solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

August 18, 2016 9:58 AM

Justice Department to end use of private prisons. The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.
posted by blue_beetle (64 comments total)

The end of private prisons is good news. The even more encouraging part is that the Justice Department is, to some degree, willing to consider which modalities of correctional service are safe and effective.

You'd think the latter part being important was a given, but it really has not been.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:00 AM on August 18, 2016 [26 favorites]

Previously. And if you haven't read the Mother Jones article from that post: set aside some time. I know it's a novella, but it's one of the best pieces of journalism I've ever read.
posted by selfnoise at 10:00 AM on August 18, 2016 [39 favorites]

Corrections Corporation of America stock price falling off a cliff.
posted by Etrigan at 10:02 AM on August 18, 2016 [104 favorites]

Oh, and a question: this has no effect on states that are paying for private state prisons, correct?
posted by selfnoise at 10:02 AM on August 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

Well this is pretty fantastic news. Good job, Obama.
posted by boo_radley at 10:02 AM on August 18, 2016 [11 favorites]

this is utterly fantastic!! I hope they are able to push for a full implementation of this decision.
posted by supermedusa at 10:06 AM on August 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Holy crap! That's awesome!
posted by edheil at 10:06 AM on August 18, 2016

Wow. Not something I really expected to see happen. I'm sure there are downsides and loopholes and state prisons, and bad actors will do everything they can to take advantage of the situation, and it's not like I'm all "yay, prisons as long as they are run by the state", but still, wow.
posted by Frowner at 10:06 AM on August 18, 2016 [6 favorites]

Wow. "No fucks left" Obama just keeps going.
posted by octothorpe at 10:07 AM on August 18, 2016 [60 favorites]

Good job!
Thanks Obama. Fuck, I'm going to miss this guy.
posted by charlesminus at 10:07 AM on August 18, 2016 [16 favorites]

The primary organizing principle behind American prisons has always been how they make the people who aren't in prison feel: how grimly satisfied they are with the punishment inflicted on prisoners, and how much this punishment costs them in taxes. How effective said prisons are in actually reducing crime or promoting recidivism, let alone in providing the bare minimum of humane treatment of people within, have seldom been factors at all.

This was unexpected. Here's hoping it's indicative of a larger shift in how we approach the correctional system.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:08 AM on August 18, 2016 [16 favorites]

Corrections Corporation of America stock price falling off a cliff.

Either I didn't truly know what schadenfreude was before or I have achieved a new level where I finally truly understand it because of this.
posted by MCMikeNamara at 10:10 AM on August 18, 2016 [70 favorites]

>Corrections Corporation of America stock price falling off a cliff.

You know how sometimes you can feel a smile completely involuntarily spreading all the way across your face?
posted by Sing Or Swim at 10:11 AM on August 18, 2016 [39 favorites]

What? This invisible hand stuff is all a bunch of bullshit?
posted by mondo dentro at 10:11 AM on August 18, 2016 [8 favorites]

Mother Jones: This Is What's Missing From Journalism Right Now

This June, we published a big story—Shane Bauer's account of his four-month stint as a guard in a private prison. That's "big," as in XXL: 35,000 words long, or 5 to 10 times the length of a typical feature, plus charts, graphs, and companion pieces, not to mention six videos and a radio documentary.

It was also big in impact. More than a million people read it, defying everything we're told about the attention span of online audiences; tens of thousands shared it on social media. [...]

Conservatively, our prison story cost roughly $350,000. The banner ads that appeared in it brought in $5,000, give or take. [...]

How else, then, to pay for this kind of work? If you've been reading our stuff for a while, you know what we believe the answer must be: support from readers.

posted by mbrubeck at 10:13 AM on August 18, 2016 [86 favorites]

To be 100% clear, this has zero effect on states that send their inmates to private prisons instead of state-operated prisons. It only affects federal facilities. Still a huge step forward.
posted by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 10:16 AM on August 18, 2016 [10 favorites]

Yeah, this is Good News to be sure, but it really only affects something like 13 prisons (which is still a TON OF PEOPLE). There's MUCH work to do, even though this is awesome awesome awesome.
posted by furnace.heart at 10:21 AM on August 18, 2016

August 14 (4 days ago) – Obama Administration awards $1 Billion no-bid contract to the Corrections Corporation of America to detain asylum seekers from Central America.
posted by schmod at 10:21 AM on August 18, 2016 [35 favorites]

Hopefully with the feds dropping this practice, some states will start to follow suit.

