Thursday, June 21, 2012

ProPublica: The For - Profit Detention Industry


By the Numbers: The U.S.’s Growing For-Profit Detention Industry by Suevon Lee ProPublica, June 20, 2012, 3:41 p.m.
http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-growing-for-profit-detention-industry

[Excerpted] The growth of the private detention industry has long been a subject of scrutiny. A recent eight-part series in the New Orleans Times-Picayune [1] chronicled how more than half of Louisiana’s 40,000 inmates are housed in prisons run by sheriffs or private companies as part of a broader financial incentive scheme. The detention business goes beyond just criminal prisoners.

As a Huffington Post investigation pointed out last month, nearly half of all immigrant detainees [2] are now held in privately run detention facilities. Just this week, the New York Times delved into lax oversight [3] at industrial-sized but privately run halfway houses in New Jersey.

General Statistics:

1.6 million: Total number of state and federal prisoners in the United States as of December 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics [4]

128,195: Number of state and federal prisoners housed in private facilities as of December 2010

37: percent by which number of prisoners in private facilities increased [5] between 2002 and 2009

...33,330: Estimated size of detained immigrant population as of 2011, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security [7]

Corrections Corporation of America...

Go to link above to read entire article....

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