His company started selling leather restraints in and now sells a whole variety of items including helmets, masks and handcuffs. The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Some 2. In an effort to cut costs, more state prisons and county jails are adding healthcare to the growing list of services that are outsourced to for-profit companies. Among the healthcare representatives was Todd Murphy, a director of business development for Correctional Medical Group Companies CMGC , the largest private provider of healthcare to jails and prisons in California.
It also runs the prison healthcare of 11 counties in Georgia, two in Texas, four in New Mexico and one each in Arkansas and Washington state. Not everyone agrees. Excluding homicide, it works out at a death rate of 1. The suit, brought by the ACLU, alleged incidents in which a diabetic prisoner was deprived of insulin, and another where an inmate was kept in a cell and not given food for 38 hours. They have a lot of substance abuse issues, a lot of mental health issues.
But these people are coming in sick and you know a lot of these people are going to pass with us. Murphy said the main reason counties are choosing to outsource their jail healthcare is not to reduce daily costs, but for the comfort of knowing that a lawsuit brought by the family of a dead inmate would be brought against the company and not the county. CFMG this month is expected to take over the jail healthcare contract for Alameda County in California, which includes Oakland and Berkeley, from Corizon Health , the largest private prison healthcare provider in the country.
It was the largest civil rights wrongful-death settlement in California history. In some ways, abolishing them is seen as something like a silver bullet. Part of it is because they're an easy target; there are plenty of people who are comfortable with incarceration but don't really like the idea of firms making money from it.
Private prisons are also a popular target because their abolition wouldn't disrupt the whole system. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't talk about abolishing private prisons. It's just important to remember they can't be blamed for everything wrong with the carceral system. As the Prison Policy Initiative cautioned , private prisons shouldn't be seen as the fuel driving mass incarceration, but rather as a "parasite" that happily latched onto the U.
Private prisons aren't the only firm-run detention facilities around. Perhaps one of the most concerning areas of growth for private companies is immigration detention. While a small number of the total amount of incarcerated people are being held in private prisons, the opposite is true for detained immigrants. Beyond simply operating the facilities, private companies profit off of carceral institutions in almost every way imaginable.
Hadar Aviram, a legal scholar, described this phenomenon to The Nation as "piecemeal privatization," saying that "focusing on private prison companies misses the fact that public correctional institutions are also, essentially, privatized.
Take food as an example. Aramark and Trinity are two of the biggest food service companies contracting with prisons. This privatization of food often comes at the detriment of incarcerated people: As Tim Thielman, a food service administrator at the Ramsey County Correctional Facility in St.
Paul, Minnesota, and a past president of the Association of Correctional Food Service Affiliates, told Governing , "You look at those companies, and they're in it to make a profit. I don't want to talk bad about the companies, but it's about money to them, and if there are ways that they can feed [prisoners] products that are lesser quality, [they will]. It's important to keep in mind how private companies will always find ways to profit if they are given the chance.
With the arrival of President Biden, a Democrat, into the White House, many hoped it would signal the potential demise of private prisons — or at least deal a severe blow to business. However, as The Marshall Project reported, these companies aren't afraid. Instead, they have plans to adapt. Just look at CoreCivic, which started buying up residential re-entry centers, more commonly known as "halfway houses.
By Vanessa Taylor. In return, the company would provide inmate housing and services for 20 years at a contracted rate, as long as the states kept the prisons 90 percent full. Just keep putting people in prison, and we will bail you out of bad deals. Their operating model is finding ways to house, feed, guard, and sometimes rehabilitate prisoners at a lower cost than a state or county or the federal government would have to pay. As you might imagine, Alabama has a much smaller percentage of prisoners in private prisons, less than 1 percent, than California, which until recently had about 5 percent of its prisoners in private facilities.
A few states, such as Montana and New Mexico, have a majority of their prisoners in private prisons. Some private incarceration facilities are paid much, more than the average to house prisoners. Immigrant detention is where private prisons currently make their big bucks.
But there are other ways for private prisons to make money. Chance are you have heard about prisoners making license plates. For over a century, state prisons have used prison labor to make license plates and road signs. The states of Louisiana and Texas have famously, or infamously, also used prison labor to run sugar plantations.
The most popular brand of sugar in those states was once made from sugar cane grown with prison labor. But modern private prisons have many more options for earning extra revenue from the work of the prisoners they house. In the federal prison system, prisoners can get jobs as groundskeepers, kitchen workers, orderlies, plumbers, painters, and warehouse workers for the prison itself. But the greatest number of prisoners in private correctional facilities work on large contracts between the private prison and outside companies.
Prisoners are less expensive than workers in offshore call centers. There have even been credit card companies that contracted call center work to private prisons. Haystack Mountain Goat Dairy has used prisoners to run its goat farms and dairies to make fine chevre goat cheese that is sold at Whole Foods.
And many cities and counties contract with private prisons to find the labor to mow roadsides, maintain streets, and take care of trash collection,. Prisoners are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, so there is no minimum wage for prison labor.
Prisoners can spend their earnings at the prison commissary for candy, cigarettes, noodles, shaving equipment, toothpaste, deodorant, shower shoes, thermal underwear, cosmetics, denture adhesive and countless other items for personal use, none of them at a discount from prices on the outside.
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