The plan to privatize 29 correctional facilities across 18 counties in South Florida was introduced by state legislators as an amendment to a budget bill, which, according to Thursday’s ruling, didn’t allow for full consideration of the costs of the planned mass privatization. GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America were set to see a steep windfall from the privatization deals but lobbying records show the companies invested in lawmakers long before these lucrative contracts were penned.

GEO Group, the second-largest private prison operator in the country, is headquartered in Florida and is already running the state’s largest private prison, the Blackwater River Correctional Facility in Milton. When the Corrections Corporation of America builds the largest private immigration center in the country, as it agreed with the town of Pembroke Pines and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to do earlier this year, Florida will become ground zero for private prisons.

The situation in Florida isn’t unique, but advocates say the scale of Florida’s plan is remarkable.

“It’s precedent setting,” said Ken Kopczynski, executive director of the Private Corrections Working Group, a website that collects news and resources on the growing influence of the private prison industry.

Community protests planned CCA immigration center. (Photo courtesy of Gail Tyree)

Kopczynski said proposed budget amendment and the planned Immigration and Customs Enforcement-contracted center “is the largest privatization effort in the U.S. if not in the world.”

The private-prison industry, like many others service-based private companies, relies on the goodwill of legislators. Campaign finance rules in Florida place a limit on how much companies can give to any individual state legislator, so companies often give to a party instead, said Nicole Porter, state advocacy coordinator for the Justice Center.

GEO Group, conceived in 1954, is a significant donor to the Republican Party of Florida, according to information from the Florida Department of State; in 2010, GEO Group donated $575,000, and through the first two quarters of 2011, they gave $160,000 total.

This often means if donations trickle down to an individual candidate, there is little record, said Porter. Gov. Rick Scott and Senate President Mike Haridopolos, the most vocal proponents of the privatization bill, have no record of funding from GEO Group in their campaign disclosure statements from the last three years.

Porter says considering the political donations of GEO Group, the “assumptions around efficiency and cost management” in private prisons “is problematic particularly when you are talking about policies that impact the real lives of people.”

Community protests planned CCA immigration center. (Photo courtesy of Gail Tyree)

The planned privatization would have impacted one-fifth of Florida’s prison population, and investigations have shown private prisons often cut costs at the expense of prisoner safety.

In fact, GEO Group is already under investigation for a pay-for-play scandal involving Blackwater River Correctional Facility in Florida. An FBI subpeona calls for, among othe rthings, the travel vouchers of a former Florida speaker of the house, Rep. Ray Sansom, according to legal documents obtained by DBA Press. Sansom resigned amid an ethics investigation in Feburary 2010.

Prominent lawmakers on the national stage, including Sen. Marco Rubio, have been tarred with the same brush - Sansom was Rubio’s budget chief when he allegedly inserted language creating Blackwater into a Florida budget bill.

On the congressional level, six of the top twenty recipients of private-prison cash are from Florida, more than any other state.

Rubio was the largest recipient of funds from GEO Group and its subsidiaries — he received $27,400 between 2009 and 2010, according to Open Secrets.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson and U.S. Reps. David Rivera, Vern Buchanan, Sandy Adams and Allen West all received between $18,950 and $5,500 dollars from GEO Group or CCA.

CCA, in operation since 1983, “always thinks 3-5 years ahead,” said Kopczynski, “anticipating they will get a contract,” and their political donations reflect this.

Contributions aside, one of Gov. Scott’s top transition budget advisers, Donna Arduin, is a former trustee of a GEO Group real-estate company called Correctional Properties Trust.

The International Brotherhood of Teamsters brought an ethics complaint against the prison privatization measure, arguing that the Scott’s support for the bill faces a conflict of interest because as governor, he oversees both the state Department of Corrections and a state investment fund that has stock in private prison companies, according to the Florida News Service.

Grassroots groups have continued to voice their opposition to pay-for-play private prison contracts and private detention centers in their communities, as The Florida Independent has reported, and they hope shining light on the issues is the first step to increasing accountability and culpability in prison privatization.

