{"id":176427663,"date":"2013-11-09T00:23:02","date_gmt":"2013-11-09T06:23:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/?p=176427663"},"modified":"2013-11-09T00:23:02","modified_gmt":"2013-11-09T06:23:02","slug":"incarceration-prison-profiteers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kalamu.com\/neogriot\/2013\/11\/09\/incarceration-prison-profiteers\/","title":{"rendered":"INCARCERATION: Prison Profiteers"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Global Tel-Link<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/div>\n
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This price-gouging phone company profits off love, charging prisoners up to $17 for a 15-minute phone call. Tell the FCC to set prices families can afford.<\/span><\/a>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++<\/strong><\/span> <\/p>\n

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Corizon<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/div>\n
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How does this for-profit prison healthcare company keep its costs low and profits high? By failing to provide sick prisoners with needed care.<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
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The Bail Industry<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
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If you’re arrested, you can pay a hefty sum or sit in a cell waiting for trial. Don’t have the funds? The for-profit bail industry can help \u2013 for a big fee, of course.<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The GEO Group<\/span><\/div>\n
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This for-profit prison company already pulls in billions by locking people up. Fight the dangerous, profit-hungry legislation that could help GEO rake in even more.<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
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Law Enforcement<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
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Police officers are forcing people to choose between time behind bars or turning over their money and property \u2013 all without ever making an arrest. Fight asset forfeiture abuse.<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
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Corrections Corporation of America<\/strong><\/span><\/a><\/div>\n
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The country’s biggest for-profit prison company calls human beings in lock-up a “revenue stream.” Don’t let them profit off imprisoning even more.<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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+++++++++++++++++++++++++++<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n

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Fight the Prison Profiteers<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/h3>\n

Now that the federal government is up and running again, President Obama has announced that immigration reform is his highest priority. We need to make sure this reform does not include the SAFE Act, a toxic bill that would criminalize immigrants. The only winners if this bill passes are private prison companies, who already profit off the detention of half of all immigrants in federal custody.<\/span><\/p>\n

Tell Congress: no windfalls for private prison companies.<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

>via:\u00a0https:\/\/www.aclu.org\/prison-profiteers<\/a><\/p>\n

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\"white<\/p>\n

October 1, 2013<\/span><\/h2>\n

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With 2.3 Million People <\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Incarcerated in the US, <\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Prisons Are Big Business<\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n
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Meet the corporations who are profiting off our prison system.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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By Liliana Segura<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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\n(Reuters\/Joshua Lott)<\/em><\/span>
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\n\u201cGlobal Tel* Link. You have a collect call from:\u00a0<\/em>\u2018Tim.\u2019\u00a0An inmate in Shelby County Correctional Facility\u2026. If you wish to accept and pay for this call, dial zero now.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know how many times I heard the same robotic voice speak these words since last fall. I was researching the story of Timothy McKinney, a Memphis man facing his third death-penalty trial for the killing of an off-duty police officer in 1997. Tim would call from Shelby County Jail, to answer my questions and to do what anyone facing trial would want to do: air concerns about his case, vent. Sometimes he would call multiple times a week. Because the phone calls were limited to fifteen minutes at a time, a couple of times he hung up and called right back, so we could keep talking.<\/span><\/p>\n

The calls were expensive, more than a dollar per minute, depending on the time of day. In order to accept one, I had to set up a prepaid account with Global Tel* Link, or GTL, \u201cThe Next Generation of Correctional Technology.\u201d If Tim called and my account was out of money, the automated voice would prompt me to replenish it via credit card, while he waited on the other line. \u201cBy accepting an inmate call, you acknowledge and agree that your conversation may be monitored and recorded,\u201d the company advises.<\/span><\/p>\n

