Non-White Prisoners are more Profitable for Private Prisons

[The Straight Story]

Non-White Prisoners are more Profitable for Private Prisons


Private prison companies know exactly what kind of inmate they want to make their operations profitable: minorities.

A study (pdf) out of UC Berkeley shows people of color—who make up the majority of the U.S. prison population—are even more overrepresented in private correctional facilities, compared to state-run prisons.

This is not by accident. Companies like The GEO Group and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), two of the industry’s leaders, want black and Hispanic prisoners because they tend to be younger than white inmates, due to the passage of mandatory sentencing laws in the 1980s that targeted drug offenders (who tended to be minorities).

Younger prisoners are cheaper to care for than older ones, due to medical costs, which is why private prisons want more minorities.

“Based on historical sentencing patterns, if you are a prisoner today, and you are over 50 years old, there is a greater likelihood that you are white,” Christopher Petrella, a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley and the study’s author, told BillMoyers.com. “If you are under 50 years old — particularly if you’re closer to 30 years old — you’re more likely to be a person of color.”

The American Civil Liberties Union issued a report two years ago that revealed it costs $34,135 annually to house a non-geriatric prisoner, compared with $68,270 for a prisoner age 50 or older.

http://www.allgov.com/news/controversies/non-white-prisoners-are-more-profitable-for-private-prisons-140211?news=852404

[Scuba]

1. Private prisons are a huge and growing stain on America.

[Go Vols]

8. +1

[CrispyQ]

12. A few days ago there was an article

about a county jail starting to charge the inmates for their stay- they will take it out of their commissary account. I don't recall all the details, I was so steamed when I read it. The state incarcerates you & then charges you for it.

[dotymed]

15. In Clarksville, Tn. (Montgomery Co.)

Inmates are charged approximately $150 a day for their luxurious (HA) accommodations in the local jail.
So, when released (the usual sentence is 11 months, 29 days (11-29) these former prisoners are expected o pay this money in a "timely manner."
Contempt of court charges, pay (for hose lucky enough to find a job) is garnished, tax refunds garnished, you name it, they will get your (their) money or increase your bill (through more incarceration).
I have never seen such a (legal?) revolving door anywhere else.
People whose children are taken by the state (whether the charges are eventually dropped or not) are charged exorbitant child support
which is collected the same way(s).
It is a system designed to keep people impoverished.

[CrispyQ]

19. That is so disgusting to read.

I had no idea it went that far.

[woo me with science]

23. Private prisons are being aggressively grown without accountability or responsibility

Last edited Tue Feb 11, 2014, 09:41 PM - Edit history (1)

by both Democratic and Republican corporatists. It is an outrage that a Democratic Presidential administration is actively and deliberately expanding this evil, with virtually no public awareness of what they have done and continue to do to increase the imprisonment of human beings for profit.

Prisons are finding more and more ways to benefit from this type of exploitation. Their growth is aggressively supported by both Republicans and the corporate Third Way, for one simple reason: Imprisoning human beings is a very profitable industry. But a government's complicity in attaching a profit motive to the imprisonment of human beings is nothing short of evil.

Poor minorities are worthless to corporations on the street. In prison they can bring in $40,000/yr
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10023368969

Government guarantees 90% occupancy rate in private prisons.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=2569173

The Obama administration is aggressively growing private prisons
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022568681

Obama's 2013 budget: One area of marked growth, the prison industrial complex
http://sync.democraticunderground.com/1002392306

Obama selects the owner of a private prison consulting firm as the new Director of the United States Marshals Service (USMS)
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/12/mars-d03.html

Poor Land in Jail as Companies Add Huge Fees for Probation
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014158005

Private prison corporations move up on list on federal contractors, receiving BILLIONS
http://www.nationofchange.org/president-obama-s-incarcernation-1335274655

The Caging of America - Why do we lock up so many people
http://www.democraticunderground.com/1002226110

Prison Labor Booms As Unemployment Remains High; Companies Reap Benefits
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/10/prison-labor_n_2272036.html

Private Prison Corporation's Letters to Shareholders Reveal Industry's Tactics: Profiting from Human Incarceration
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022665091

Financial growth of private prison industry...Profiting from caging humans.

http://l.yimg.com/bt/api/res/1.2/BshteP8i282pcaeH8pdUsA--/YXBwaWQ9eW5ld3M7cT04NTt3PTUyMA--/

This Is How Private Prison Companies Make Millions Even When Crime Rates Fall
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

This Is How Private Prison Companies Make Millions Even When Crime Rates Fall

—By Andy Kroll
| Thu Sep. 19, 2013 9:43 AM PDT MotherJones

We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.

Occupancy requirements, as it turns out, are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full. (The report was funded by grants from the Open Society Institute and Public Welfare, according to a spokesman.)

All the big private prison companies—CCA, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation—try to include occupancy requirements in their contracts, according to the report. States with the highest occupancy requirements include Arizona (three prison contracts with 100 percent occupancy guarantees), Oklahoma (three contracts with 98 percent occupancy guarantees), and Virginia (one contract with a 95 percent occupancy guarantee). At the same time, private prison companies have supported and helped write "three-strike" and "truth-in-sentencing" laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.

[Scuba]

25. Thanks for these sordid details.

[RainDog]

26. Thanks for this post. n/t

[daleanime]

2. Kick....

[RainDog]

3. ACLU: billions wasted on racially-biased arrests

https://www.aclu.org/billions-dollars-wasted-racially-biased-arrests

The Drug War is the new Jim Crow - https://www.aclu.org/drug-law-reform/drug-war-new-jim-crow

Pervasive racial targeting provides another peculiarly U.S. stamp to the drug war. We are incarcerating African-American men at a rate approximately four times the rate of incarceration of black men in South Africa under apartheid.5 Worse still, we have managed to replicate-at least on a statistical level-the shame of chattel slavery in this country: The number of black men in prison (792,000) has already equaled the number of men enslaved in 1820. With the current momentum of the drug war fueling an ever expanding prison-industrial complex, if current trends continue, only 15 years remain before the United States incarcerates as many African-American men as were forced into chattel bondage at slavery's peak, in 1860.