“The private prison industry for as long as I have been doing this work has always worked undercover,” said Gail Tyree, a fellow at the Open Society Foundation working to bring together a coalition of organizations to oppose prison privatization.

“They’re always saying you don’t stand a chance, but I believe that you stand a chance to stop the project until the last brick is in the building.”

Community protests planned CCA immigration center. (Photo courtesy of Gail Tyree)

“The refusal…by the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Troy Davis clemency underscores the vast systemic injustices that plague our death penalty system,” Denny LeBoeuf, the director of the Capital Punishment Project of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), said in a statement. “The death penalty system in the United States is arbitrary, discriminatory and comes at an enormous cost to taxpayers, and it must be ended.”

Instances of doubt, such as the case of Troy Davis, first and foremost highlight the grave cost of taking the life of a man who has continued to proclaim his innocence since the start of his prosecution. But additional housing and prosecutions costs, especially heavy in death penalty cases, add up in cash-strapped states that continue to use the death penalty. In California, keeping an individual on the maximum-security death row costs $90,000 annually per inmate, and with the state’s current death row population of 670, the cost is $63.3 million annually, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The cost of the entire system in California, including prosecutions and court cases, is $137 million per year — if the number of crimes that encompass the death penalty were narrowed, a report by the Center notes, the cost of the system would narrow to $130 million per year.

The Federal Office of Defender Services found that defending a murder trial in which the death penalty is sought — an average of $620,932 per prisoner — is eight times that of a murder case where is it not sought.

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles agreed last Friday to grant his early release,KHOU reported, sparking a renewed outcry over what the TV station described as “Houston’s most infamous gay-bashing hate crime.”

Jon Buice 

Buice was one of a group known as the “Woodlands Ten,” tied to the brutal stabbing near a gay bar in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood. The blog Queertyrecalled a statement from one of the group members, that they had been out “to beat up some queers.”

Buice received the stiffest sentence handed down in the murder trial, and is the last of the group left behind bars. At the time, the rest of the group’s sentences drew criticism for being too light.

Noel Freeman, president of the Houston Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Political Caucus told the Houston Chronicle Broussard’s murder has had a lasting impact in Houston:

The attack, he said, unified the gay and lesbian community and energized the campaign to include gay-directed violence in hate-crime legislation. It also fueled lingering concerns over security.

“I still don’t feel comfortable holding my husband’s hand walking down the street,” Freeman said.

Buice had been denied parole multiple times since 2003. Freeman is leading an effort to get the most recent ruling overturned, KHOU reported:

“We’re going to encourage all members of the community to write the parole board, write their representatives, write their state senators,” Freeman said. “We will mobilize the community. The community mobilized when Paul was murdered back in 1991.”

Equality Texas has also taken up that cause, according to the Dallas Voice.

But one prominent gay activist in Houston has taken Buice’s side: Ray Hill, the KPFT community radio cofounder who helped push for further investigation into Broussard’s murder. In 1999, Buice apologized to the gay community in an open letter; Hill told the Chronicle he believes Buice has been rehabilitated.

“This was not a hate crime,” Hill said. “We had a bunch of kids drunk and stoned and disappointed they couldn’t get into a gay bar. They drove around looking for trouble. It had more to do with immaturity. … There never was any intent to hurt or kill gay people.”

Buice appears in a 2002 Mother Jones story about Hill’s prison radio show.

Last year the Houston Press took an in-depth look at Buice’s time in prison, and the evidence that Buice “may not be [a] model prisoner,” allegations of sex tapes and an illicit relationship with a prison chaplain — which Broussard’s mother had hoped would keep Buice locked up for years to come.

According to the Chronicle, Buice’s good behavior and enrollment in college classes won him points toward his early release.

Jail isn’t just costly to the taxpayer. It’s also costly to the inmate. Time in jail reduces an inmate’s earnings 40 percent, on average. It limits their future economic mobility. And it hurts the fortunes of their children — a lot of children, given that 1 in every 28 has a parent behind bars (including one in nine black children).

