Truly Nobody Cares

If you live in an inner city community, are a minority person of color, your odds of getting busted and doing time are a vast multiple than occurs with white folks living in white communities. The nature and quality of jails and prisons are of little concern to “most of us.” That incarcerated males face absurd levels of life-threatening violence in just about any such facility in the United States… as well as the notorious prisons in third world countries where violence is everywhere anyway… is the stuff of bad Hollywood dramas and emotionally-distant documentary exposés on television. Women fare better but most still under pretty miserable conditions. Prisons are America’s new warehouses for the mentally ill as well.

For law-abiding white folks on the outside looking in, such harsh conditions are just “the way it is,” often a stark contrast to the humane counterparts in Western Europe and Japan. Under a rather clear “law and order” mandate (a white supremacist dog whistle that counters “equal justice under the law”) from Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the United States seems prepared to recommit itself to stepped-up efforts with longer sentences, a least at the federal level. That we disproportionately jail more people than any other nation on earth – our 5% of the earth’s population simply cannot justify why we incarcerate a quarter of all jailed inmates in the world – and that we spend around $40 thousand per prisoner per year to do that usually generates a “so what” shrug from most Americans.

Even as conservative leaders began to question our incarceration practices and the multi-million dollar per condemned prisoner costs, the Trump administration seems to be gearing itself up for more convictions, greater jail time, and unleashing police departments no longer under federal probes and court orders for racially-motivated law enforcement. To implement this “we need more people in jail for longer sentences” federal vector, Sessions has announced a cancellation of the Obama Administration’s policy to end federal use of private prisons, a practice that is vastly more widely used by states. To most of us, that’s a great big, “so what?”

The “so what” is the level of incompetence, much higher incidences of violence, and how the profit motive has created an inferior product open to severe corruption and massive attempts to influence government officials and legislators. The trend in private prisons includes limited training, understaffing and high personnel turnover. It’s all about profitability and little else.

As the September 17^th Journal from the American Bar Association reports (pages 16-18) points out, Luzerne County, Pennsylvania judge, Mark Ciavarella, was convicted of taking $2.6 million in kickbacks from the PA Child Care juvenile detention facility. You see a government prison saves money by not having inmates, but a private facility is actually compensated by the government for each prisoner it maintains. More prisoners in a private facility, more profits. Ciavarella made sure that the local juvenile detention facility was filled, even if that meant children who would not normally get any confinement time would be sentenced to incarceration. Ciavarella was himself sentenced to serve 28 years, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated all his juvenile convictions. Unfortunately, this is hardly an isolated case. One child so jailed had committed suicide.

According to the ABA Journal, America’s two largest private prison operators, Geo Group and correction Corporation of America, spent approximately $1 million in 2016 lobbying Congress to maintain federal dependence on private jails. Those two companies apparently gave $250 thousand each to fund Trump’s inauguration. And Geo Group directly or indirectly donated $450 thousand to Trump-affiliated organizations. These lobbying efforts have consistently paid off like the Private Prison Information Act that has been introduced seven times as a Congressional bill to foster transparency… and have never passed. The more money these private prison contractors make, the more money they have to buy influence.

But what’s even worse is the much greater likelihood of truly horrible conditions in these facilities, worse even than the notorious prisons run by state and federal governments themselves. The ABA Journal cites the result of an August 2017 report, comparing public to private prisons, released by the Department of Justice showing that “private prisons had higher rates of assault by inmates; more than twice many complaints about staff; eight times as many contraband cellphones confiscated; and 10 times as many lockdowns.” Is this heartlessness? Or just crass stupidity?

Are we making jailing inmates – which is horrifically expensive no matter how you implement incarceration (we spend vastly more money jailing people than any other country on earth!) – way too easy and infinitely more cruel? What’s really in it for society? Just think about all those angry mistreated prisoners, now further trained to be “better” criminals by their fellow inmates, whose criminal records pretty much guarantee they won’t find honest employment when they get out. Really think about how that makes your world safer and better.

I’m Peter Dekom, and we are so distracted by so many issues that sometimes it is too easy to let something that is obviously very wrong just slip through the cracks of indifference.