Category Archives: History

Why did CCA pick Lowndes County for a private prison?

Apparently CCA picked Lowndes County for a private prison for reasons that were not what VLCIA’s consultant seemed to think would influence the selection.

According to Valdosta-Lowndes County, GA / CCA Partnership: Talking Points (undated, but it refers to “The agreement formalized by the Industrial Authority on 8/17”),

The Valdosta/Lowndes site became the primary due to the local and regional workforce, collaboration of local leadership, site characteristics, proximity to necessary services and infrastructure, accessibility, etc.
Nothing in there about low poverty or high wages. One could even read that the other way around, as in a low-wage population looking for jobs.

Looks to me like our Industrial Authority didn’t do much due diligence about private prisons.

Also note that the contract of 17 August 2010 between VLCIA and CCA was signed after the announcement in July 2010 that CCA had selected Decatur County. More about that in another post.

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Quitman 10 and Americans right to vote —George Rhynes

Received Wednesday. -jsq
The citizens of (Quitman) Brooks County Georgia and South Georgia are extremely greatful for their support and outreach! They are indeed the real patriots of our beloved republic by standing up for voting rights.

The News Media seem to be taking a back seat to keeping citizens and voters informed along the lines of fairness in the State of Georgia and beyond.

As a retired military veteran, I was extremely happy for the Press Conference in support of the Quitman 10 as included in the links below. We must not forget about the citizens and voters in Brooks County, Willacoochee, Douglass-Coffee County Georgia (nooses) Tallahassee, Madison, Florida and other rural areas acorss the nation.

All Georgians and American citzens

Continue reading →

the relatives of those people don’t care who is winning (the drug war) —Carlos Fuentes

A writer of fiction tells the truth about the failed war on drugs. We’re way past the beginning and middle of this story: time to end it. Which makes this a very bad time to build a private prison that depends on the war on drugs.

Anita Singh wrote for the Telegraph today, Carlos Fuentes: legalise drugs to save Mexico,

Fuentes, Mexico’s greatest writer and a former diplomat, addressed the contemporary problems of Latin American — in particular, Mexico’s drug problem.

He said: “The drug traffickers are in Mexico, they send the drugs to the US and once they get across the border what happens? We don’t know who consumes them. We can’t prosecute, we can’t defend. It’s a very difficult situation for us Mexicans. The governments of the US and Mexico have to fight drug trafficking together.”

Fuentes believes that decriminalising drugs is the only way to end the violence that in the past five years has claimed nearly 50,000 lives of gang members, security forces and innocent bystanders.

“It is a confrontation. Sometimes we win, sometimes they win. But there are 50,000 killed and the relatives of those people don’t care who is winning.

Nobody is winning except the profiteers in arms and pesticides, such as Monsanto. And even mighty MON is losing to Boliviana negra. Alcohol prohibition produced Al Capone and other gangsters; the failed War on Drugs produced drug gangs and ever more vicious militarization of police forces, right up to the Mexican failed “solution” of calling out the Army into the streets.

We’re all losing through lack of money for education and militarization of our own police. We can’t afford this costly failed experiment. The real solution is the same today as in 1933: legalize, regulate, and tax. That will also drop the U.S. prison population way down, saving a lot of money that can be used for education. It’s going to happen eventually, so building more prisons that will end up being closed is a bad idea.

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How to end the epidemic of incarceration

There are historical reasons for why we lock up so many people, some going back a century or more, and some starting in 1980 and 2001. Knowing what they are (and what they are not) lets us see what we can do to end the epidemic of incarceration that is damaging education and agriculture in Georgia.

Adam Gopnik wrote for the New Yorker dated 30 January 2012, The Caging of America: Why do we lock up so many people?

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then.
In Georgia, 1 in 13 of all adults is in jail, prison, probation, or parole: highest in the country (1 in 31 nationwide). Georgia is only number 4 in adults in prison, but we’re continuing to lock more people up, so we may get to number 1 on that, too.
Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.

And we can’t afford that, especially not when we’re cutting school budgets. That graph of education vs. incarceration spending is for California. Somebody should do a similar graph for Georgia.

