![]() ![]() Which explains the popularity of one of President Joe Biden’s first executive orders, which was headlined as “directing the Department of Justice to end its contracts with privately run prisons. And even though the studies noted, private prisons spend less on staff salaries and staff training, and often, on the number of staffers running their facilities, they may not cost less for the counties, states and federal agencies that pay them. Most studies not funded by the three companies have concluded that their private prisons are more violent, more dangerous for inmates and staff, and offer fewer and lesser services to the folks they’ve locked up than publicly-run facilities. Today just three companies, CoreCivic (which once more honestly called itself the Corrections Corporation of America), GEO - the “community supervision” company and MTC, the self-titled Management and Training Corporation - made to sound like they counsel rug-rats on “going potty,” have cornered the state, federal and local corrections markets. This, in turn, the theory went, would create a free market in which the prison privateers would compete to lower costs and improve services. The politicians’ bipartisan solution - monetize the problem, make incarceration so profitable it would attract private-sector prison managers. ![]() When Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs in the 1980s, and Bill Clinton and then-Senator Joe Biden’s crime bills of the 1990s helped make America the “lock ‘em up” capitol of the world, the politicians created a big problem: there weren’t enough spaces to hold all the people being arrested, convicted and handed long, often mandatory, sentences. But there is a real message in those word changes - public support for mass incarceration is waning. In 2010, GEO said its job was tracking “offenders.” Four years later it was supervising “individuals,” and if that didn’t seem innocuous enough, by 2019 the inmates no longer known as “offenders” had become “individuals under community supervision.” Sounds like GEO is overseeing parks and recreation playgrounds, not jails, prisons and detention centers. But consider these word changes in the self-descriptions of GEO, America’s second-biggest proprietor of privately-run prisons. The language of corporate self-praise, would you might think, have little to tell us. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |