My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard: A Mother Jones Investigation

[TheGoodBits]

7 minutes ago, Rocky21 said:

Great call.  This only applies to federal prisoners, is that right? 

Yeah. At the state level the machine rolls on. 

[visionary]

 

[TheGoodBits]

Damn. Just left him to die.

[Gamebreaker]

1 hour ago, skinsfan_1215 said:

Damn. Just left him to die.

You can't say that yet. We have to wait until all the facts come out. 

[TheGoodBits]

Just now, Gamebreaker said:

You can't say that yet. We have to wait until all the facts come out. 

I'm reading this as sarcasm but let me know if my detector is broken.

[Gamebreaker]

21 minutes ago, skinsfan_1215 said:

I'm reading this as sarcasm but let me know if my detector is broken.

100% sarcasm. I thought it would be obvious coming from me. My bad. 

[TheGoodBits]

13 minutes ago, Gamebreaker said:

100% sarcasm. I thought it would be obvious coming from me. My bad. 

No it was fairly obvious, just double checking.

[Destino]

They left him to die AFTER all of this:

He saw a nurse twice complaining that he couldn't breath, she cleared him twice.  No paperwork though because the nurse claims to have put the paperwork in the wrong file.  He fell down while walking away from the second visit and needed help returning to his cell.  He then went to court where the judge noticed he was visibly ill, and he said in court that he needed a hospital.  He was taken back to jail and he stopped to lean against a wall, and asked to use the phone.  That when he was wrestled to the ground and pepper sprayed in the face, and he once again stated that he couldn't breath.  

The same nurse, Ms. Venable, that saw him in earlier that day, where he fell on the floor, decided that his complaints were normal for someone that had just been pepper sprayed and again does not have paperwork because she was in a hurry to leave work and decided to do it the next day.  Too bad the inconsiderate man went and died, no doubt causing this poor nurse to fill out even more boring paperwork.

It's only after all of that, that they left this poor man to during his cell.  What else could he have done to alert his jailers of his need for medical attention?  Nothing reasonable.  

 

[skinsmarydu]

6 hours ago, Destino said:

It's only after all of that, that they left this poor man to during his cell.  What else could he have done to alert his jailers of his need for medical attention?  Nothing reasonable.  

 

I went into jail with "money on the books" because I thought I would just be fined, so I bought extra snacks for my cellie, who was diabetic, and had been there for 2 months without seeing the doctor. (I also bought some panties for a couple girls who had hand-washed theirs to extinction.)  She sent me a letter (after we were both released) thanking me for my kindness.  To me, I was just being a human.  Unless you've been there for more than overnight, you can't imagine even a public county jail...I can't imagine what goes on with nothing but corporate oversight on profit/loss.

Prayers for all.

[Gamebreaker]

What is even worse about this whole situation is that he should've never been jailed to begin with. Most domestic disturbance issues don't end with the husband going to jail simply off the word of the wife. Could his wife have been in danger? Possibly. But he made a threatening comment and then walked away. Why his wife called 911 is beyond me, but I'm sure she wishes she didn't now. 

Did anyone else catch the part in that story where it said that county's biggest source of revenue is the ****ing jail? How the **** is that your biggest source of revenue? So you know what all the public officials are in the business of, jailing as many people as possible. 

All private prisons should be illegal. Just because someone is incarcerated doesn't mean you get to treat them worse than you'd treat your dog. 

[Riggo-toni]

Another reason we'll never end the insane war on drugs, and why we have the highest% of population behind bars of any democracy. Prisons have become like Army bases - politicians actually fighting to keep them open to support local economies.

[Riggo-toni]

On 6/25/2016 at 2:59 PM, zoony said:

Applying a profit motive to the basic functions of government might be the most harmful policy to ever come out of conservatism

Sometimes this is true, but money for local economies is just as likely to be a factor for bad policy outcomes, even when there is no profit motive directly involved. Minimum mandatory sentencing for drug offenses has done more damage imo than privatizing prisons. Treating addiction as a medical rather than a criminal issue would ultimately be cheaper and improve quality of life.

There could also be monetary incentives for lower recidivism rates; instead, simply providing funds per inmate might actually disincentivise trying to reform the incarcerated.

[TheGreatBuzz]

While I think that prisons should not be a source of revenue for the town, the people complaining about it need to remember that the money has to come from somewhere.  Are you fine with your property taxes being raised?  More toll roads?  Or whatever the area decides to use to raise money instead?  Personally, I am fine with it.  I just want everyone to think it through. 

Though I do with they would spend my money in a better manner.  Right now a road by my house is being completely redone but it was perfectly fine the way it was before.  Seems wasteful.