“On average, incarceration eliminates more than half the earnings a white man would otherwise have made through age 48, and 41 and 44 percent of the earnings for Hispanic and black men, respectively,” the report says. “Of note, these losses do not include earnings forfeited during incarceration; they reflect instead a sizable lifelong earnings gap between former inmates and those never incarcerated.”

The report also notes that the United States incarcerates so many working-age people — 2.3 million of them — that it distorts the employment and unemployment figures. “[C]onventional methods of assessing employment exclude the men and women behind bars, resulting in an incomplete picture,” the report says. The biggest impact is on the employment-to-population ratio, a way of gauging how economically productive the workforce is. When prisoners are included in the standard calculation, the EPOP changes dramatically. For working-age black men, it falls from 67 to 61 percent. For 20 to 34-year-old black men, it falls from 66 to 58 percent. Jail has become so common for black men, in fact, that they are more likely to be in jail than at work, if they are young and don’t have a high-school diploma.

The flip side of all of this, of course, is that the United States could do a lot of financial good for itself and its citizens if Congress took up prison reform. (Notably, it’s a bipartisan issue, if not a popular one. Fiscal conservatives and social-justice-conscious liberals can get behind it.)

The report has some commonsense recommendations:

• Proactively reconnect former inmates to the labor market through education and training, job search and placement support and follow-up services to help former inmates stay employed.
• Enhance former inmates’ economic condition and make work pay by capping the percent of an offenders’ income subject to deductions for unpaid debts (such as court-ordered fines and fees), and expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit to include non-custodial, low-income parents.
• Screen and sort people convicted of crimes by the risks they pose to society, diverting lower-risk offenders into high-quality, community-based mandatory supervision programs.
• Use earned-time credits, a proven model that offers selected inmates a shortened prison stay if they complete educational, vocational or rehabilitation programs that boost their chances of successful reentry into the community and the labor market.
• Provide funding incentives to corrections agencies and programs that succeed in reducing crime and increasing employment.
• Use swift and certain sanctions other than prison, such as short but immediate weekend jail stays, to punish probation and parole violations, holding offenders accountable while allowing them to keep their jobs.

Some states are taking cost-saving reforms into their own hands. Missouri, for instance, gives judges cost-of-sentence guidelines while they are deliberating.

For someone convicted of endangering the welfare of a child, for instance, a judge might now learn that a three-year prison sentence would run more than $37,000 while probation would cost $6,770. A second-degree robber, a judge could be told, would carry a price tag of less than $9,000 for five years of intensive probation, but more than $50,000 for a comparable prison sentence and parole afterward. The bill for a murderer’s 30-year prison term: $504,690.

[B]lack market prices were suddenly going through the roof. The price of a deck of smokes tripled. There was an actual economic reason about this. I went away in Michigan, where a lot of people lost their houses, mostly poor people already. When they had to move away from the prison, it meant they couldn’t bring their loved ones as much contraband group, which meant the price of what there was sky rocketed. And the worse things got, the more the people who worked in the store would wonk and take home with them, which meant stocks ran low which [screwed] us even further.

Bet you didn’t read about that one in the Wall Street Journal.

From a very profane, disturbing and interesting read on life inside.

As the President has made clear, we will need to continue to detain some individuals currently held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. To securely house these detainees, Federal agencies plan to work with you and other state officials to acquire the nearly vacant maximum security facility in Thomson, Illinois. This facility will serve dual purposes. First, the Department of Justice will acquire this facility primarily to house Federal inmates. The Bureau of Prisons has a pressing need for more bed space in light of current crowded conditions. Second, the Defense Department will operate part of the facility to house a limited number of detainees from Guantanamo. The two parts of the facility will be managed separately, and Federal inmates will have no opportunity to interact with Guantanamo detainees.

The security of the facility and the surrounding region is our paramount concern. The facility was built in 2001 to maximum security specifications, and after acquisition it will be enhanced to exceed perimeter security standards at the nation’s only “supermax” prison in Florence, Colorado, where there has never been an escape or external attack. Federal departments and agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Defense, will work closely with state and local law enforcement authorities to identify and mitigate any risks, including sharing information through the state’s “fusion center” and working with the Federal Joint Terrorism Task Force.

