs counter to what should be a rehabilitative mission of the nation’s criminal justice system. Instead, private prison contracts often require the government to keep the correctional facilities and immigration detention centers full, forcing communities to continuously funnel people into the prison system, even if actual crime rates are falling. Nearly two-thirds of private prison contracts mandate that state and local governments maintain a certain occupancy rate – usually 90 percent – or require taxpayers to pay for empty beds. In Arizona, three private prisons are operating with a 100 percent occupancy guarantee, according to Mother Jones. There’s even a lockup quota at the federal level: The Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention budget includes a mandate from Congress that at least 34,000 immigrants remain detained on a daily basis, a quota that has steadily grown each year, even as the undocumented immigrant population in the United States has leveled off. Private prisons have profited handsomely from that policy, owning nine of the 10 largest ICE detention centers, according to a report released this month by Grassroots Leadership.

With the growing influence of the prison lobby, the nation is, in effect, commoditizing human bodies for an industry in militant pursuit of profit. For instance, privatization created the atmosphere that made the “Kids For Cash” scandal possible, in which two Pennsylvania judges received $2.6 million in kickbacks from for-profit juvenile detention centers for sending more kids to the facilities and with unusually long sentences. The influence of private prisons creates a system that trades money for human freedom, often at the expense of the nation’s most vulnerable populations: children, immigrants and the poor.

Industrial prisons are every bit as good an idea as industrial food and industrial child rearing. The huge surge in prison populations and incarceration of the poor and mentally ill were made possible and profitable by for profit prisons.

Profit driven incarceration is a crime.

I have friends who work in or have worked (and can no longer stomach the issues and have an option to quit) in the for profit prison systems as psychologists.  The horrors they witness (and many have worked in federal or state prisons) committed in the name of profit is chilling.  Denying proper medical care, denying mental health care except for the bare minimum to meet federal or state guidelines, the use of isolation as punishment, the physical abuse, the mental abuse, the incarceration for being poor (not able to pay fines or afford decent counsel), for being non-white upper class, etc should not be allowed.  After all, isn't there something in the constitution called the 8th amendment about cruel and unusual punishment????

I thought debter's prisons were abolished. Well, how better for the state to meet the population quota of the prison contract than to incarcerate men who can't afford to pay child support ( or refuses to pay support for step children after divorcing their mother).
Pretty much sucks.