Tag Archives: prison

Why private prison employees might not want to work too close to home —Barbara Stratton

Received yesterday on

Video: Drive Away CCA radio. -jsq

Great interview John. The comment about employees not wanting to
work at a facility in the same county they live in was an
interesting thought relative to the proposed local employment
benefits. When I worked for CCA in the inmate Mental Health unit at
the Valdosta Correctional Institute we were always warned that


keeping pictures of our families or anything personal on our desks
was possibly dangerous and therefore not recommended. I loved my job
there because being inside the prison meant we had to form close
working relationships with each other and I love teamwork on the job
and it was never boring. We had almost constant training hours
warning us about the dangers of being in close contact with inmates
and all the rules about interacting. Forheight=”1 instance we had one inmate
who was a brilliant artist. He like to gift us with his artwork,
which we were allowed to accept as a non-personal gift to be placed
on the office walls. He was a very well behaved prisoner especially
to females, but his beautiful artwork always consisted of some form
of predator watching prey such as a cat watching a bird. We loved
the artwork, but took note of the inuendos.

Prisoners were always given strict instructions that

Continue reading →

Starting up Drive Away CCA —Winn Roberson 2012 03 06





Winn Roberson told us how he had the idea for the

motorcade against CCA,
from the private prison site past Valdosta City Hall to the Industrial Authority.

Here’s

Part 1 of 2:




Starting up Drive Away CCA —Winn Roberson 2012 03 06 Part 1 of 2:

No private prison in Lowndes County,

Motorcade against Corrections Corporation of America, Drive Away CCA,

CCA, VLCIA, Corrections Corporation of America, Valdosta-Lowndes County Industrial Authority,

Valdosta City Council, Lowndes County Commission, incarceration, prison, private prison,

Valdosta, Lowndes County, Georgia, 6 March 2012.

Videos by Gretchen Quarterman for LAKE, the Lowndes Area Knowledge Exchange.



And how he wasn’t opposed to it just because it was down the street from him;
also because:

“Every step so far has dollar signs behind it.”

A private prison would give everybody from justices to jailers incentive
to keep more people in prison instead of rehabilitating anybody.

Here’s

Part 2 of 2:

Continue reading →

Audio of WVGA 105.9 Drive Away CCA Interview



5PM today,

Drive Away CCA, from the prison site at East US 84 and Inner Perimeter Road,
honk at Valdosta City Hall, and march at the Industrial Authority office.

Chris Beckham’s show has put audio on the web of his
interview with me this morning.

Update: Here’s LAKE video of the interview.


John Quarterman, who is with a group informally called “Drive
Away CCA” visited The Morning Drive to discuss the group’s
displeasure with a possible private prison that is being discussed
in Lowndes County. A possible extension for the company to continue
its plans here is up for renewal and the group feels its location
here would be bad for area businesses and citizens alike.

Follow the link for the audio.
Video up shortly.

-jsq

Drive Away CCA Today!

Today at 5PM, help Drive Away CCA!


Join the motorcade from the private prison site to honk at Valdosta City Hall
and march at the Industrial Authority office.

I’ll be on Chris Beckham’s show on WVGA 105.9 FM this morning at 7:30 AM
to talk about it.



Update: audio of the interview.

Update 2: Here’s video of the interview.

Here’s
the case against a private prison:

Continue reading →

Private companies are not subject to sunshine laws —VDT

The VDT reminds us of an important distinction in yesterday’s
editorial,



Citizens entitled to open government,

All governmental entities supported by tax dollars are subject to
the laws. Private companies are not.

As the VDT knows better than anybody else around here,

getting informaiton out of Valdosta State Prison
or the Georgia Department of Correcions (GDOC) is very hard.
The VDT has been trying to find out what’s going on at Valdosta
State Prison for years now, and getting the runaround
and hitting stone walls.

Florida has a law that says private prison operators have to comply
with

Continue reading →

CCA Go Away

Somebody else is trying to



drive away CCA.
Near Ft. Lauderdale, CCA wants to put a detention center
in Southwest Ranches, Florida, and
CCA Go Away (facebook)
is organizing against that.

Lots of clever signs, from the unmistakable:




CCA Go Away

to the symbolic

orange jailbirds holding oversize $20 and $100 bills.

Plenty more

in their flickr set:


No Prison Here in This Town

Put Residents Before Profit

The Prison is No Longer A Secret



Did You Know?

A Prison is coming to your neighborhood!

Say No to

Corrections Corporation of America

No CCA



If they can do it, we can, too.
Come to the prison site Tuesday 5PM to help

Drive Away CCA!

-jsq

Faith groups urge state governors not to sell prisons to CCA

From

Quakers
to
Catholics,

“Our
organizations advocate for a criminal justice system that brings
healing for victims of crime, restoration for those who commit
crimes, and to maintain public safety.”

religious groups oppose privatization of prisons.
Here is

the text of a letter
many of them sent to all 50 state governors,

joining the ACLU in opposing
CCA’s recent

offer to 48 states to buy their prisons.