The President has no intention of releasing any detainees in the United States. Current law effectively bars the release of the Guantanamo detainees on U.S. soil, and the Federal Government has broad authority under current law to detain individuals during removal proceedings and pending the execution of final removal orders.

Watch the right ignore that particular law in its reaction.

Here’s the letter:

From a statement issued by the trio:

We are confident that the government can preserve national security without resorting to sweeping and radical departures from an American constitutional tradition that has served us effectively for over two centuries.

Civilian federal courts are the proper forum for terrorism cases. Civilian prisons are the safe, cost effective and appropriate venue to hold persons convicted in federal courts. Over the last two decades, federal courts constituted under Article III of the U.S. Constitution have proven capable of trying a wide array of terrorism cases, without sacrificing either national security or fair trial standards.

Likewise the federal prison system has proven itself fully capable of safely holding literally hundreds of convicted terrorists with no threat or danger to the surrounding community.

The scaremongering about these issues should stop.

Barr has a unique position in the conservative coalition–he left the GOP to run for president as a Libertarian candidate, but his campaign is not seen to have spoiled anything for the McCain-Palin ticket. Keene and Norquist remain conservative powerhouses, and the former played key role in making Doug Hoffman’s NY-23  campaign into a national cause.

Lawyers have been making that argument for years now, but the United States has insisted that the prisoners at Bagram have no right to challenge their detention in a U.S. court. The Obama administration recently appealed a federal court’s ruling that some of the prisoners do indeed have that right.

Now, notwithstanding any constitutional concerns, Maj. Gen. Doug Stone is reportedly recommending that the United States completely revamp its detention policy in Afghanistan, focusing on rehabilitating rather than simply imprisoning the detainees. He also acknowledges that the vast majority of the men held at Bagram were likely swept up in raids yet had not engaged in hostilities against the United States.

As I’ve written before, many of the prisoners at Bagram have been held there for six or seven years without charge or access to lawyers. Stone worries that imprisoning them without charge or an ability to defend themselves for years will turn them into hardened anti-American radicals.

Stone’s 700-page report is not yet available, but he has reportedly briefed senior U.S. officials on his findings, including the top commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal; Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan; and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Stone earlier helped revamp the prison system in Iraq.

McChrystal is expected to address the issue of detention facilities in an assessment of Afghanistan due within the next few weeks.

In April, DHS responded to the Freedom of Information Act lawsuit with a “comprehensive” list of all deaths in detention, which totaled 90 people. Today, the agency said it realized it had overlooked 11 more. The government has now admitted to 104 deaths of immigrants in detention since 2003.

“Today’s announcement confirms our very worst fears,” said David Shapiro, staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project, in a statement. “For too long, the system of detaining immigration detainees has been devoid of transparency and accountability. This forces us to question even further whether there are still more deaths that somehow have gone unaccounted for.”

The Obama administration recently announced a new plan to improve the conditions of immigration detention, including strengthening federal oversight of the sprawling system that now houses about 32,000 detainees across 350 local jails, state prisons and contract facilities.

Representatives of the Departments of Defense, Justice and Homeland Security are scheduled to visit the prison in Standish, Mich., which is slated to be closed soon, to consider whether the maximum-security facility could safely house detainees.

This is the second prison named as a potential site for holding Gitmo prisoners; the other is the federal penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kans.  If President Obama is going to be able to keep his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison by January, maximum security facilities in the United States are the obvious place for at least some of the prisoners to go.

Because the Standish prison employs about 340 workers, who are reportedly upset that their employer was planning to shut down, the Michigan site would have the added bonus of providing local jobs to an area that’s already suffering an unemployment rate of more than 17 percent. Nevertheless, as The Michigan Messenger reported yesterday, the proposal remains controversial among state officials.

Update: The New York Times has confirmed with a spokesperson from the Michigan governor’s office that federal officials will be touring the Standish prison site today. It’s one of eight prisons the state is considering closing due to budget cuts.