The article does get into why we lock up so many people: Continue reading →

Quitman 10 + 2 Press Conference

Received yesterday. -jsq
News never reported in the Quitman FREE PRESS or in SOUTH GEORGIA NEWS MEDIA:


Video of Quitman 10 + 2 Press Conference in Atlanta 23 January 2012 by voiceofthevoiceless1

From the YouTube description:

Senator Emanuel Jones is demanding “all charges are dropped”
Continue reading →

Just as prohibition of alcohol failed… the war on drugs has failed —Richard Branson

Richard Branson wrote for the Telegraph yesterday, It’s time to end the failed war on drugs
Just as prohibition of alcohol failed in the United States in the 1920s, the war on drugs has failed globally. Over the past 50 years, more than $1 trillion has been spent fighting this battle, and all we have to show for it is increased drug use, overflowing jails, billions of pounds and dollars of taxpayers’ money wasted, and thriving crime syndicates. It is time for a new approach.

Too many of our leaders worldwide are ignoring policy reforms that could rapidly reduce violence and organised crime, cut down on theft, improve public health and reduce the use of illicit drugs. They are failing to act because the reforms that are needed centre on decriminalising drug use and treating it as a health problem. They are scared to take a stand that might seem “soft”.

But exploring ways to decriminalise drugs is anything but soft. It would free up crime-fighting resources to go after violent organised crime, and get more people the help they need to get off drugs. It’s time to get tough on misguided policies and end the war on drugs.

Branson isn’t just a billionaire speaking his mind, he was also on the Global Commission on Drug Policy that studied the problem and recommended last summer that we end prohibition.

Branson does bring his business experience to bear: Continue reading →

Pop the drug war balloon: legalize and regulate the drug trade —Terry Nelson, LEAP

LTE in the WSJ, 21 January 2012:
The article illustrates what I learned over my 30-year career as a federal agent: Cracking down in one place doesn’t make drugs disappear, it only moves the trade elsewhere. This so-called “balloon effect,” combined with the insatiable demand for drugs across the globe, means that no level of law-enforcement skill or dedication can make a significant dent.

The only way to pop the proverbial balloon is to legalize and regulate the drug trade, which would eliminate the opportunity to make enormous black-market profits. It wasn’t easy for me to come to this revelation after dedicating so many years to enforcing drug laws, but it is common sense. Law-enforcement officers don’t have to chase gangsters selling booze from town to town because we ended the failed experiment of alcohol prohibition decades ago. It is time we do the same for other drugs.

Terry Nelson
Executive Board Member
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
Granbury, Texas

And that will pop the incarceration bubble, as well, according to CCA’s own 2010 report to the SEC. -jsq

ACLU podcast against private prisons —Alex Friedmann

CCA inadvertently rehabilitated former prisoner Alex Friedmann and gave him a new career, lobbying against prison privatization. He says:
In my view, the worst thing is that they have normalized the notion of incarcerating people for profit. Basically commodifying people, seeing them as nothing more than a revenue stream….

If you incarcerate more people and you put more people in your private prisons you make more money. Which provides perverse incentives against reforming our justice system. And increasing the number of people we’re putting in prison, whether they need to be there or not, just to generate corporate profit. I think that’s incredibly immoral and unethical, I think that’s the worst aspect of our private prison industry.

This comes from the ACLU’s Prison Voices, Episode 1: Private Prisons: Continue reading →

If Gov. Deal can investigate school elections, why not jail deaths? — George Rhynes

George Rhynes suggests that if Gov. Deal can investigate a school board election in Brooks County, he could also
issue another Executive Order and STOP the jail deaths in the Valdosta, Lowndes County Jail. (30 Jail deaths from 1994-2009) Today the general public is told that the public does not have a right to know under the law.
In this video George goes into many years of evidence regarding jail violations.

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Cobb EMC backing off of coal at Plant Washington

Could Plant Ben Hill be next?

Kim Isaza wrote for MDJOnline yesterday, Cobb EMC’s pursuit cools on coal-fired power plant

Cobb EMC’s interest in building the coal-fired Plant Washington appears to be dead, and the company has begun soliciting bids for its future power supplies.

The electric cooperative has already spent $13.5 million toward permitting for the coal plant, which would be a new direction for the company from simply delivering electricity to also generating it.

On Jan. 24, Dean Alford, a spokesman for the Power 4 Georgians consortium of EMCs behind Plant Washington, is slated to address the Cobb EMC board, presumably in an effort to save the plant, for which his company, Allied Energy, got a no-bid development contract from P4G.

The Cobb EMC board could decide at that meeting whether to put any more money toward the project.

Many details of the 850-megawatt Plant Washington, including exactly why it is needed and any firm idea of what it will cost to build and operate, have been kept quiet, sparking critical questions from EMC members and environmental groups. It was proposed under former EMC head Dwight Brown, who is facing 34 criminal charges of theft and racketeering relating to his leadership at EMC.

So can somebody come up with an 850 MW solar plant to propose by 24 Jan 2012?

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