[Bang]

34 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

While I think that prisons should not be a source of revenue for the town, the people complaining about it need to remember that the money has to come from somewhere.  Are you fine with your property taxes being raised?  More toll roads?  Or whatever the area decides to use to raise money instead?  Personally, I am fine with it.  I just want everyone to think it through. 

Though I do with they would spend my money in a better manner.  Right now a road by my house is being completely redone but it was perfectly fine the way it was before.  Seems wasteful.

this will sound worse than intended,,  but it sounds to me like reasoning slavery because food prices will go up.

At least back then they were open about it..  catch people, sell them.

Now catch someone, rely on a minimum sentencing guidelines, and put them to work.
(Work that the owners and upper classes won't be subjected to, because of horrible diseases like Affluenza and the ever popular "I'm too big to fail, and thus too big to even arrest". )
No, we have slave-farms, then we dodge bull**** sentencing guidelines set up by those who own them so we don't end up in them.

~Bang

[Gamebreaker]

28 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

While I think that prisons should not be a source of revenue for the town, the people complaining about it need to remember that the money has to come from somewhere.  Are you fine with your property taxes being raised?  More toll roads?  Or whatever the area decides to use to raise money instead?  Personally, I am fine with it.  I just want everyone to think it through. 

Though I do with they would spend my money in a better manner.  Right now a road by my house is being completely redone but it was perfectly fine the way it was before.  Seems wasteful.

I am more than fine with higher property tax or toll roads, if they are necessary. I don't think being slightly inconvenienced in those ways is a good enough excuse to make life worse on poorer income citizens. 

Furthermore, if we really want to get into the weeds on this. We can talk about how private prisons are allowing private businesses to basically have legal slavery within our country, and are paying the inmates even less than what an outsourced worker in China gets paid to make iPhones. This was a jail, and so that wasn't happening in that facility, but there is a large percentage of our population that complains about no jobs being available, yet has no problem with the disproportionate number of years that minorities are sentenced and are all for private prisons. Some of these counties wouldn't have to rely on jail revenue if there wasn't a prison in their state with an inmate working for .12 cents/hour. 

[TheGreatBuzz]

2 hours ago, Bang said:

this will sound worse than intended,,  but it sounds to me like reasoning slavery because food prices will go up.

At least back then they were open about it..  catch people, sell them.

Now catch someone, rely on a minimum sentencing guidelines, and put them to work.
(Work that the owners and upper classes won't be subjected to, because of horrible diseases like Affluenza and the ever popular "I'm too big to fail, and thus too big to even arrest". )
No, we have slave-farms, then we dodge bull**** sentencing guidelines set up by those who own them so we don't end up in them.

~Bang

Oh I agree.  I just meant people in general that complain about the prison system will also complain when their taxes go up.  They fail to realize the money has to come from somewhere.

[The Sisko]

On 6/23/2016 at 6:59 PM, TryTheBeal! said:

I'm scared to read this. I know it's really gonna piss me off.

^^This. In spades!

[Riggo-toni]

18 minutes ago, TheGreatBuzz said:

Oh I agree.  I just meant people in general that complain about the prison system will also complain when their taxes go up.  They fail to realize the money has to come from somewhere.

Or....we could stop handing out prison sentences for victimless crimes like non violent drug offenses or prostitution. A crack addict with a 2 days supply gets a mandatory minimum sentence of about 3 years, whereas for powder cocaine, someone has to have roughly 1000x more for the same minimum sentence. We could legalize and tax pot, which would simultaneously lower the cost of prisons and raise revenue. We could legalize and regulate prostitution along the Dutch model, and use the proceeds for medical exams.

The biggest winners in the war on drugs have been violent criminals. Crime labs have become so overburdened from drug cases that conviction rates for other crimes have fallen.

[TheGreatBuzz]

1 hour ago, Riggo-toni said:

Or....we could stop handing out prison sentences for victimless crimes like non violent drug offenses or prostitution. A crack addict with a 2 days supply gets a mandatory minimum sentence of about 3 years, whereas for powder cocaine, someone has to have roughly 1000x more for the same minimum sentence. We could legalize and tax pot, which would simultaneously lower the cost of prisons and raise revenue. We could legalize and regulate prostitution along the Dutch model, and use the proceeds for medical exams.

The biggest winners in the war on drugs have been violent criminals. Crime labs have become so overburdened from drug cases that conviction rates for other crimes have fallen.

While I'm not gonna argue about sentences, that isn't a fix to the revenue issue.  In many locations, prison revenue pays for more than just prisons.  It may pay for your roads or schools or any other thing your area pays for.  As for your other ideas for raising revenue, I don't necessarily disagree but I think it is so far from happening, it's not worth discussing.