One can hope.
posted by curious nu at 10:21 AM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

To be 100% clear, this has zero effect on states that send their inmates to private prisons instead of state-operated prisons.

Well, it's not zero...

I don't know how prison corporations work, but I did some time working for a security company, and my main job was bidding out U.S. Embassy security contracts.* And here's the thing about those: we didn't care whether we made money on them. Sure, we didn't want to lose money, but what we were looking to do was win those contracts so we could go to other companies and organizations in that country and say "Clearly, we are the gold standard for security, because we guard the U.S. Embassy (so you should pay us a premium)."

So maybe that's how these things work -- the companies bid out the federal stuff cheap so they can go to states and cities and wherever and say "Look, we handle all these federal prisons, so we can totally run your prisons and jails too (and you should pay us a premium)."

Plus, if you take all that federal money out of the pool, it's not as lucrative an industry to be in generally.

* -- "Don't they have Marines for that?" you ask. No. Marine Embassy security forces are only there to protect (and destroy, if necessary) classified information and systems. If they have a choice between getting the Ambassador on the chopper and burning the last hard drive, they will 100 percent burn that hard drive.
posted by Etrigan at 10:23 AM on August 18, 2016 [33 favorites]

If the democrats ever got the hill back, for any length of time, it would be interesting to see how this would start to shake out…with the feds finally admitting this, there will be maps now comparing private-prison-states versus no-private-prison states in a sort of “who wants to be on the wrong side of history” kind of way.

There are whole cities and towns all over regions like the south and southwest that now exist/subsist solely based on the private prison industry and some state legislatures are basically controlled by their lobby…could become a huge “don't destroy our jerbs” issue. I imagine this, hand in hand with weed prohibition, could become the next marriage-equality-style major wedge issue.
posted by trackofalljades at 10:34 AM on August 18, 2016 [6 favorites]

As of 2014, federal private prisons housed about 40,000 people in 13 total facilities. The remaining 91,300 are in private prisons across 30 states (131,300 total). The BOP website on private prisons states that “[t]he majority of BOP inmates in private prisons are sentenced criminal aliens.”
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 10:34 AM on August 18, 2016 [5 favorites]

It will have a direct effect on the (non-state) District of Columbia, whose prisoners serve sentences too long for the local facilities in the federal system.* One of the two local facilities (the Correctional Treatment Facility as opposed to the D.C. Jail) is privately run by CCA, and hopefully this move will lead the District to end that contract when it's up.

*A terrible side effect of this is that many DC inmates are housed all over, which makes it difficult for them to stay connected to families and communities back home.
posted by Bulgaroktonos at 10:36 AM on August 18, 2016 [9 favorites]

At last.
posted by Gelatin at 10:36 AM on August 18, 2016

I've been waiting to read this for years.

Fuck for-profit prisons; they're a blight on our society.
posted by Mooski at 10:37 AM on August 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

Corrections Corporation of America stock price falling off a cliff.

mfw
posted by entropicamericana at 10:38 AM on August 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

The even more encouraging part is that the Justice Department is, to some degree, willing to consider which modalities of correctional service are safe and effective.

The even more encouraging part would be if Democrats, or those interested at all in good governance (but I repeat myself), would use this information to push back on the conservative "private industry is always better and more cost effective" article of misplaced faith.
posted by Gelatin at 10:39 AM on August 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Good riddance. I hope the whole corrupt industry collapses.
posted by tobascodagama at 10:39 AM on August 18, 2016

Privatizations of government services all seem to follow the same model: cut the wages of the workers (going from middle class wages to working poor), reduce the quality of the service (in prisons this would be the quality of the food and counseling) and use the savings to pay off your investors. It costs the government the same as always.
posted by Bee'sWing at 10:39 AM on August 18, 2016 [11 favorites]

"Meanwhile the DEA
Teamed up with the CCA
They tryna lock niggas up
They tryna make new slaves
See thats that privately owned prison
Get your piece today"

