Liliana Segura puts out the latest report on the businesses exploiting America’s penal system, including a phone company that charges $1.13 a minute for calls and a healthcare provider that “discourages treatment for hepatitis”:
Defenders of for-profit prison services pitch them as superior, efficient, money-saving options for cash-strapped states and localities that can ill-afford the costs of mass incarceration. (And indeed, historically, state-run services have often proven abysmal in themselves.) But not only do such privatized services often end up more expensive in reality, they can incur huge unseen costs to inmates and their families. Worse still are the implications on a larger scale: when corporations seek to profit from prisons, it creates a powerful financial incentive, not just to push for policies that fuel mass incarceration but to cut corners in the services they’ve been hired to provide. Society shows little concern for prisoners who might receive substandard food, phone service or healthcare behind bars, after all.
Cory Doctorow lists some disturbing facts from Segura’s piece:
These prisons are not subject to freedom of information requests, are not inspected in the same way as public prisons, and have profit-taking built into their billion-dollar business, meaning that every dollar they spend on care and rehabilitation for prisoners is a dollar they don’t return to their shareholders.
Previous Dish on for-profit prisons here.
The Dish 