foptiludrop
05-24-2005, 09:04 AM
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y201/wappened/beale.jpg
“I want the CCA deal stopped now! I want the CCA deal stopped now!”
Who knew that Howard Beale’s exhortations in 1976’s film, “Network,” would be worth shouting again nearly 30 years later?
What sent Martha Stewart to prison were four counts of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators about her ImClone stock sale, which amounted to her avoiding losses of about $50,000.
Contrast her insider trading with that of Corrections Corporation of America, Inc.’s W. Blake Brock, who was controller of CCA in 1996 and who, along with his wife and father, used inside knowledge of CCA’s pending quarterly losses to sell their CCA stock and buy put options in anticipation of the company's negative earnings release. Their scam spared them losses more than twice those of Stewart’s.
Yet the Brocks were allowed to buy their way out of trouble, (http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr17005.htm) in the form of monetary penalties, without admitting any wrongdoing.
Really, this is just a Sidestep, though, because it’s CCA as it stands today that I want to talk about.
CCA operates 15 prisons in Texas, 8 in its home state of Tennessee, 7 in Florida, and a couple dozen more are scattered in a handful of other states.
CCA was an appellant in a case that went all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1997, in which the Court upheld the lower courts’ decision(s) that a private company (and its employees) do not enjoy, as government contractors, the same immunities as government agencies do. So, the CCA inmate (Ronnie Lee McKnight, housed at the South Central Corrections Center in Clinton, Tennessee) who’d alleged injuries at the hands of CCA guards was allowed to sue them and CCA -- something he would not have been allowed to do (except in an extreme case of abuse, which this was not) against government-paid state guards or the state government itself. (There have been other US Supreme Court cases where federal prisoners’ rights to sue private prison corporations have been rejected, however. It’s an absurd function of the way the Court has interpreted two distinct laws that affect state-level and federal-level prisoners differently.)
I’ve always found the idea of privatizing prisons odious and unconstitutional; our US Supreme Court has refused to consider the matter (although the ACLU has repeatedly badgered it to do so) but historically, states have ultimately had to step in and take them over when the abuses perpetrated in them became known. (San Quentin was built and operated by a private company for a decade before California took it over.)
Consider this quote from CCA’s latest quarterly earnings report:
“...financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2005, were negatively impacted by reduced inmate populations at a number of the Company's facilities...”
CCA needs to keep 95% of its jail beds full to turn a profit. That’s the major flaw right there. When the states and the feds ran their own prisons, they had no vested interest in filling them up or keeping them full; indeed, they could (and did) close facilities to consolidate dwindling inmate populations and relocate them to other more modern (efficient) sites.
Other flaws include the lack of public oversight of private prisons, their often appalling conditions, high turnover rate of undertrained, underpaid staff, behind-the-scenes bribery of public officials to secure prison contracts, keeping prisoners past their release dates to pad the per diem checks, and, scandalously, such “cost-efficient” understaffing that when CCA’s Florence, AZ prisoners rioted in 2000, CCA guards actually called 911 for help from local police!
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y201/wappened/cca.gif
Corrections Corporation of America's Florence, AZ facility
Add to all these flaws nearly twenty years of documented proof that it is no less expensive for the government to hire contractor prisons than it is to administer them itself. Not only that, CCA’s inept management of its prisons has cost us -- the public -- lives and money.
CCA’s stock is trading at $36.00 today. CCA pays a hefty insurance premium in anticipation of the lawsuits inmates abused by its staff will be filing in any given year, but don’t let that fool you into thinking *we* aren’t the ones underwriting that policy, because the courts have found that states *are* liable for putting in harm’s way (meaning into CCA’s fiendish care) any convict who suffers at the hands of one of its “corporate cops”.
In a nutshell, we have paid some greedy privateers to mete out our public justice. CCA has taken our money and absconded outright with most of it, barely staffing its facilities and cutting operating costs in other areas (longer “lights out” periods, less toilet paper, fewer showers, etc.) to such a degree that it has created unacceptably volatile conditions, which have led to escapes -- and the commission of new crimes while on the loose, fights, riots, and lawsuits.
It’s time we took our prisons back. All that the privatization of them has done is put another layer of grease on the pig.
