Prison Privatization

In a news feature entitled, "Private prison business, the most prosperous in the U.S." HISPANTV's Spanish-language Washington Correspondent, Alfredo Miranda, covers the Sep. 13, 2012 hearing held, by Rep. Jared Polis of Colorado, on the role of private prisons in the incarceration of immigrants and their treatment in those facilities, funded by contracts with the federal Bureau of Prisons. Read more »

Thirteen privately operated, federally funded prisons housing 23,000 alleged illegal immigrants represent an "extremely expensive and problem-plagued, second-class penal system," contends a report presented today at a briefing on Capitol Hill. Read more »

Prison reform advocates are calling for an end to private prisons that mainly hold illegal immigrants, including a Mississippi facility that erupted in a deadly riot this spring. MPB's Jeffrey Hess reports the groups claim the prisons create the conditions that contributed to the May riot that left one guard dead.

There are 13 federally funded private prisons intended mainly to hold illegal immigrations nationwide.

One is the the Adams County Correctional Facility where a May prisoner riot left a guard dead. Read more »

When Angelica Moreno’s brother died of cancer after nearly three years locked in a private prison in Mississippi, she vowed to fight so that he’d be the last to suffer such a fate. “I want to fight for every other person inside that jail,” she told me in July, weeks after her brother died. On Wednesday, Moreno joined a group of human rights and criminal justice advocates and a member of Congress for a briefing on Capitol Hill to halt the expansion of private federal prisons like the one that Moreno says killed her brother. “No other family should have to go through this.” Read more »

The unnecessary prosecution of nonviolent illegal immigrants is sending ever larger numbers to poorly managed private prisons, a coalition of advocacy groups said in a report released Thursday, calling on Congress to reject the appropriation of $25,865,000 for 1,000 new private prison beds. Read more »

WASHINGTON — Prison hurt Richard Lee Pollard, in more than the usual ways.

Now, from improbable beginnings, the Supreme Court will examine Pollard’s treatment at a privately run California facility. The outcome could either shield or render more vulnerable the fast-growing private prison industry, not to mention what it might do for Pollard’s own post-prison life.

It was 11 years ago when Arizona first entered the business of outsourcing its corrections operations to private, for-profit corporations with the approval of a privately-run state prison in Marana. Read more »

Judith Greene debates Adrian Moore, director of the Reason Foundation's Public Policy Institute, in a Corrections Connection forum on prison privatization.  Click here to listen online.