Profit is great. Enlightened self-interest is a spectacular motivator that drives our economic system. Nothing incentivizes a behavior like making it profitable in one form or another.
But here’s a blasphemy… profit is not the only good in our world! Other things are important as well, and some may be even more important than profit.
Liberty is one of those things. Short of life itself, nothing is as valuable to a human being as liberty. It’s so important that the power to send people to prison is limited to our government, and then only after a complex due process. “Justice”, as this 
quaint idea was once called, is one of the six things our founders said our country was created to establish. So what happens when it becomes profitable to deprive people of their liberty? When liberty clashes with profit, which one wins?
And click here for our Dec 2013 update
Get ready… the answer just might make you Furious.
The Lucerne, Pennsylvania’s “Kids for Cash” scandal was uncovered in 2007. Judges Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan were receiving millions of dollars in kickbacks from two for-profit youth detention centers to sentence juveniles to their facilities. This is from Pensylvania’s Juvenile Law Center, one of the groups that broke the story…
“The scope of the violations of the children’s rights in Luzerne County turned out to be more egregious than anyone could have imagined. From 2003 to 2008, the Luzerne County judicial corruption scandal altered the lives of more than 2500 children and involved more than 6000 cases. Over 50 percent of the children who appeared before Ciavarella lacked legal representation; 60 percent of these children were removed from their homes. Many of them were sent to one or both of the two facilities at the center of the corruption scandal.”
And this…
“Shackling compounded the trauma that a corrupt juvenile court inflicted on the children in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania. Hillary—whose “conviction” for a MySpace parody of a school official started Juvenile Law Center’s 2007 investigation into Luzerne County practices—was shackled and dragged from the courtroom after a two-minute hearing. She had never before been in trouble. She presented no physical threat. She was not a threat to flee. Hillary was not alone—the shackling in Luzerne County is just one of many examples of the daily state-sanctioned maltreatment of children in jurisdictions across the country.”
If you’re interested in the Lucerne tragedy, this page from the “Legal Intelligencer” has a great series of stories that will give you all the details. You may also “enjoy” this month’s Book Spotlight, “Kids for Cash” by Pulitzer winning journalist William Ecenbarger. But don’t worry, the wholesale theft of liberty isn’t limited to kids… we adults get to play too. Here’s way too many links to a variety of stories about the problem…
We like to think we bring you stories that are being overlooked, but the private prison industry has caught the attention of other news outlets. Here are two excellent documentaries about it…
- PBS’s “NOW” covered the issue in their May 2008 program “Prisons for Profit”. This link takes you to their show page with video, transcripts, and other resources.
- Another PBS program, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, has a short video on the issue.
- CNBC’s program “Billions Behind Bars” is from October, 2011. Here’s a summary of the show with a few web extras, and here’s a link to watch it on Hulu.
And here are a few more stories you may find interesting…
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is having his image tarnished by his involvement with his friend and contributor’s halfway houses. Massive escapes, unqualified supervision, violence, drugs, the whole nine yards.
The New Orleans Times Picayune has an expose titled “Louisiana is the world’s prison capitol” . Yes, you read that right- the WORLD’s prison capitol. “Freakonomics” a frequent contributor to NPR, added several infographics that really bring the story home.
From John Whitehead in the HuffPost Crime blog: “Jailing Americans for profit: The rise of the prison industrial complex”
Suevon Lee on ProPublica give us “By the numbers: The growing for-profit detention industry”, an extensive fact sheet on the money and players in the industry.
In October 2012, the federal government’s Justice Department filed a lawsuit against the state of Mississippi and various government bodies in the city of Meridian for policies very much like those at issue in Luzerne County. In the complaint, the Justice Department claims the Meridian school district developed new policies to call the police and have students arrested for “crimes” such as using profanity, disrespect and failing to obey a teacher’s directions.
The ACLU has started a section on their website about the threats posed by for-profit prisons, and as usual they have the stats and stories to back up their position.
From Andreal Nill Sanchez on Think Progress- Private prisons spend millions on lobbying to put more people in jail.
Corrections Corporation of America is the largest private prison company in the country. In 2011 they make enough profit on it to spend over $300K on campaign contributions and $1.56M on lobbying. Here’s the breakdown.
From Dina Rasor on Trughout- Prison Industries: “Don’t let society improve or we lose business”
CCA’s the biggest, but they aren’t the only prison-for-profit company. Here’s a story about the fine work being done in Mississippi by GEO Group, the second-largest private prison operator in the world. “The lawsuit detailed monstrous abuses by GEO staff — including peddling drugs to the teenagers in their custody and subjecting them to brutal beatings, sexual exploitation and solitary confinement.”
Update 3/25/13– Good news from New Hampshire, where their state House voted to outlaw private prisons. Something important must have changed, because in May of 2012 they were considering transferring their entire male prison population to private oversight. We’ll keep you posted.
