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  1. #1
    Still Hates Small Ball Spurminator's Avatar
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    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/...=.762de2d3c3c9

    The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

    Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

    “They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote.

    In an interview, Yates said there are 13 privately run privately run facilities in the Bureau of Prisons system, and they will not close overnight. Yates said the Justice Department would not terminate existing contracts but instead review those that come up for renewal. She said all the contracts would come up for renewal over the next five years.

    The Justice Department’s inspector general last week released a critical reportconcluding that privately operated facilities incurred more safety and security incidents than those run by the federal Bureau of Prisons. The private facilities, for example, had higher rates of assaults — both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff — and had eight times as many contraband cellphones confiscated each year on average, according to the report.

    Disturbances in the facilities, the report said, led in recent years to “extensive property damage, bodily injury, and the death of a Correctional Officer.” The report listed several examples of mayhem at private facilities, including a May 2012 riot at the Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi in which 20 people were injured and a correctional officer killed. That incident, according to the report, involved 250 inmates who were upset about low-quality food and medical care.

    “The fact of the matter is that private prisons don’t compare favorably to Bureau of Prisons facilities in terms of safety or security or services, and now with the decline in the federal prison population, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something about that,” Yates said.

    The problems at private facilities were hardly a secret, and Yates said Justice Department and Bureau of Prisons officials had been talking for months about discontinuing their use. Mother Jones recently published a 35,000-word exposé detailing a reporter’s undercover work as a private prison guard in Louisiana — a piece that found serious deficiencies. The Nation magazine wrote earlier this year about deaths under questionable cir stances in privately operated facilities.

    It is possible the directive could face resistance from those companies that will be affected. In response to the inspector general’s report, the contractors running the prisons noted that their inmate populations consist largely of noncitizens, presenting them with challenges that government-run facilities do not have.

    Scott Marquardt, president of Management and Training Corporation, wrote that comparing Bureau of Prisons facilities to privately operated ones was “comparing apples and oranges.” He generally disputed the inspector general’s report.

    “Any casual reader would come to the conclusion that contract prisons are not as safe as BOP prisons,” Marquardt wrote. “The conclusion is wrong and is not supported by the work done by the [Office of the Inspector General].”

    Yates, though, noted that the Bureau of Prisons was “already taking steps” to make her order a reality. Three weeks ago, she wrote, the bureau declined to renew a contract for 1,200 beds at the Cibola County Correctional Center in New Mexico. According to a local TV station, the county sheriff said the facility’s closure would have a negative impact on the community.

    Yates wrote that the bureau also would amend a solicitation for a 10,800-bed contract to one for a maximum 3,600-bed contract. That, Yates wrote, would allow the Bureau of Prisons over the next year to discontinue housing inmates in at least three private prisons, and by May 1, 2017, the total private prison population would stand at less than 14,200 inmates. She said it was “hard to know precisely” when all the privately run facilities would no longer have federal inmates, though she noted that 14,200 was less than half the inmates they held at their apex three years ago, a figure she said indicated the department was “well on our way to ultimately eliminating the use of private prisons entirely.”

    “We have to be realistic about the time it will take, but that really depends on the continuing decline of the federal prison population, and that’s really hard to accurately predict,” Yates said.

    According to the inspector general’s report, private prisons housed roughly 22,660 federal inmates as of December 2015. That represents about 12 percent of the Bureau of Prisons total inmate population, according to the report.

    In her memo, Yates wrote that the Bureau of Prisons began contracting with privately run ins utions about a decade ago in the wake of exploding prison populations, and by 2013, as the federal prison population reached its peak, nearly 30,000 inmates were housed in privately operated facilities. But in 2013, Yates wrote, the prison population began to decline because of efforts to adjust sentencing guidelines, sometimes retroactively, and to change the way low-level drug offenders are charged. She said the drop in federal inmates gave officials the opportunity to reevaluate the use of private prisons.

    Yates wrote that private prisons “served an important role during a difficult time period,” but they had proven less effective than facilities run by the government. The contract prisons are operated by three private corporations, according to the inspector general’s report: Corrections Corporation of America, GEO Group and Management and Training Corporation.

    The Bureau of Prisons spent $639 million on private prisons in fiscal year 2014, according to the report.

    Yates said it was “really hard to determine whether private prisons are less expensive” and whether their closure would cause costs to go up, though she said officials did not anticipate having to hire additional Bureau of Prisons staff.

