Yesterday came the news that The Geo Group and Cornell Companies are officially merging. Just terrific, now these private prison and detention facility operators can combine their evil powers to wreak more havoc on our communities and the rest of the world.

“The GEO Group (http://www.geogroup.com) is a world leader in the delivery of correctional, detention, and residential treatment services to federal, state, and local government agencies around the globe. GEO offers a turnkey approach that includes design, construction, financing, and operations. GEO represents government clients in the United States, Australia, South Africa, and the United Kingdom. GEO’s worldwide operations include the management and/or ownership of 62 correctional and residential treatment facilities with a total design capacity of approximately 60,000 beds, including projects under development.”

“Cornell Companies, Inc. (http://www.cornellcompanies.com) is a leading private provider of corrections, treatment and educational services outsourced by federal, state and local governmental agencies. Cornell provides a diversified portfolio of services for adults and juveniles, including incarceration and detention, transition from incarceration, drug and alcohol treatment programs, behavioral rehabilitation and treatment, and grades 3-12 alternative education in an environment of dignity and respect, emphasizing community safety and rehabilitation in support of public policy. At December 31, 2009, the Company had 68 facilities in 15 states and the District of Columbia and a total service capacity of 21,392.”

Cornell does not even pretend that it isn’t working to reinforce the school to prison pipeline. It is right out there owning “alternative education” schools as well as detention center. I guess that they are just going to cut out the middle man.

Matt Miller recently published a blog post called Do Private Prisons Save Money? Miller was hopeful that because private prison companies are struggling financially and that they are not really cost-effective for local governments, that their days may be numbered. Well after merging with Cornell, something tells me the the Geo Group intends to be around for the long haul.

Design Collective Shackled Hands

I read an interesting blog post a couple of weeks ago called Hip Hop Goes to Prison. Basically the writer lists a number of high profile rappers and discusses the contact that they have had with the criminal legal system. He wrote this blog in response to what at the time was going to be the impending incarceration of rapper Lil Wayne.

Lil Wayne is currently serving a one year prison sentence at Rikers Island in New York. Lil Wayne born Dwayne Michael Carter just released his most successful album “Tha Carter III” in 2008. In March 2010, Lil Wayne began serving his prison sentence after being convicted of criminal possession of a weapon. This was not his first encounter with the criminal legal system. He had previously been arrested for use or possession of marijuana and other drugs.

Wayne is expected to be released from prison in November. He is 27 years old so he joins others in his demographic in serving time locked up. Young black men are the most likely to be incarcerated in America. It seems that even if you are a rich rapper, you cannot escape the clutches of the PIC.

However Wayne is so famous that The Week Magazine posted an article about his time in prison called “The Incarcerated Life of Lil Wayne." The article opens as follows:

Hip-hop superstar Lil Wayne — real name: Dwayne Carter — is currently serving time at New York’s infamous Rikers Island prison on drugs and weapons charges. But, based on media reports and the 27-year-old rapper’s own account of his life behind bars, life on the inside isn’t all bad for a pop culture icon.

I would like to emphasize the following part of the paragraph that I quote: “…life on the inside isn’t all bad for a pop culture icon.” Apparently, the general public is being led to believe that Rikers is just like summer camp for Wayne.

According to an article in the New York Daily News, Lil Wayne took to the internet to update his fans on life at Rikers Island. The article begins:

It doesn’t sound like Lil’ Wayne is doing hard time.

The rapper is giving fans a glimpse into his day-to-day life at Rikers Island – and the routine sounds like the average New Yorker’s lazy weekend, except that he can’t exactly leave for brunch.

“I wake up around 11 a.m. Have some coffee. Call my kids, and my wonderful mother. I then shower up. Read fan mail,” he wrote in a letter posted on weezythanxyou.com.

After that, the hip-hop star has lunch, gets back on the phone, reads a book or jots down his thoughts.

After dinner, he makes one more trip to the phone and does some pushups.

“Then I listen to ESPN on the radio. Read the Bible, then sleep. That’s my day,” he wrote.

This sounds like a veritable Club Med. I cannot stress how damaging these types of stories are to anti-prison activism and abolition efforts. Most of the public gets its information through the mainstream media and these types of accounts of prison life being positively leisurely reinforce the idea in the public imagination that prison is “no big deal.” In fact, it engenders public backlash where people say “see, prison is a country club” and therefore they support even more punitive policies. With all due respect, even if it is true that Wayne’s prison experience is a long vacation for him, the vast majority of other young black men in prison are NOT living such a life.

Making going to prison into a mundane routine also serves to desensitize young people of color to the violence and sheer dehumanization of the experience of incarceration. One can imagine a 13 year old black youth reading these accounts and getting a skewed and false impression of what prison is like. This type of “reporting” must be debunked and exposed as “bunk.”

Just for good measure, The Week Magazine’s article “The Incarcerated Life of Lil’ Wayne: By the Numbers” offers this “helpful” accounting for public consumption:

12
Duration, in months, of Lil Wayne’s prison sentence at Rikers Island for illegally possessing a handgun

.40
Caliber of the loaded semiautomatic pistol that Lil Wayne tried to hide in a Louis Vuitton knapsack when police entered his “pot smoke infused” tour bus in 2007

8
Number of months Wayne will actually serve, if he remains on good behavior

1
Minimum number of times Rikers guards have busted Lil Wayne for possession of “contraband,” including headphones and a charger for an Mp3 player

11 a.m.
Hour at which Lil Wayne wakes up each day. According to the rapper, his prison routine consists mostly of talking on the phone to his kids and “wonderful mother,” reading fan mail, doing “pushups,” listening to ESPN radio and reading the Bible

90
Length, in seconds, of the vocal solo Lil Wayne recorded over the phone, from jail, for Canadian rap artist Drake, one of his musical protegés

7,795,000
Approximate number of Facebook users who “like” Wayne’s personal website, Weezythanxyou.com. The site is regularly updated with letters the rapper sends from Rikers.

