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- Up one level
- ACLU - Private Prisons
Over the past four decades, imprisonment in the United States has increased explosively, spurred by criminal laws that put more people in prison for longer sentences. At the same time, the nation has seen the rise of for-profit prison companies, which benefit from keeping more people locked up.
- AP - Poor offenders pay high price when probation turns on profit
Adam Geller and Sharon Cohen, Associated Press, Mar. 12, 2016 "... more than 1,000 courts, most in the South but ranging to Michigan and Washington state, sign over supervision of misdemeanor offenders to private companies. "The arrangement is praised as a way to uphold justice and improve collection of fines while saving money for governments. Critics, though, call it unfair, saying probation funded entirely by charging offenders piles costs on people who can't pay and jails them for offenses as innocuous as traffic tickets."
- CoreCivic
When CoreCivic first entered this arena some thirty-plus years ago, we did so to solve a critical problem. At the time, forty-one of the fifty states in this country had been declared by the Federal Courts to be operating their prison systems in an unconstitutional fashion. For two hundred years, nobody but government had operated our prisons and jails. That lack of a comparative operation, that absolute lack of competition, had lulled states and local governments into indifference in dealing with what had become the lowest priority of government responsibilities.