I dealt with Global Tel* Link for only a few months. But for Tim\u2019s relatives, this had been their reality for years. GTL makes more than $500 million a year exploiting families like his, who face the choice between paying exorbitant phone rates to keep in touch with incarcerated loved ones\u2014up to $1.13 per minute\u2014or simply giving up on regular phone calls. Like many other telecommunications companies that enjoy profitable monopolies on prison and jail contracts across the country, GTL wins its contracts by offering a kickback\u2014or \u201ccommission\u201d\u2014to the prison or jail systems it serves. As an exhaustive 2011 study in\u00a0Prison Legal News<\/em>\u00a0explained, the kickback is \u201cbased on a percentage of the gross revenue generated by prisoners\u2019 phone calls\u2026. [The] commissions dwarf all other considerations and are a controlling factor when awarding prison phone contracts.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

The higher a kickback, in other words, the more likely a company is to win the contract. These high kickbacks translate into higher phone rates for family members\u2014usually the very people who can least afford it. Like the vast majority of those who pass through the massive jail and court complex known as 201 Poplar in downtown Memphis, Tim\u2019s family was not wealthy. When it came time for his trial last spring, his mother would be in court every day, only to leave straight for her night job, cleaning office buildings.<\/span><\/p>\n

Global Tel* Link is one of five companies profiled in a new video series called \u201cPrison Profiteers<\/span><\/a>,\u201d a collaboration between\u00a0Beyond Bars<\/span><\/a>\u2014a Brave New Films project\u2014the\u00a0ACLU<\/span><\/a>, and\u00a0The Nation.<\/em>\u00a0With 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, prisons are big business; the goal of the series is to expose the myriad ways people enrich themselves off crime and punishment. Defenders of for-profit prison services pitch them as superior, efficient, money-saving options for cash-strapped states and localities that can ill-afford the costs of mass incarceration. (And indeed, historically, state-run services have often proven abysmal in themselves.) But not only do such privatized services often end up more expensive in reality, they can incur huge unseen costs to inmates and their families.<\/span><\/p>\n

Worse still are the implications on a larger scale: when corporations seek to profit from prisons, it creates a powerful financial incentive, not just to push for policies that fuel mass incarceration but to cut corners in the services they\u2019ve been hired to provide. Society shows little concern for prisoners who might receive substandard food, phone service or healthcare behind bars, after all. In the prison equation, the real consumer is the state, whose own financial priorities often run counter to the needs of prisoners and their families.<\/span><\/p>\n

The cost for families is not just financial. The Global Tel* Link video features 9-year-old Kenny Davis at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. Kenny\u2019s father is housed in a private prison four hours from where they live. \u201cPhone calls are a problem,\u201d Kenny\u2019s mother says, \u201cbecause they cost too much.\u201d So Kenny rarely talks to his father. Ideally, he says, he would talk to him once a week.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some 2.7 million children have parents who are incarcerated. Preventing them from having regular contact with their moms and dads isn\u2019t just bad for these kids. All the evidence shows that prisoners who maintain close family ties fare better upon release. Making it harder for prisoners to stay connected with their families is not only needlessly punitive and cruel, it is unwise from a public safety standpoint.<\/span><\/p>\n

But, for all their rhetoric to the contrary, prison profiteers are not as concerned with public safety as they are with the bottom line.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThey Have No Protocol for Treating Anybody With Hepatitis C\u201d<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The human cost of prison profiteering is especially pronounced and disturbing in\u00a0the video about Corizon<\/span><\/a>, the largest prison healthcare company in the country. In it, we meet a Tucson woman named Eleanor Grant, who receives a phone call from her partner, Thomas, incarcerated since 1994. Thomas suffers from an enlarged prostate, among other problems, and the prison medical staff will not give him the medication he needs to cope. \u201cI\u2019m in constant pain,\u201d he tells Eleanor, sounding like a frail old man. Pain registers in her eyes, too, as she listens. \u201cI can\u2019t even sit now,\u201d he says. \u201cThey just ignore it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Medical neglect runs rampant in prisons across the country, a largely invisible problem that has few in positions of power scrambling for a meaningful solution. The problem is not unique to states that have outsourced their prison healthcare: In California, the crisis of overcrowding in state facilities, merged with catastrophically inadequate state-provided care, was the basis for a 2011\u00a0Supreme Court<\/span><\/a>\u00a0decision ordering the state to release tens of thousands of prisoners. In September, the state paid $585,000 to a man who lost an eye while locked up on a parole violation in 2008. He had repeatedly requested medication for his glaucoma, but was ignored. Eventually, his cornea burst.<\/span><\/p>\n