Kanye West - New Slaves

This is a good start. Hopefully this means, in time, states will kill their contracts with CCA and other private prisons, and we can start to see some real penal reform in this country.
posted by SansPoint at 10:40 AM on August 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

And let's not forget this judge.
posted by Bee'sWing at 10:41 AM on August 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Corrections Corporation of America stock price falling off a cliff.

horrible_shrill_witch_cackling.mp3
posted by poffin boffin at 10:42 AM on August 18, 2016 [9 favorites]

This tweetstorm from criminal defense attorney David Menschel points out that there's a lot of work to do, and, perhaps most notably, that it's unclear if this will affect Immigration Detention Centers. Some highlights:

3. In my experience, conditions among public prisons and among private ones vary widely. Many public are worse than many private.

5. To my mind, reason to hate private prisons is not the conditions – public ones also frequently awful – its the incentives privates create

6. Private prisons create incentives for powerful corporations to lobby legislatures to create more crimes, pass harsher sentencing laws.

10. My biggest question about Obama's move: Does it apply to *immigration detention? That is not part of BOP.

11. My understanding is that ~400,000 people flow through our immigration detention system each year. That system is run by DHS not BOP.

12. Private prisons play a MUCH larger role in our immigration detention system than our federal prison system.

17. Obama has not had the courage to address the problems in his own publicly run prisons, b/c that would involve taking on BOP, DOJ.

posted by tonycpsu at 10:44 AM on August 18, 2016 [19 favorites]

Corrections Corporation of America stock price falling off a cliff.

MRW I read this.
posted by haileris23 at 10:50 AM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Corrections Corporation of America stock price falling off a cliff

Now that's what I call a correction.
posted by flabdablet at 10:51 AM on August 18, 2016 [12 favorites]

This is great news. Now let's move towards a constitutional amendment banning private prisons everywhere in the U.S. Their existence is incompatible with a free society.
posted by biogeo at 10:55 AM on August 18, 2016 [10 favorites]

Maybe a side effect is that the industry pivots toward psychiatric facilities? There's quite a bit of call for that where I live on the west coast.
posted by circular at 10:55 AM on August 18, 2016

Revealing that there's no need to specify in the title of this thread which country it is referring to.
posted by fairmettle at 10:55 AM on August 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Revealing that there's no need to specify in the title of this thread which country it is referring to.


GB and Australia have significant numbers of private prisons. Canada dabbled in it, though to their credit they don't have any now.

Anyway, this is great small step, but keep in mind, the vast majority of criminals in the U.S. go through the state systems. The U.S. prison population is about 2.2 million, with only around 200,000 of those prisoners in federal custody.
posted by skewed at 11:09 AM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

tonycpsu: “This tweetstorm from criminal defense attorney David Menschel points out that there's a lot of work to do, and, perhaps most notably, that it's unclear if this will affect Immigration Detention Centers.”

It's pretty thoroughly clear that it won't affect Immigrant Detention. Which really sucks, because the DHS actually has a majority of its detained immigrants in private facilities, and those private facilities are generally atrocious. But this announcement was made specifically by the Justice Department - this was not an announcement by Barack Obama, but an announcement by Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates on behalf of DOJ. And the DOJ and the DHS are separate departments.

In the final analysis, this is a really good tiny step, but we're talking about 13 prisons here. 13 prisons - out of over five thousand in the United States. As Dara Lind, a journalist who has been following these issues for years, put it today on Twitter:

Most prisons aren't private.

Most private prisons aren't federal.

Most fed private prisons are run by DHS.

New memo affects 13 prisons.

It's very common for politicians to broadly announce some change that seems sweeping but ultimately changes very little in order to please those who call out for change but aren't ultimately affected by the changes all that much. That's exactly what happened with "decriminalize drugs!" – a lot of us middle-class white liberals had convinced ourselves that most of the people in prison were in there on some petty little drug charge, and figured that if we got rid of petty little drug charges, they'd get out. But that's not true. A miniscule minority of prisoners are in solely on some petty little drug charge. Almost the entire prison population in America today is inside on some crime which the state counts as "violent" – violence being a very broad descriptor, of course, and in many cases amounting to "assault on a police officer" by touching them, but in other case amounting to punching, hitting, kicking, shooting, etc. As much as we wanted "decriminalize drugs!" to be a magic solution to mass incarceration, it isn't, and any thoughtful look at the data should have shown us it wouldn't be.

