Tag Archives: Immigration

“I’ve found that Minnesotans do not want their laws written by the lobbyists of big corporations” — MN Gov. Mark Dayton

Remember

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC),
the

big corporate lobby group that

helps CCA push for private prisons?
The one that

lobbied 24 states
to pass “anti-immigration” laws that create new misdemeanors and felonies
to send more customers to CCA prisons?
One governor has decided he’s had enough of that.

Zaid Jilani wrote for Republic Report 15 February 2012,

Minnesota Governor Calls Out Corporate Front Group ALEC, Vetoes Its Bills

It has grown so powerful that it now has

nearly one-third
of all state legislators under its umbrella.

ALEC has worked with legislators to pass bills ranging from issues
as diverse as stripping unionized workers of their rights to

making it harder for low-income citizens to vote.
It is usually able to do so because it hands its corporate-written
template bills to state legislators and gets them passed without any
public scrutiny as to the origin of this legislation.

Late last week, Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D)



decided that
corporate front groups like ALEC should not be able to write his
state’s laws. Dayton decided to veto a series of “tort
reform” bills that would’ve restricted the rights of citizens
to sue to hold big corporations responsible. In a press conference
discussing his vetoes, Dayton condemned ALEC for providing the
templates for the bills. “I’ve found that Minnesotans

do not want
their laws written by the lobbyists of big corporations,” said
Dayton.

Here’s
video:

Continue reading →

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 →

CCA charges inmates five days’ pay for one telephone minute

That’s $1 a day in pay and $5 a telephone minute.
While CCA is collecting as much as $200 a day per inmate
in your tax dollars and CCA’s CEO is compensated $3,266,387
from your tax dollars.

Amanda Peterson Beadle wrote for ThinkProgress 16 November 2011,

Private Prison Charges Inmates $5 a Minute for Phone Calls While They Work for $1 a Day

Last year the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation’s


largest private prison company, received $74 million of taxpayers’ money
to run immigration detention centers.
Georgia, receives $200 a night for each of the 2,000 detainees it holds,
and rakes in yearly profits between $35 million and $50 million.

Prisoners held in this remote facility depend on the prison’s phones
to communicate with their lawyers and loved ones. Exploiting inmates’
need, CCA charges detainees here $5 per minute to make phone calls. Yet
the prison only pays inmates who work at the facility $1 a day. At that
rate, it would take five days to pay for just one minute.

They charge for food, too.

And remember,

CCA profits from anti-immigration laws, at taxpayer expense:

Recent anti-immigration laws in Alabama (HB56) and Georgia (HB87)
guarantee that neighbor facilities will have an influx of “product.”
In the past few years, CCA has spent $14.8 million lobbying for
anti-immigration laws to ensure they have continuous access to fresh
inmates and keep their money racket going. In 2010 CCA CEO Damon
T. Hininger received $3,266,387 in total compensation.

Private CEO profit for public injustice.
Does that seem right to you?




We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.
Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.

-jsq

Private prison operator sued for sexual abuse

Yes, it’s CCA, the same company that wants to build a private prison in
Lowndes County, Georgia, sued for sexual abuse at its immigration
detention center in Taylor, Texas.
CCA runs the ICE center in Georgia, too.

Elise Foley wrote for Huff Post yesterday,

Immigrant Detainees Report Nearly 200 Instances Of Sexual Abuse



More than 180 sexual abuse complaints have been reported in immigration
detention centers since 2007, according to government documents obtained
by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a class-action suit
filed this week….

All three women in the ACLU lawsuit were held for a time in the T. Don
Hutto Residiental Center in Taylor, Texas, a 512-bed detention center
privately run on a government contract by private prison giant Corrections
Corporation of America.

The suit targets Corrections Corporation of America along with three
ICE officials, a former facility manager of the Hutto facility, and a
former Hutto guard named Donald Dunn, who was charged last year with
assaulting five women and has been accused of abusing more.

This is also the same CCA that runs a prison in Idaho
commonly known as
Gladiator School because it has twice the rate of assaults
as other prisons in that state.

We don’t need a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.
Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.

-jsq

To the people of Valdosta and South Georgia —Occupy Valdosta

Posted today in

Occupy Valdosta’s facebook page:

To the people of Valdosta and South Georgia



We, the local citizens occupying Valdosta, urge you to assert your power.


Exercise your right to peaceably assemble; to nonviolently occupy
public space;
to create an open process to address the problems we face, and to generate
solutions accessible to everyone.

Our issues are varied, yet related.