You can help

drive away CCA, 5PM this Tuesday, March 6th.
Or sign the

petition to the Industrial Authority
to reject the private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia.

-jsq

March 1, 2012

Dear Governor:

We the undersigned faith organizations represent different


traditions from across the religious and political spectrum. Our
organizations advocate for a criminal justice system that brings
healing for victims of crime, restoration for those who commit
crimes, and to maintain public safety.

We write in reference to a letter you recently received from Harley
Lappin, Chief Corrections Officer at Corrections Corporation of
America (CCA), announcing the Corrections Investment Initiative –
the corporation’s plan to spend up to $250 million buying prisons
from state, local, and federal government entities, and then
managing the facilities. The letter from Mr. Lappin states that CCA
is only interested in buying prisons if the state selling the prison
agrees to pay CCA to operate the prison for 20 years — at minimum.
Mr. Lappin further notes that any prison to be sold must have at
least 1,000 beds, and that the state must agree to keep the prison
at least 90% full during the length of the contract.

The undersigned faith organizations urge you to decline this
dangerous and costly invitation. CCA’s initiative would be costly

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Georgia prison population plummetting

In two years, the legislature went from denial to doing something
about the unsupportable costs of Georgia’s prison system.
The Georgia prison population is already plumetting, and will drop more.
This makes a private prison in Lowndes County, Georgia an even worse business deal.
If it ever opens, it probably will close.

Two years ago the Georgia legislature was in denial,
as Carrie Teegardin wrote for the AJC 4 April 2010,

Georgia prison population, costs on rise,



As Georgia lawmakers desperately search for ways to slash spending,
they are not debating an option taken by other states: cutting the
prison population.

Georgia operates the fifth-largest prison system in the nation, at a


cost of $1 billion a year. The job of overseeing 60,000 inmates and
150,000 felons on probation consumes 1 of every 17 state dollars.

The state’s prison population has jumped by more than a quarter in
the past decade and officials expect the number of state inmates to
continue to creep upward. Georgia has resorted to measures other
than reducing the prison population to keep corrections spending
under control.

19 months later, things had changed,
as the Atlanta Business Chronic reported 15 December 2011,

BJS: Georgia prison population drops in 2010,

Continue reading →

Monticello, FL prison maybe not yet closing, but at what cost?



Monticello and Jefferson County, Florida, have become
dependent on a prison that opened in 1990.
Why?
According to

Rick Stone of WUSF 1 Feb 2012,

Late in the 80s, with crime rising and prisons filling up, Florida
needed new prison sites but few counties wanted to be one. Jefferson

because of the state’s declining inmate population.

County, just east of Tallahassee, was different. Then, as now,
underpopulated and desperately poor, it saw an opportunity and it
did something unusual.

“We welcomed them with open arms,” said Kirk Reams,
Jefferson County’s court clerk and chief financial officer.

That’s not our situation.
Crime is as low as it has been since the 1960s,
prison populations have peaked,
and we do have other sources of employment.
Or are we really that desperate?

Jefferson County thinks it has lucked out again, but only at the expense
of Florida taxpayers, and against the prison population trend.

John Kennedy wrote for the Palm Beach Post 8 February 2012,

Condemned Florida prison gets second chance at life in House,

Continue reading →

ACLU and 60 policy and religious groups ask states to reject CCA’s prison privatization offer

What do the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees,
The Sentencing Project, the NAACP, and the Southern Poverty Law Center
have in common?
They all want states to reject

CCA’s offer to 48 states to buy prisons.
Right here in Lowndes County, our Industrial Authority wants to go
one better for CCA and help

build a shiny fresh new private prison with our tax dollars.

PR from yesterday,

ACLU Urges States to Reject CCA Offer to Privatize Prisons,



The American Civil Liberties Union and a broad coalition of 60
policy and religious groups today urged states to reject a recent
offer by the nation’s largest private prison company to buy and
privatize state prisons.

In a letter sent to governors in every state, the ACLU and 26 other
organizations said a recent offer by Corrections Corporation of
America (CCA) to buy prisons currently run by state officials is a
backdoor invitation to take on additional debt while increasing
CCA’s profits and impeding the serious criminal justice reforms
needed to combat the nation’s mass incarceration crisis.

Two similar letters are also being sent today by religious
coalitions to governors. One of the letters, sent by 32 faith groups
including the United Methodist Church General Board of Church and
Society, the United Church of Christ/Justice and Witness Ministries,
the Episcopal Church and the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) Office of
Public Witness, says there is a moral imperative in reducing
incarceration through evidence-based alternatives to imprisonment
and re-entry policies that ease the transition of prisoners back
into society. A third letter, from the Presbyterian Criminal Justice
Network, argues that the principles of mercy, forgiveness,
redemption and reconciliation are largely absent from the private
prison industry.

“Selling off prisons to CCA would be a tragic mistake for your
state,” the ACLU’s letter reads. “[CCA’s] proposal is an
invitation to fiscal irresponsibility, prisoner abuse and decreased
public safety. It should be promptly declined.”



You can

help decline CCA’s private prison in Lowndes County.

-jsq