Similarly, "ban private prisons!" seems like an easy fix, but it isn't. Public prisons are also hideously unjust. Private prisons lead to all sorts of terrible conflicts of interest, and give rise to an industry which can lobby for legal changes and prolong and expand the carceral state; but private prisons were not themselves responsible for the rise of mass incarceration. We were – we, the voters and the public, who for hundreds of years have bought the lies of politicians who got our votes by promising to put all the bad people in jail, and who not only voted them in but vociferously demanded that they spare no expense and cut out the red tape, and who cheered on our folk heroes like Dirty Harry who violated the rights of the accused in order to get them off the streets, by sticking them in prison if not by murdering them in cold blood.

Ending private prisons would help a lot with incarcerated immigrants – who are mostly held in private facilities – but elsewhere, and in the vast majority of the carceral state, a ban on private prisons will do almost nothing. We need a real, thorough, dedicated reform of prisons in this country – which might require closing them altogether. At the very least, it will require us to allow the crime rate to go up a bit so that we can clear out the population in the prisons and make our society more just. Unfortunately, that will be a lot harder than changing the management in thirteen prisons. Because there are over five thousand prisons in the United States today.

In short: this is nice, but it's almost nothing when the whole problem is considered, and we must fight for much, much more if we want to solve the unimaginably unjust system of mass incarceration in this country today.
posted by koeselitz at 11:16 AM on August 18, 2016 [37 favorites]

Also – the below article is now four years old, and I've shared it here before, but I'm going to keep sharing it, because I think it's a good elucidation of the choice we have to make if we really want to fix this problem:

RAISE THE CRIME RATE.
posted by koeselitz at 11:20 AM on August 18, 2016 [6 favorites]

Oh, and I linked to this article from last year by Dara Lind in my first comment here, but it's very pertinent to this announcement today, so it's worth pointing up on its own:

Why focusing on private prisons won't end mass incarceration
posted by koeselitz at 11:25 AM on August 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

for reals though the stock crashing may inadvertently lead to the professional downfall of one of the people i hate most on this earth and oh my god the pure visceral ecstasy is indescribable
posted by poffin boffin at 11:43 AM on August 18, 2016 [11 favorites]

It's very common for politicians to broadly announce some change that seems sweeping but ultimately changes very little in order to please those who call out for change but aren't ultimately affected by the changes all that much.

This is the very opposite of true in this case.
posted by roomthreeseventeen at 11:43 AM on August 18, 2016 [4 favorites]

A step forward is still a step forward. Thanks to the OP, and thanks to the various MeFites for the timely reminders that there is still Much Work to be Done. Even so, I'm doing a little happy dance about this development because 0.07% of a loaf is better than none in some cases. And I'm thinking this is one of those cases.
posted by Bella Donna at 11:45 AM on August 18, 2016 [6 favorites]

Monika Bauerlein, the CEO of Mother Jones, pretty much got me my gig as theater critic at City Pages back in 2000. She was very good and very serious about news, and I was not surprised that she moved on to Mother Jones, neither am I surprised that they continue to produce extraordinary, country transforming journalism.

Come to think of it, everyone there has gone on to something huge. Keith writes for Rolling Stone, as does Michaelangelo. Dara is a multiple James Beard-award winner. My editor Michael writes for the NY Times.

Good Lord.

What have I done with my life
posted by maxsparber at 11:45 AM on August 18, 2016 [5 favorites]

Wow. "No fucks left" Obama just keeps going.