But in those states that have turned to private companies to provide medical care to prisoners, stories of neglect and abuse also abound. In 2005,\u00a0The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0published a shocking investigation into Prison Health Services, a company responsible for two prisoner deaths in separate jails in upstate New York within two months of one another. In both cases, the inmates had been repeatedly denied medication and accused of faking their distress. TheTimes<\/em>\u00a0also told the story of 46-year-old Diane Nelson, who died of a heart attack in a Florida jail. \u201cStop the theatrics,\u201d a Prison Health nurse snapped at her as she collapsed. \u201cThat same nurse, in a deposition, also admitted that she had joked to the jail staff, \u2018We save money because we skip the ambulance and bring them right to the morgue.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

In a 2003 piece for\u00a0Harper\u2019s<\/em>, Wil S. Hylton profiled Correctional Medical Services, the company that in 2011 merged with Prison Health Services to create Corizon. Hylton\u2019s piece exposed staggering levels of malpractice at CMS, which he described as \u201cnot merely the nation\u2019s largest provider of prison medicine,\u201d but \u201calso the nation\u2019s cheapest provider, a perfect convergence of big business and low budgets.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

At the center of Hylton\u2019s report was the company\u2019s alarming protocol when it came to Hepatitis C, a virus that destroys the liver, and which is particuarly prevalent among prisoners. \u201cAs a matter of formal company policy, CMS discourages treatment for hepatitis,\u201d he wrote, citing an internal memo from a medical director explicitly ordering doctors to deny treatment as a general rule. Hylton spoke to nurses who expressed shame at their own complicity in the system. \u201cIt was absolutely appalling, to the point that I can\u2019t even tell you,\u201d one woman told him. \u201cYou knew that as long as you worked there, you did not challenge any of it. But your disgust builds as the horrible cases build\u2026. As far as I\u2019m concerned, if you\u2019re sick and you get into one of these places, you might as well be signing your death certificate.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Ten years after Hylton\u2019s expose, CMS is now Corizon, and the same policy exists. The Prison Profiteers video on Corizon features Frankie Barton, another Tucson woman, whose son is sick with Hepatitis C. \u201cMy son\u2019s being told they have no protocol for treating anybody with Hepatitis C,\u201d she says.<\/span><\/p>\n

The result could be deadly. Last year alone, no fewer than seven sick prisoners died at Metro Corrections, a jail in Louisville, Kentucky, while on Corizon\u2019s watch. The company made headlines when six employees quit their jobs, according to local press, \u201camid an investigation by the jail that found that the workers \u2018may\u2019 have contributed\u201d to two of the deaths. This summer, it was announced that the contract between Corizon and the city would not be renewed.<\/span><\/p>\n

In 2009, CMS CEO Rich Hallworth boasted a salary of nearly a million dollars, according toForbes.<\/em>\u00a0Today, his company, Corizon, makes nearly $1.5 billion a year ostensibly treating inmates in some twenty-nine states.<\/span><\/p>\n

