The Rick Scott wrecking ball continues its destructive course through the state of Florida. The Florida Governor promised to privatize state prisons when he was elected and that’s exactly what he did. Scott is at the helm of one of the biggest prison privatization programs in the United States of America and phase 1 is already in place.
With Scott’s finalization of Florida’s budget the state will shift $600 million dollars to private firms who will take charge of more than 19,000 inmates in 18 Florida counties.
By privatizing many of the state’s prisons Scott will cut more than 1,700 jobs from the state prison system.
Scott also claims that making the state prison system private will save the state more than $40 million dollars annually, a number the Governor can’t validate.
So much for job creation, eh Ricky?
But the issue of prison privatization runs a little deeper than saving money. The GEO Group is the second largest private prison operative in the country. The group runs two private prisons in the state of Florida and contributed more than $25,000 to Rick Scott’s campaign last year when he ran for governor.
The connection that the GEO Group has with the Republican Party runs deeper than the river Nile, but that information regarding their links with Scott is enough to make you seethe. The sheer potential for political back scratching here is in plain sight.
But that’s not the most interesting part of prison privatization.
The prison and jail population in the United States topped more than 2 million inmates for the first time in the history of this country in 2002 and black males made up 35 percent of the total U.S. prison and jail population.
For young black men the news doesn’t improve. A little over 10% of black men between the ages of 25 and 29 are incarcerated further confirming the effects of the prison industrial complex.
PIC, the prison industrial complex, has far outgrown its youth as a far left conspiracy theory into a full fledged blood sucking monster of politically connected fear mongering network of thieves.
That network is responsible for helping to elect the first President Bush, remember this guy?
For young black men the fear of becoming a part of the pic is all too real, just look at the numbers. The United States imprisons more individuals than any nation on the face of the planet for the least of crimes. Statistically there are nations far more violent than the U.S. but we use harsher sentencing tactics to deal with our crimes but why?
The history of the pic dates back to the phony war on drugs and former New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who imposed the now infamous Rockefeller drug laws that require a mandatory sentence of 15 years to life for the possession of four ounces of an illegal drug. Many states adopted this policy in an effort to show their toughness toward drug dealers and addicts.
This eventually led to prison over crowding and the construction of bigger prisons which allowed states to jail even more individuals.
By engaging in such a morally inept process Scott and many other states that are privatizing prison systems are using inmates as a form of cheap labor. When new prisons are built private prison companies use inmate labor to help build the new prisons and perform other jobs at the company’s or state’s discretion.
A recent New York Times article all but glorified the practice of inmate labor as some states move to make it a mandatory law.
But where the water gets murky is when that labor turns into slave labor. The article makes mention of Nevada Senator John Ensign who wants to make it mandatory that all minimum-security inmates work 50 hours per week for pennies on the dollar.
Senator Ensign please meet the barrel of my journalistic pen.
The undertones of such a bill should be grounds for your termination as a government employee and your immediate deportation for this nation. Slavery is one the nastiest stains on this nation’s history and you are attempting to unearth its remains through prisoners? Disgust isn’t the proper word for individuals of your ilk since you seem to think that all prisoners sit around lifting weights thinking of ways to rob you.
But, back to the lecture at hand.
Here is where education begins to play a factor. In 2007 the state of Florida had over 420,000 students drop out of high school and 22 percent of those students were African-Americans and 29 percent Hispanic.
A 2009 study showed that there is a 22% daily jailing rate for young black males who have dropped out of high school. The study also reveals that high school drop-outs are four times as likely as their peers with a higher form of education to live with a family with an income level below 125% of the poverty line. That’s a predominate channel to prison for many low income individuals and minorities.
The state of Florida’s prison privatization plan is morally bankrupt and has the stink of prejudice all over it.
With an unemployment rate of almost 17% for black people and 14% for Hispanics in the state of Florida, many of those without jobs are becoming targets of the pic or those who run it.
The call for cheaper labor and spending cuts undermines the spirit of innovation and creativity that American once took pride in. Our nation and state have turned into a plutocracy where money and government wed.
Rick Scott has effectively handcuffed our economic and educational growth for years to come with new plan for the states prisons.
It’s just too bad we let him do it.