Meanwhile, he is still fighting for the TPP.
posted by Foosnark at 12:08 PM on August 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

Thank you for your post @mbrubeck! I printed that article to read offline. Tonight I will be paying MJ for the value received.
posted by booksarelame at 12:19 PM on August 18, 2016

I'll give Obama a thumbs up for this. I'm saving the slow hand clap just in case Mr. No-Fucks-To-Give tells the Justice Department and FDA to change their minds about marijuana.
posted by Ber at 1:17 PM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

Holy fuck. Shane Bauer and Mother Jones: thank you.
posted by latkes at 1:31 PM on August 18, 2016 [3 favorites]

I read this as a really positive move toward broader prison reform. This sets a precident and helps create a community standard. What is defined as an ethical practice in this context matters to other decision making about imprisonment on both the federal and state levels. This is the direct result of the capital J Journalism of Bauer and Mother Jones, and also of the decades of work by prison reform and abolition activists, who will of course not stop their efforts here, but will be bolstered in their efforts toward broader reform, which we should all continue to advocate for.
posted by latkes at 1:37 PM on August 18, 2016 [7 favorites]

From the article: It is possible the directive could face resistance from those companies that will be affected.

Ya think?
posted by medusa at 1:57 PM on August 18, 2016

Now, to enact federal +50 state legislation to eradicate it and prevent it from coming back.
posted by benbenson at 2:14 PM on August 18, 2016

It's very common for politicians to broadly announce some change that seems sweeping but ultimately changes very little in order to please those who call out for change but aren't ultimately affected by the changes all that much. That's exactly what happened with "decriminalize drugs!" – a lot of us middle-class white liberals had convinced ourselves that most of the people in prison were in there on some petty little drug charge, and figured that if we got rid of petty little drug charges, they'd get out. But that's not true. A miniscule minority of prisoners are in solely on some petty little drug charge. Almost the entire prison population in America today is inside on some crime which the state counts as "violent" – violence being a very broad descriptor, of course, and in many cases amounting to "assault on a police officer" by touching them, but in other case amounting to punching, hitting, kicking, shooting, etc. As much as we wanted "decriminalize drugs!" to be a magic solution to mass incarceration, it isn't, and any thoughtful look at the data should have shown us it wouldn't be.

This strikes me as... pretty seriously unfair to those of use who have actually been involved in the movement against the drug war - though I'm guessing you're kinda really talking about yourself here. I do think people get confused by the statistic about federal prisoners incarcerated on drug charges - which is a huge percentage but doesn't account for as big a swath of total prisoners as one might think.
posted by atoxyl at 3:51 PM on August 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

What I meant was: the drug war never ended, even though a lot of people are satisfied with the extraordinarily limited results we've had under the heading of "decriminalization." And the damage is much, much deeper than the demonization of drugs, which most thoughtful people now see was ridiculous. The drug war has had lasting effects, and one of those effects is building a system of incarceration that will be around long after every upper-middle-class white person in the US is granted the right to smoke pot in their homes.

The actual problem is the demonization of the other under the heading of paranoia about crime, as a priority that stands over all else. That is the core problem with the drug war, but it's also the root of nearly every other problem with the justice system over the past fifty years. Seeing the drug war as some individual problem apart from that - and as a problem that's solved once upper-middle-class white people are left alone with their drugs - is a very big mistake.
posted by koeselitz at 5:04 PM on August 18, 2016

(And I was pretty clearly not talking about people who've actually fought against the drug war - I was talking about the voters who are vaguely concerned by it, and mollified when politicians talk blandly about decriminalization without actually doing much to stop the injustice of the carceral state. Which - you do believe that politicians who exploit opposition to the drug war exist, right?)
posted by koeselitz at 5:07 PM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

If your core point is that drug policy is low-hanging fruit of criminal justice reform - and possession laws below low - then yeah, absolutely.

I just - maybe it's the company I keep, maybe it's my age, but I think I know very few people who match this description?

What I meant was: the drug war never ended, even though a lot of people are satisfied with the extraordinarily limited results we've had under the heading of "decriminalization."

In my world people who care aren't satisfied at all and people who don't care don't care about "decriminalization."

Not to mention that there are a lot of people in this country decriminalization has only barely reached, really.

(I'm also not sure drug policy reform ought to be viewed only as a subset of broader criminal justice reform, even though I personally am a supporter of both.)
posted by atoxyl at 8:27 PM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

I feel like news about even a small blow by the feds against for-profit private prisons is just the thing to lift my spirits after yesterday's post about the sick games for-profit health insurance cartels are playing. Even though there's a LOT more that needs to be done (outlawing the entire concept of private prisons, reforming public prisons, and on and on). Still, this is great, thanks Obama.
posted by elsilnora at 9:26 PM on August 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

correctional services
posted by thelonius at 12:08 AM on August 19, 2016

A good start. Private prisons, managing human suffering with a profit motive, are a clear and obvious moral failing.