We seek

Continue reading →

Gary Black starts to see reason on HB 87

Jim Galloway quotes GA Ag. Commissioner Gary Black:



“One of the discussions we have to have is, do we want to have our
food produced here or somewhere else? I don’t think Wal-Mart is
going to cease to carry cucumbers. I think they’re going to get them
somewhere,”

Also in Galloway’s AJC column yesterday,

Gary Black and the shifting debate over illegal immigration,
Black won’t back off HB 87, but admits it’s the source of the problem:

The state agriculture commissioner is walking a fine line. “Let me
be clear. My position from a standpoint of amnesty and pathways to
citizenship has not changed one iota,” he said.

Nor has Black renounced HB 87. Rather, state efforts to enforce federal
immigration laws — blocked as a consequence of lawsuits — have
contributed to “a sea change” in Washington’s attitude, he said.

“Without HB 87 and some of the other proposals, I don’t know
that we’d be having this discussion about changing the guest-worker
program,” Black said.

Black seems to have organized some interesting timing of a report release
by his department:

Continue reading →

CCA really doesn’t like community opposition, so apparently it works

Private prison company CCA, which in conjunction with ALEC promotes laws in dozens of states and nationally that lock up more people for CCA’s private profit at taxpayer expense, really doesn’t like
community opposition to siting private prisons in their communities.
Hm, why would CCA hate community opposition so much, unless it works?

Not quite rolling his eyes when she mentions visiting communities,
CCA’s video pair disparage

community opposition to private prisons
on their own web page,

When Corrections Meets Communities:



Question:
There are Web sites and blogs that are adamantly opposed to your company
and industry, and they provide negative information about you. Why?

Hm, you mean like some of the material on this blog?

Answer:
CCA and all corrections companies recognize the ongoing efforts
of local, loosely formed grassroots groups and national, well-funded
associations that jointly oppose the establishment of partnership
prisons, many for self-serving reasons. Such groups go to great lengths
to attack, criticize and misrepresent the entire industry. They make false
allegations and often rely on hearsay and unreliable sources. Regrettably,
these biased groups often resort to misinformation and inflammatory
rhetoric to turn isolated incidents into broad generalizations about
the corrections industry as a whole.

Well-funded? Har! OK, not this blog.
That plus we provide evidence, like

Continue reading →

Time to divest from private prison companies

It’s time to stop private prison profiteering by refusing to take
their profit: divest private prison company stock from personal,
pension, and church funds.

There’s no need to speculate that private prison companies have
incentive to keep more people locked up: CCA says so.
Kanya D’Almeida wrote for IPS 24 August 2011,

‘Profiteers of Misery’: The U.S. Private Prison Industrial Complex:




CCA’s 2010 annual report states categorically that, “The demand for our
facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation
of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards
and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain
activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws — for
instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances
or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested,
convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for
correctional facilities to house them.”

CCA continues, “Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions
that could lower minimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and
make more inmates eligible for early release based on good behaviour,
(while) sentencing alternatives under consideration could put some
offenders on probation who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly,
reductions in crime rates or resources dedicated to prevent and enforce
crime could lead to reductions in arrests, convictions and sentences
requiring incarceration at correctional facilities.”

What’s this got to do with Georgia?

Continue reading →

Private prisons unaccountable —ACLU

Found on the
ACLU blog of rights.


Azadeh Shahshahani wrote for the AJC 11 June 2009,

Private prisons for immigrants lack accountability, oversight



On March 11, a 39-year-old man held in detention at the Stewart Detention
Center, a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility in
southwest Georgia, died at a hospital in Columbus.

That’s in Lumpkin, west of Americus, south of Columbus.

To this day, the immediate cause of Roberto Martinez Medina’s death
remains unclear (a press release pronounced the cause of death as
“apparent natural causes”).



Last month, Leonard Odom, 37, died at the Wheeler County Correctional
Facility in south-central Georgia.

That’s in Alamo, GA, between Macon, Tifton, and Savannah.

Both facilities are operated by Corrections Corp. of America, which
has a contract with the Department of Homeland Security to operate the
Stewart center and one with the Georgia Department of Corrections to
operate the one in Wheeler County.

So, what happened?

Continue reading →

Jack Kingston from Valdosta to Tifton to Atlanta

You may have seen by the front page of the VDT this morning
that Jack Kingston was in Valdosta yesterday morning
and by

the VDT editorial
that he will be in Atlanta today.
The VDT whines:

Why do you have to take the one politician that actually works for us?



Well, some farmers in Tifton didn’t take kindly to

the main idea Kingston was pushing yesterday.
Said a farmer:

I have tried working with probationers
and I’ll just say that it was a very inconsistent supply of workers.

Hm, the VDT previously was of a similar opinion,
an opinion that got quoted in the AJC.
Maybe the VDT didn’t know Kingston was pushing HB 87,
even though they sat down with him yesterday morning?

We don’t need an ALEC-organized private prison law like HB 87
to profit private prison company CCA,
and we don’t need a CC private prison in Lowndes County.
Spend those tax dollars on rehabilitation and education instead.

-jsq