Privatizing Incarceration<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

No phenomenon is more emblematic of prison profiteering than the rise of private prisons. By now it is perhaps the most familiar and troubling trend for many progressives, and with good reason: the financial incentives involved are obvious and egregious. \u201cIt\u2019s like the hotel industry,\u201d says Alex Friedmann, an editor at\u00a0Prison Legal News<\/em>, who himself was once incarcerated at a private prison. \u201cThe hotel industry wants to keep their beds full as much as possible, because it means more revenue. Same thing for the private prison companies.\u201d Two separate videos look at the two major private prison companies, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country\u2019s largest operator of private prisons, and GEO Group. Both companies made headlines in September upon the release of a report by In the Public Interest that scrutinized the \u201coccupancy requirements\u201d commonly found in private prison contracts. Last year, CCA sent letters to forty-eight governors, offering to take their prison systems off state hands in exchange for a guarantee that their states would keep their facilities up to ninety percent full\u2014regardless of crime rates.<\/span><\/p>\n

In addition to its lobbying for harsh sentencing\u2014in particular when it comes to immigration enforcement, which funnels a growing number of people into its facilities\u2014CCA and Geo Group have become notorious for providing substandard and sometimes harrowing living conditions to their prisoners.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was disgusting,\u201d says former ACLU attorney Will Harrell, about one GEO Group facility he inspected in Coke County, Texas. \u201cThere was an infestation of insects everywhere you looked, including the kitchen. Insects in the food. It was horrible.\u201d Another interview subject, Donald Weeks, who spent ten months locked up at GEO-run East Mississippi Correctional Facility, described intolerable sewage problems. \u201cThe stench was so bad in there, I couldn\u2019t eat anymore.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

At the heart of the problem is an utter lack of transparency. Facilities run by private prison corporations are not subjected to the same oversight as state and federal prisons. As Alex Friedmann has pointed out, \u201cthe private prison industry operates in secrecy while being funded almost entirely with public taxpayer money.\u201d In September Bloomberg reported that \u201cthe federal government provided almost 43 percent of [CCA\u2019s] $1.76 billion of revenue in 2012, according to its annual report.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Private prisons have inspired activism across the country. In May, activists descended upon Nashville to protest CCA\u2019s shareholder\u2019s meeting and thirtieth anniversary celebration. To coincide with the demonstration, Friedman released a list he compiled of deaths in CCA custody, \u201cthe most vivid testament to the fact that thirty years of imprisoning people for money is nothing to celebrate.\u201d In addition to a long list of prisoners, it included prison staff\u2014as well as three babies who were born to mothers in CCA custody.<\/span><\/p>\n

The protests came months after a coalition of thirty-five organizations called on Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee to reintroduce the Private Prison Information Act, legislation first introduced in 2005, which would require CCA and Geo Group\u2014indeed, anyone with a federal prison contract\u2014to \u201cmake the same information available to the public that Federal prisons and correctional facilities are required to make available.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Fight the Prison Profiteers<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Years of activism against prison profiteering has paid off. In August the FCC took a major step in the right direction by announcing a rate cap on long-distance calls made by inmates. It was a hard-fought victory, albeit a limited one. For Kenny Davis who lives in the same state where his father is incarcerated, high phone rates remain a barrier to keeping in touch.<\/span><\/p>\n

Want to learn more about the wide range of exploitative practices that come from mass incarceration? Start by visiting the\u00a0Prison Profiteers action page<\/span><\/a>. From the companies mentioned above to relatively recent innovations such as privatized bail bonds, to such age-old practices as civil asset forfeiture, the videos covering some of the worst ways people and politicians have found to prey upon the misery of others. As Brave New Foundation\u2019s Jesse Lava explains, \u201cThe Prison Profiteers series illustrates how greed has become a major driver of mass incarceration\u2014and how the system is more vast than most citizens imagine.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

More valuable still, it is a public education campaign that invites us to do something about it. \u201cFor-profit companies are making billions by exploiting our mass incarceration crisis,\u201d said Vanita Gupta, director of the ACLU\u2019s Center for Justice. \u201cOver the next six weeks,\u00a0we\u2019ll be attacking their bottom lines<\/span><\/a>. These companies need to know we\u2019re watching.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Watch the Videos and Take Action<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n