Now, when can we talk about for-profit hospitals and health care?
posted by rokusan at 3:02 PM on August 19, 2016 [4 favorites]

An ex of mine went to prison and sent me a letter asking me to call her. I tried, honest I did. The prison wanted $30 to set up an account, then $10 a minute for the actual phone call. I simply couldn't afford it at the time, and I can only imagine the position some poor families must be struggling with. "Should we buy food or call Daddy?" No, I won't be sad to see these privateers go away.
posted by ambulocetus at 5:42 PM on August 20, 2016 [2 favorites]

fresh air...
Investigation Into Private Prisons Reveals Crowding, Under-Staffing And Inmate Deaths

DAVIES: Were there ever cases where there were questions about whether some of the for-profit correctional companies might have had influence on decisions in the Bureau of Prisons?

WESSLER: One of these private facilities, the Adams County Correctional Center in Natchez, Miss. It was the site in 2012 of a pretty major riot that left 20 people injured, and a prison guard was killed in this riot. The riot erupted after complaints about poor conditions inside, significantly about medical care and really left a stain on that facility.

After the riot, federal monitors who were tasked with overseeing the operations of this facility proposed to senior bureau administrators that the prison lose its contract, that they shut the facility down. And my sources, former Bureau of Prisons monitors who were tasked with overseeing these contracts, say that they were told by their bosses in Washington that they wouldn't be allowed to close the contract.

The contract with CCA was renewed in 2013 and again in July of 2015. What my sources tell me is that one of the factors that stopped this contract from being closed down were the close ties between present Bureau of Prisons officials and officials in CCA who had formerly worked for the Bureau of Prisons, in particular a man named Harley Lappin, who was the director of the Bureau of Prisons and left in 2011, immediately taking a pretty lucrative contract with the CCA.

DAVIES: That's the private prisons facility or the Corrections Corporation of America.

WESSLER: That's right. So he left his job in government and took a job earning more than a million dollars for Corrections Corporation of America. And my sources tell me that the refusal by senior bureau officials to close the facility down was in part a result of conversations and close ties between Mr. Lappin and existing Bureau of Prisons officials that Mr. Lappin was pressing the Bureau of Prisons not to close the Adams County facility and that the contract was renewed. In 2015, the key Bureau of Prisons official who blocked the termination, the end of the CCA contract to run Adams County, he also left his job at the BOP and has taken a contract with CCA, with Corrections Corporation as a consultant as well.

DAVIES: You tried to reach of the principals involved here as well as the company, Corrections Corporation of America. What does everyone say about this?

WESSLER: Corrections Corporation of America, who responded for itself and for Harley Lappin, said that no ethics laws had been broken. The former Bureau of Prisons official who recently left kicked responsibility for the Adams County contract to other people in the Bureau of Prisons and said that no wrongdoing had happened. But the facility in Adams County remains open. Its contract was renewed a year ago. And what I found in my reporting is that federal monitors, just after the contract was renewed following the riot, found that five people had died in that very facility in the wake of clearly substandard medical care. And yet the contract was renewed again after that.

DAVIES: Seth Wessler is an investigative journalist who has just completed a two-year investigation of the operations of private prisons for The Nation.

posted by kliuless at 11:42 AM on August 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

The Guardian: US considers ending use of private immigration detention facilities

Johnson said his department’s advisory council has been tasked to examine whether “immigration detention operations conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) should move in the same direction” as the justice department. The panel will have until the end of November to make recommendations, and will consider “all factors … including fiscal considerations” related to ICE’s use of private centres.

posted by elsilnora at 3:53 PM on August 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Dahlia Lithwick: Leavenworth’s Spygate: A private prison facility in Kansas was spying on constitutionally protected attorney-client conversations.

Charles Pierce: Why Private Prisons Fail. A lack of democratic accountability makes the law obsolete anyway.
posted by homunculus at 5:10 PM on August 29, 2016 [1 favorite]