The war on drugs thus offers seamless continuity with the most shameful episodes of our past. Slaves were bound in plantations from which they could not escape. Now, it is prisons that deprive black men of their freedom. For African-American men between the ages of 20 and 29, almost one in three are currently under the thumb of the criminal justice system.6

[zazen]

4. bumping for a scourge of our time that I have no idea how to address n/t

[Laelth]

5. Sandra Day O'Connor and Ronald Reagan are to blame.

Mandatory minimum sentencing has been a disaster.

-Laelth

[nxylas]

7. Or a triumph, depening on your perspective

Prison Industries=slavery resurgent.

[Laelth]

9. I suppose so.

Deep down I think Justice O'Connor meant well. Reagan was too stupid to know better, and his handlers did not mean well, but I doubt Justice O'Connor really wanted to reinstate slavery. Our 1%, on the other hand, would only object to slavery now because they'd be responsible for the food, housing, and health care of their slaves. At the moment, they have the best of both worlds--dirt cheap labor and no responsibility for the laborers.

-Laelth

[marmar]

6. Angry K/R

[rocktivity]

10. Candidate for this year's "You Call This NEWS?" Award"

The "To Figure This Out, You Had To Do A Freaking STUDY?" category


rocktivity

[Orrex]

11. Oh, great. Another example of the white man getting passed over.

[heaven05]

13. per title

ya think!!!! But that has been the creed of america from the beginning. Get as much labor as cheap as possible. Ask me what institution profited from that. Private prisons are the new plantations for the racist pigs who are the 'elite' forces in the capitalist ranks that really run this country. Ain't amerikkka grand?

[raouldukelives]

14. But on the plus side it supports a lot of jobs and mutual funds.

Most likely going to people who consider themselves Christian. "I was in prison and you profited from me." or something.

[Shoulders of Giants]

16. The owners of the private prisons need to be put behind bars.

I don't use this word lightly, but they are fascist. We cannot call ourselves "the land of the free" with this prison system. Any private prison owner or lobbyist who lobbies Congress for more clients, or any Congress-critter who accepts their bribes, are the worst of the worst, up there with Ariel Castro and Charles Manson. Its a sad time when the owners of the prison are bigger criminals than the people behind bars.

[Romulox]

17. War on Drugs + for profit prisons = Modern day Jim Crow

But my favorite actor died of an OD, so I support our for-profit police state. I guess?

[FreedRadical]

18. I believe this sentence is misleading and untrue...

A study (pdf) out of UC Berkeley shows people of color—who make up the majority of the U.S. prison population—

I believe it is more of a talking point meant to imply that black men make up a majority of the US prison population. In fact it is white men who make up the majority. At least a higher percentage than black men. Further down in the replies, the number 792,000 was used for slavery to prison comparisons leading to the conclusion of higher black male prison populations. I am not talking about demographic percentages. I am taking about real numbers.

Now I am not an analyst, researcher or even a journalist. I may be stepping out on a limb hear in trying to refute this. However, I did not make the statement. I believe it is untrue.

[The Straight Story]

20. According to the BJS non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% with whites at 34.2%

According to the BJS non-Hispanic blacks accounted for 39.4% of the prison and jail population in 2009, with whites 34.2%, and Hispanics 20.6%. The incarceration rate of black males was over 6 times higher than that of white males, with a rate of 4,749 per 100,000 US residents.

..

Racial Disparities in Incarceration

African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population
African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites
Together, African American and Hispanics comprised 58% of all prisoners in 2008, even though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately one quarter of the US population
According to Unlocking America, if African American and Hispanics were incarcerated at the same rates of whites, today's prison and jail populations would decline by approximately 50%
One in six black men had been incarcerated as of 2001. If current trends continue, one in three black males born today can expect to spend time in prison during his lifetime
1 in 100 African American women are in prison
Nationwide, African-Americans represent 26% of juvenile arrests, 44% of youth who are detained, 46% of the youth who are judicially waived to criminal court, and 58% of the youth admitted to state prisons (Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice).


http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet

...

Some interesting aspects of this study of prison statistics are these:
California, which has the sixth largest economy in the world, (including its Silicon Valley), and a population that is 52% nonwhite, and is supposedly on the cutting edge of racial and social tolerance, has a prison population that is 69% nonwhite. And, of course, with a Black population that is only 7%, it has a prison population that is 32% Black. And this large population of Black inmates has helped this enlightened state to be the sixth state in incarceration rates.

http://www.gibbsmagazine.com/blacks_in_prisons.htm

[FreedRadical]

21. ...

Guess I was really hoping it was untrue.

Thank you for clarification.

[RainDog]

22. k&r n/t

[woo me with science]

24. Huge K&R

Attaching a profit motive to the imprisonment of human beings is nothing short of evil. This wholly bipartisan evil must be stopped. Thank you for posting this.

[JaneyVee]

27. Fucking disgusting.

[Liberal_in_LA]

28. omg

[Jesus Malverde]

29. That there are defined patterns like that age wise is sick.

Really shows the impact of the war on drugs.

[RainDog]

32. Part of the Republican "southern strategy"

felons can't vote in many places, too. how conveeeeenient for those pols who support the laws that made this possible.

[frwrfpos]

30. du rec for exposure

disgusting shit

[woo me with science]

31. Kick