Send The White House a telegram in Howard’s honor and say so... :)
“I want the CCA deal stopped now! I want the CCA deal stopped now!”
Who knew that Howard Beale’s exhortations in 1976’s film, “Network,” would be worth shouting again nearly 30 years later?
What sent Martha Stewart to prison were four counts of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators about her ImClone stock sale, which amounted to her avoiding losses of about $50,000.
Contrast her insider trading with that of Corrections Corporation of America, Inc.’s W. Blake Brock, who was controller of CCA in 1996 and who, along with his wife and father, used inside knowledge of CCA’s pending quarterly losses to sell their CCA stock and buy put options in anticipation of the company's negative earnings release. Their scam spared them losses more than twice those of Stewart’s.
Yet the Brocks were allowed to buy their way out of trouble, (http://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/lr17005.htm) in the form of monetary penalties, without admitting any wrongdoing.
Really, this is just a Sidestep, though, because it’s CCA as it stands today that I want to talk about.
CCA operates 15 prisons in Texas, 8 in its home state of Tennessee, 7 in Florida, and a couple dozen more are scattered in a handful of other states.
CCA was an appellant in a case that went all the way to the US Supreme Court in 1997, in which the Court upheld the lower courts’ decision(s) that a private company (and its employees) do not enjoy, as government contractors, the same immunities as government agencies do. So, the CCA inmate (Ronnie Lee McKnight, housed at the South Central Corrections Center in Clinton, Tennessee) who’d alleged injuries at the hands of CCA guards was allowed to sue them and CCA -- something he would not have been allowed to do (except in an extreme case of abuse, which this was not) against government-paid state guards or the state government itself. (There have been other US Supreme Court cases where federal prisoners’ rights to sue private prison corporations have been rejected, however. It’s an absurd function of the way the Court has interpreted two distinct laws that affect state-level and federal-level prisoners differently.)
I’ve always found the idea of privatizing prisons odious and unconstitutional; our US Supreme Court has refused to consider the matter (although the ACLU has repeatedly badgered it to do so) but historically, states have ultimately had to step in and take them over when the abuses perpetrated in them became known. (San Quentin was built and operated by a private company for a decade before California took it over.)
Consider this quote from CCA’s latest quarterly earnings report:
“...financial results for the three months ended March 31, 2005, were negatively impacted by reduced inmate populations at a number of the Company's facilities...”
CCA needs to keep 95% of its jail beds full to turn a profit. That’s the major flaw right there. When the states and the feds ran their own prisons, they had no vested interest in filling them up or keeping them full; indeed, they could (and did) close facilities to consolidate dwindling inmate populations and relocate them to other more modern (efficient) sites.
Other flaws include the lack of public oversight of private prisons, their often appalling conditions, high turnover rate of undertrained, underpaid staff, behind-the-scenes bribery of public officials to secure prison contracts, keeping prisoners past their release dates to pad the per diem checks, and, scandalously, such “cost-efficient” understaffing that when CCA’s Florence, AZ prisoners rioted in 2000, CCA guards actually called 911 for help from local police!
http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y201/wappened/cca.gif
Corrections Corporation of America's Florence, AZ facility
Add to all these flaws nearly twenty years of documented proof that it is no less expensive for the government to hire contractor prisons than it is to administer them itself. Not only that, CCA’s inept management of its prisons has cost us -- the public -- lives and money.
CCA’s stock is trading at $36.00 today. CCA pays a hefty insurance premium in anticipation of the lawsuits inmates abused by its staff will be filing in any given year, but don’t let that fool you into thinking *we* aren’t the ones underwriting that policy, because the courts have found that states *are* liable for putting in harm’s way (meaning into CCA’s fiendish care) any convict who suffers at the hands of one of its “corporate cops”.
In a nutshell, we have paid some greedy privateers to mete out our public justice. CCA has taken our money and absconded outright with most of it, barely staffing its facilities and cutting operating costs in other areas (longer “lights out” periods, less toilet paper, fewer showers, etc.) to such a degree that it has created unacceptably volatile conditions, which have led to escapes -- and the commission of new crimes while on the loose, fights, riots, and lawsuits.
It’s time we took our prisons back. All that the privatization of them has done is put another layer of grease on the pig.
Send The White House a telegram in Howard’s honor and say so... :)