Monday, February 3, 2020

On the contrary, private prisons are not helping anyone but the operators' bottom line


Source:  Management and Training Corporation

15th state inmate dies amid Mississippi prison crisis, cause under investigation.  (USA Today, 2/3/2020)
He is the 15th inmate to die since Dec. 29 and the fifth in little more than a week.

Related reading:
Following the Money of Mass Incarceration.  (Prison Policy Initiative, 4/25/2017)
Using MTC’s own records received through a public record request a decade ago, we found that MTC had an average per-incarcerated person revenue for 2005 and 2006 of $15,567. Using the current capacity of 31,962, we calculated that MTC’s estimated current correctional revenue is $498 million or $0.5 billion. We also calculated the average profit margin from its operations in the same time period and found a profit margin of 2.7%, which allowed us to estimate $13.4 million in profits.
Escapes, Riots and Beatings. But States Can’t Seem to Ditch Private Prisons.  (The New York Times, 4/10/2018)
The staying power of the two companies shows how private prisons maintain their hold on the nation’s criminal justice system despite large-scale failures. The field is dominated by a handful of companies who have swallowed the competition and entrenched their positions through aggressive lawyering, intricate financial arrangements and in some cases, according to lawsuits by the Mississippi attorney general, bribery and kickbacks.
Corporate Confession: Gangs Ran This Private Prison.  (The Marshall Project, 6/26/2019)
Like most prisons in Mississippi and a growing number across the country, Wilkinson had trouble finding people willing to take dangerous, low-paying guard jobs (more than a third were vacant, and annual turnover was close to 90 percent).

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