Responding to Hearts & Hands notes**
The paragraph and note I selected from Luis Rodriguez’s Hearts and Hands is from Chapter 10 located on pages 123-124. The paragraph is:
“Private industries also gain immensely from prisons when a captive workforce becomes the most profitable game in town. According to Eric Bates, in The Nation, January 5, 1998, “The stock of the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Its performance is in the top twenty percent of stock market returns over the past ten years.” There are powerful hands directing the construction of more prisons in the United States, and at the expense of the poor people – black, brown, and white – who are the ones who end up in them.”
The note is number 18 located on pages 346-347 and discusses how privately owned correctional facilities can be poorly kept and very hazardous since the bottom line for the corporations that own them is to save money in order to maximize their profits. It also discusses Louisiana’s Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth, which was privately owned, and due to the ways costs were cut legal experts considered it one of the worst facilities in the nation. The president of the National Juvenile Detention Association, Earl Dunlap, is quoted as stating the following: “The issues of violence against offenders, lack of adequate education and mental health, of crowding and of poorly paid and poorly trained staff are the norm rather than the exception.” (Rodriguez, 2003, p. 347) The issues that Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth are plagued with don’t just affect privately owned correctional facilities and Luis Rodriguez goes on to briefly discuss that hundreds of juvenile facility investigations have occurred all over the nation.
I selected this paragraph and corresponding note because I thought it was very interesting when I first read it in the text. While I did know that there was some privatization of our correctional institutions occurring throughout the nation, I did not realize that there was Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) stock being publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange nor did I realize the full scope of the issue. It is very alarming, especially after reading the notes section, to discover some of the negative effects of institutional privatization. Most corporations in America are generally known to cut corners to save money because profit is their bottom line and our corrections system is already far from perfect, so combining the two does not seem like a good idea to me. Rodriguez even discusses that the Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth provided unsuitable meals, improper medical treatment, and poorly paid staff beat the children at the facility.
There are many more ethical issues that arise regarding the privatization of correctional facilities. Those that make the laws can end up profiting greatly from privatization because they can invest in the CCA stock and create and pass laws to support privatization, thus causing their stock and individual profits to rise while producing a substandard and borderline inhumane corrections system. Our tax dollars end up going into private pockets instead of going into the actual corrections system to provide prisoners with the things they need such as adequate food and proper medical services. I personally don’t want my tax dollars to be spent on some rich man’s yacht and European family vacation; I want them put into programs in our facilities to help combat recidivism. Privatization in my opinion hurts more than it helps and the dangers and issues it can cause are far reaching. Chente states a sad reality in Always Running, “’I don’t know, but I can tell you this,’ Chente said. ‘The law isn’t always about truth.’” (Rodriguez, 2005, p. 192).
This is the website for the CCA if anyone is interested:
www.cca.com
These interesting statistics are taken from the corrections project website:
www.correctionsproject.com
1-in-4 Black men are in prison, on parole or probation, 10% stripped of their right to vote;
Unprecedented numbers of children are locked up, many sentenced into their adult lives;
Native Americans have the highest percentage of their population in prison;
Latinos and women are the fastest growing populations in the prison system;
New prisons are being forced upon rural communities to “revive” their economies;
70% of prisoners are locked up for crimes that did not involve violence;
Immigrants are now subject to separate laws, many disappeared and detained indefinitely;
The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in the entire world at a cost of over $55 billion per year.
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