The Ash Twins Blog

I suppose it’s a perfectly rational move, but it still shocks the conscience to read accounts like this:

To be fair, government employees weren’t the only ones to lobby against crack-cocaine sentence equalization. A little-recognized subset of this vast prison-industrial complex lobbying community is composed of private correctional corporations, which sign lucrative contracts with governments to house inmates for profit, often shipping them to facilities out of state.

It is, of course, in these private prisons’ economic interests to see more people in prison serving longer sentences. And with current facilities bursting at the seams, times for this burgeoning industry are good. The country’s largest private prison provider, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), spent more than $2.7 million from 2006 through September 2008 on lobbying for stricter laws…

The societal costs — both human and financial — of these policies and practices are enormous, and growing. California — which carried a $15.2 billion deficit into this fiscal year — spends $10 billion per year on more than 170,000 inmates… California also faces high recidivism rates; state records show that more than two-thirds of released inmates return to prison within three years…

Source: http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/73092-Freedom-watch-Jailhouse-bloc/