    “Bottom line, I’d also say, you get what you pay for,” Yates said.

  2. #2
    Kang Trill Clinton's Avatar
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    systematic racism/white supremacy just took a huge blow

  3. #3
    Savvy Veteran spurraider21's Avatar
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    Good

  4. #4
    bandwagoner fans suck ducks's Avatar
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    bad gov control post office
    post office broke
    federal gov broke
    think private prisons would work better

  5. #5
    The Wemby Assembly z0sa's Avatar
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    All private prisons need to be closed down.

  6. #6
    4-25-20 Will Hunting's Avatar
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    bad gov control post office
    post office broke
    federal gov broke
    think private prisons would work better
    Excellent analysis.

    Keep doing god's work in reminding the world what the average Repubican voter is like.

  7. #7
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    Private Prisons Are Far From Ended: 62 Percent of Immigrant Detainees Are in Privatized Jails


    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...ivatized-jails

  8. #8
    ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ TheSanityAnnex's Avatar
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    Private Prisons Are Far From Ended: 62 Percent of Immigrant Detainees Are in Privatized Jails


    http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/3...ivatized-jails
    Deport them all and shut down the immigration detention centers, problem solved.

  9. #9
    bandwagoner fans suck ducks's Avatar
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    instead of letting them sit in jail make them build the wall!

  10. #10
    i hunt fenced animals clambake's Avatar
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    nothing says stay out quite like a wall of corpses.

  11. #11
    Mr. John Wayne CosmicCowboy's Avatar
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    That works. How about heads on es?

  12. #12
    i hunt fenced animals clambake's Avatar
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    thats right.

    no mixed message there.

  13. #13
    i hunt fenced animals clambake's Avatar
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    put up a bunch of signs "would you like to be part of our new wall"

  14. #14
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    systematic racism/white supremacy just took a huge blow
    +1

    Making money on imprisoning people is a moral abomination, IMO.

  15. #15
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    bad gov control post office
    post office broke
    federal gov broke
    think private prisons would work better
    You realize the post office is privately run, right? (sighs)

  16. #16
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    That works. How about heads on es?
    Not quite the sentiment that built the greatest civilization in human history.


  17. #17
    i hunt fenced animals clambake's Avatar
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    yep......the french ed us again.

  18. #18
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    Excellent analysis.

    Keep doing god's work in reminding the world what the average Repubican voter is like.
    This election cycle has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Republican party cannot be trusted with governments.

    The people of Kansas have found that out the hard way. Massive Republican policy failures are ing expensive. 2tn+ Iraq blunder, Kansas in the toilet, etc, etc, etc.

    The string of Republican policy failures was really obvious to many, but this cycle is hopefully waking people up to the moral and intellectual rot at the center of conservatism in this country.

  19. #19
    I am that guy RandomGuy's Avatar
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    Not that conservative ideas are bad in and of themselves.

    It is just that so many of the policy proscriptions that come out of them ignore evidence, morals, and basic human nature.

  20. #20
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    You realize the post office is privately run, right? (sighs)
    That's effectively UNTRUE, when Repugs force USPS into annual losses by dictating 75 years pension pre-funding in 10 years, AND blocking USPS from expanding into retail banking.

  21. #21
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    Uncovering a $1 Billion Deal to Detain Unauthorized Immigrants

    In his piece for the Washington Post, reporter Chico Harlan sheds light on one of these secretive arrangements, detailing a $1 billion deal between the Obama Administration and Corrections Corporation of America, also known as CCA, the largest private prison company in the country.

    Under the deal, CCA was responsible for building and maintaining a large immigrant detention facility for women and children in South Texas; in an unusual arrangement, CCA is guaranteed payment for being at capacity regardless of how full the facility actually is.

    https://www.propublica.org/podcast/i...zed-immigrants



  22. #22
    dangerous floater Winehole23's Avatar
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    good riddance to smelly garbage

  23. #23
    License to Lillard tlongII's Avatar
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    You realize the post office is privately run, right? (sighs)
    Uh what?

    The United States Postal Service (USPS), (also known as the Post Office, U.S. Mail, or Postal Service), is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for providing postal service in the United States. It is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Cons ution.

    The U.S. Mail traces its roots to 1775 during the Second Continental Congress, where Benjamin Franklin was appointed the first postmaster general. The Post Office Department was created in 1792 from Franklin's operation, elevated to a cabinet-level department in 1872, and transformed in 1971 into the U.S. Postal Service as an agency of the U.S. government.

