Thursday, July 12, 2007

News and Blogs Together, Thursday, July 12, 2007

  • Looks like the leaked Genarlow Wilson video WAS child porn. Now find out who distributed it in the first place. Wanna bet where the trail ends up?
  • Kent Scheidegger makes a great point over at Crime and Consequences regarding prison work and training. Corrections departments usually face a lot of heat for competing with private businesspeople for products and services. But today there are a lot of outsourced businesses with which DOCs could compete, and should. Helping the inmates along the way toward better reentry as well.
  • $40,000 contributed in 2006 to ID election races, $300 of it to Democrats, by private prison corporations to expand business with the state, even though “Abuse by guards at the Newton County Correctional Center in eastern Texas prompted Idaho officials to demand inmates be relocated in 2006 to the Dickens County Correctional Center. Now, Idaho officials have called Dickens ‘filthy’ and ‘beyond repair,’ prompting a move to another GEO Texas prison. ‘The way the contractor makes the most money is by providing the least amount of service,’ said Robert Perkinson, a University of Hawaii professor who is writing a book on Texas prisons, including privately run facilities. ‘It's an inherently problematic area of government to privatize.’” One offender slit his throat in part due to the conditions of his imprisonment, and apparently one of the facilities ended up with a jail monitor to oversee operations as part of a settlement with one offender’s family. But when you have more inmates than beds, pickiness tends to decline. As we’ll find out more and more, undoubtedly, in the near future.
  • Here’s one way to come up with more prison cash. Sell off state land. If you have it. That’s a long-term solution, surely.
  • Interesting and rare debate in CA about prosecutorial misconduct here. Both sides’ statistics sounded pretty weak. The prosecutors say they can police themselves well. Just ask Genarlow Wilson or those Duke lacrosse guys.

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