Florida Republican Stripped Of Senate Chairmanship For Opposing Prison Privatization Scheme

Prisons should be the last resort of society to keep people's behavior civilized. We should not be out sourcing this to the lowest bidder, who will reduce the wages of those working in the prisons, while increasing their profits. Society must decide if they want to be more of a military state that China or one that cares for its population. What is it that is more important to us? Do we want to increase the profits made by corporations at the expense of the tax payer or do we want to seriously look at the underlying causes of our problems.

I fear the RIPublicans, for the most part do not care for underlying causes because that is too difficult, especially when some simplistic answer will work. Like our health care system wer treat the symptoms, not the disease. Crime is caused by a lack of a good education, lack of good well paying jobs, poor housing conditions (caused by the former), and a propensity to just lock people up for "innocuous" crimes, while allowing real criminals to walk the streets. We should be looking at putting white collar criminals in real jails, not club feds; looking at ending stupid marijuana laws that put people in prison for a drug no more harmful than alcohol; building better school systems that require critical thinking rather than passing multiple guess tests; and reintroducing civic classes and have them go from elementary school through high school.

Change the tax laws to stop companies from profiting by sending our jobs, factories and technologies overseas. Give people a reason to live a decent life and punish people equally, rather than the disparity we see between white people and people of color.

Rant temporarily suspending until the next article about the stupidity we call politics pisses me off.

There have been how many studies of the efficacy of 'privatization'? I have read none that can demonstrate it is a success...contrary to neo-con propaganda, privatization is much more expensive, less efficient, and is nothing but a ploy to give corporations a greater hold on the economy...I say THANK YOU to one Repub with balls enough to stand up against that form of corruption...

A really good article on the Prison Industrial Complex, was already posted to c u r r e n t...

Lengthy detailed article, but our police state, and prison industry is a serious humanitarian crisis....

And in case anyone hasn't noticed, our police state on the outside is looking more and more like a prison from the inside....

http://nplusonemag.com/raise-the-crime-rate

"America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history. Dismantling the system of American gulags, and holding accountable those responsible for their operation, presents the most urgent humanitarian imperative of our time.

Progressives lament the growth of private prisons (prisons for profit). But it’s sadism, not avarice, that fuels the country’s prison crisis. Prisoners are not the victims of poor planning (as other progressive reformers have argued)—they are the victims of an ideological system that dehumanizes an entire class of human being and permits nearly infinite violence against it. As much as a physical space, prisons denote an ethical space, or, more precisely, a space where ordinary ethics are suspended. Bunk beds, in and of themselves, are not cruel and unusual. University dorms have bunk beds, too. What matters is what happens in those beds. In the dorm room, sex, typically consensual. In prisons, also sex, but often violent rape. The prisons are “overcrowded,” we are told (and, in fact, courts have ruled). “Overcrowding” is a euphemism for an authoritarian nightmare.

As sites of governmental authority, prisons destabilize Weber’s definition of the state as the monopolist of violence. In prisons, the monopoly is suspended: anybody is free to commit rape and be reasonably assured that no state official will notice or care (barring those instances when the management knowingly encourages rape, unleashing favored inmates on troublemakers as a strategy for administrative control). The prison staff is above the law; the prison inmates, below it. Far from embodying the model of Bentham/Foucault’s panopticon— that is, one of total surveillance—America’s prisons are its blind spots, places where complaints cannot be heard and abuses cannot be seen. Though important symbols of bureaucratic authority, they are spaces that lie beyond our system of bureaucratic oversight. As far as the outside world is concerned, every American prison functions as a black site."

First I heard of this. Thanks for posting.

Bad for ethics and bad for freedom all around. Many years ago there was a ruling against a judge who had a vested interest in convicting people in his court because he got a cut of the fines. Can't remember the name of the case but it was as fundamental as Miranda. This baloney seems to fly in the face of that. Of course there cannot be any financial incentive to incarcerate citizens. Are we really this dumb?

More red state horror,buyers remorse on Scott yet.What is the governors approval rating,can't be any good.Feel sorry for any repub that tries to make sense these days.

A republican that has not been bought off? Wow.

Cannibalistic republicans... Every now and then there is an actual decent republican, and his own party tears him apart.

It's too bad. Oh-well, as it stands Obama will most likely win the presidential election, Paul won't drop out, and his supporters are to principled to back another candidate. It will leave more than a healthy enough advantage to Obama...

Why so many people are going to back Romney to begin with???? Of course the said has been same about Paul.... Simple answer;

We're tired of these wars,

We're tired of corrupt government bureaucracy,

And Obama has proven himself a nice tool of big business, going as far as appointing people from the top of Monsanto to head the FDA...

Fuck it.... The empire will crumble soon enough...

Florida continues to shit in their cereal. Georgia just needs to shore up the border and let that dump go back to the alligators.

Wow at least there are a few sane GOPers out there. Privatization never works. It ends up costing more money. The only people who profit from privatization are the ones that receive the contracts and the tax payer ends up losing.

Can't you see what is happening all over the country? Privatize everything to your buddies, kills the unions to take away workers rights and lower wages, suppress the voters so only those that agree with you can vote, take away women's rights, etc. The country is going to hell in a hand basket.

dam good post

More money for Scott's "friends" don't stand in the way of progress with your conscience or you'll be eaten by Voldemort's snake.

This is another example why the Republican party is dying. The Republicans who speak with reason, aren't listen to and often punished.

Many of the Republicans of yesterday, which I respected are now gone. The Republicans of today, don't bring along voices of reason. They bring along the 'wrongs' who only claim to be 'right'.

Sadly, the voices of reason have left the Republican party, or have been silenced by the Republican party. It's no wonder people fear them getting into more places of power.

This nationwide push by republicans to privatize such sensitive sectors as prisons has got to be stopped and rolled back hard. Our prisons are in bad enough shape already for crying out loud.