    The USPS as of February 2015 has 617,254 active employees and operated 211,264 vehicles in 2014. The USPS is the operator of the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world.[2] The USPS is legally obligated to serve all Americans, regardless of geography, at uniform price and quality. The USPS has exclusive access to letter boxes marked "U.S. Mail" and personal letterboxes in the United States, but still competes against private package delivery services, such as the United Parcel Service (UPS) and has part use with FedEx Express.[3]

    The USPS has not directly received taxpayer-dollars since the early 1980s with the exception of subsidies for costs associated with the disabled and overseas voters.[4] Since the 2006 all-time peak mail volume,[5] after which Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act,[6] (which mandated $5.5 billion per year to be paid into an account to fully prefund employee retirement health benefits, a requirement exceeding that of other government and private organizations [7]), revenue dropped sharply due to recession-influenced[8] declining mail volume,[9] prompting the postal service to look to other sources of revenue while cutting costs to reduce its budget deficit.[10] The USPS lost $5.5 billion in fiscal year 2014 and $5.1 billion in 2015, and its revenue was $67.8 billion in 2014 and $68.9 billion in 2015

  24. #24
    Savvy Veteran spurraider21's Avatar
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    Making money on imprisoning people is a moral abomination, IMO.
    i don't even care about that. the problem was that the conditions in private prisons were borderline inhumane

  25. #25
    Savvy Veteran spurraider21's Avatar
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    Earlier this week we dealt with the popular belief that because the US Cons ution mentions post offices, it would take a cons utional amendment to eliminate or privatize the USPS. Today we have the flip side of that myth- the belief that the US Postal Service isn’t part of the federal government. You see this in news stories often- FedSmith ran a column just a week ago referring to the USPS as a “quasi-governmental en y”, that had been privatized in 1971! The Gallup Organization, which was responsible for the poll we reported earlier today naming the USPS the best-liked government service, referred to “the quasi-governmental U.S. Postal Service” in an earlier poll report. A recent story in the Atlantic claims that “Postal services were quasi-privatized in the US decades ago”. Just to make things interesting, the Washington Post’s Ed O’Keefe once referred to the USPS as “a quasi-federal outfit”– whatever that means!

    Most of the quasi-confusion can be traced back to the 1971 Postal Reorganization Act, which eliminated the old Post Office Department, replacing it with the US Postal Service. The act was intended to make the USPS self-financing from its own revenues, and to make it an independent, non-political public service. Prior to the PRA, postmasters (including the postmaster general) were political appointees; rates were set by Congress, and the POD had to go through the appropriations process to get the money it needed to operate.

    The PRA established a Board of Governors who were responsible for selecting the PMG and setting policies and budgets. It allowed the USPS to use its revenue to finance its operations without any appropriation process. It set up a separate commission to set postage rates.

    What it didn’t do was privatize the postal service in any way, shape or form. Some in Congress, then as now, would have favored privatization. Consideration was also given to making the USPS a government owned corporation, like the TVA or Amtrak. But neither of those things happened. Here’s what the Act says:”The United States Postal Service shall be operated as a basic and fundamental service provided to the people by the Government of the United States”. It also defines the USPS as “an independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States”.

    Being “independent” doesn’t make the USPS a “quasi-” anything- it simply means it is not part of one of the cabinet departments. Other “independent” agencies include the CIA and NASA.

    In a footnote to its most recent report on postal finances, the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress, had this to say:

    The USPS often is mischaracterized as a quasi governmental or private en y. It is neither. The USPS is a government agency that was created by Congress to achieve various public purposes. Federal law defines what products and services the Postal Service may offer. Additionally, the USPS’s employees are federal employees who participate in the Civil Service Retirement System, the Federal Employees Retirement System, and the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program.
    The Supreme Court has even weighed in on what being “independent” means for the USPS, inan opinion from 2004:

    The PRA’s designation of the Postal Service as an “independent establishment of the executive branch of the Government of the United States,” 39 U. S. C. §201, is not consistent with the idea that the Postal Service is an en y existing outside the Government. Indeed, the designation indicates just the contrary. The PRA gives the Postal Service a high degree of independence from other Government offices, but it remains part of the Government.
    That would seem to settle it, wouldn’t it?


    http://postalnews.com/blog/2015/05/0...rnment-agency/

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