134
Number of fans Lil Wayne thanks, individually and by name, in his most recent letter

110
Number of days left in his jail stint, as of July 16

3
Number of years probation Lil Wayne must serve following his release from prison as a result of a separate 2008 bust, in which U.S. Border Patrol officers in Yuma, AZ, found drug paraphernalia, marijuana, cocaine, ecstasy and a registered handgun on his tour bus

$1.3 million
Sum concert production company RMF Productions sought to recoup from Wayne after he cancelled a series of concerts scheduled during his incarceration

7
Number of full-length studio albums Lil Wayne has released since his 1999 debut “Tha Bloc Is Hot”

1
Number of albums Wayne plans to release while he’s still in prison

Hat tip to blogger This is My Time at Daily Kos for sharing this link to a 30 minute documentary produced by a TV station in California about the high cost of incarceration. The documentary is surprisingly informative for something that has been produced by the mainstream media. Take a moment to watch it.

My friends and family know that I am a major data geek. I have been fascinated by data visualization for years. I have always been a visual learner so I really appreciate well-done and informative infographics. here is a good one about this history of the war on drugs. This is directly related to the exponential expansion of prisons in the past 35 years. (click on the image itself to get a better view of the graphic).

Source: The Consequences of Dropping Out of High School: A Report.

The Legal Action Center has published a must-read report called After Prison: Roadblocks to Reentry.

What I particularly like about this report is that it offers a state-by-state report card that assigns grades based on whether each state’s laws and policies help or hurt those seeking reentry.

They have developed an easily searchable database to see where your state falls on the list.

In particular, those of us who live in Illinois, will be particularly interested in the fact we seem to rank #1 in terms of the LEAST amount of roadblocks that our state poses for reentry.

Yet in practice, we know that formerly incarcerated people in Illinois face a number of barriers to reentry. Employers do sometimes ask about arrests and convictions. Additionally, routine background checks often uncover criminal records and we know that this play a significant role in the decision of employers to hire people. Nevertheless, those of us who work around these issues in the space can take heart that at least we are not Alaska.

According to the report, the states with the least number of roadblocks, or the best record of performance, are:

6.5 Illinois
7 New York
10.5 California
11 Hawaii
11 New Hampshire
19 Kentucky
20 Massachusetts
20 Vermont
20.5 Oregon

The states with the most number of roadblocks, or the worst record of performance, are:

46 Alaska
42 Georgia
42 South Carolina
42 Virginia
41 Pennsylvania
40.5 Delaware
40 Missouri
39 North Carolina
37 Alabama
37 Colorado
37 Mississippi

Source: America's Children in Brief - Key National Indicators of Well-Being 2010

We have been led to believe through sensational media stories that young people across America are “running wild” and perpetrating more and more violent crime. Yet this chart tells another story all together. Youth in the U.S. are in fact consistently committing fewer crimes over the past few years. Why the disconnect? Perhaps because it is in the interest of politicians and the media to stoke the fear of the public in order to justify incarcerating more and more juveniles!

For a more detailed look at the numbers, click here.

The Center on American Progress issued a new report about homelessness among gay and transgender youth.  The statistics are staggering.  However one particular piece of information jumped out at me related to the PIC:

$53,665: The estimated cost to maintain a youth in the criminal justice system for one year, while it only costs $5,887 to permanently move a homeless youth off the streets and prevent them from reentering the criminal justice system.

Again, will sanity and common sense start to prevail in America?

I read an article yesterday which really should not be surprising to me.  Apparently, the good folks in New Bedford, Massachussetts have a terrific idea.  Two Republican state reps propose to completely eliminate the meager wages that they give to prisoners for their labor.

Specifically:

In a Tuesday morning press conference at the State House in Boston, Bristol County Sheriff Thomas M. Hodgson and State Rep. Elizabeth Poirier, R-Attleboro, announced their plan for the state to stop paying nominal wages for inmates who work behind bars and in work-release programs.

The two Republican officials said the legislation would save taxpayers between $2.5 to $3 million a year, and made the argument that rewarding working inmates with “good time” off their sentences would be a better incentive and one that would save more money by releasing them from prison earlier.

But here’s the kicker:

Hodgson’s proposal to stop payments to inmates also raises the issue of his former policy of charging inmates and detainees at the Dartmouth House of Correction $5 a day as a cost-of-care fee. That policy was definitively ruled illegal earlier this year by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, which ordered the sheriff to pay back $750,000 to inmates who were charged the fee from 2002-2004.

(On Monday July 12, there was a preliminary hearing about the timeline and manner in which those inmates will be reimbursed the money. The $750,000 has been kept in an escrow account up until now.)

Still, the sheriff was successful in lobbying both chambers of the state Legislature to pass laws allowing sheriffs to charge a daily inmate fee. But the chambers’ varying bills were sent to the joint conference committee, which established a commission to study the issue; a maneuver recognized as a way to slowly kill off a bill in purgatory.

Hodgson said it is a “no-brainer” that sheriffs should have the legal authority to charge inmates a daily fee, arguing that it helps offset the costs of incarceration.

Yes, you read that correctly they were actually CHARGING prisoners for the privilege of being incarcerated.  Do people across the country know that this is happening?  The injustice of the PIC is clear but the sense of impugnity with which the actors within this system operate is mind-boggling.  Also, does anyone actually think that the former prisoners will see a dime of the money in the escrow account?  If you do, then I have some land to sell you in Alaska?