First published on WhyIHateCCA I apologize for falling silent for the past few months.  Life caught up with me.  Anyway, don’t think I’ve stopped hating on private prisons – far from it.  I just haven’t really had the time to write. But I can’t let a day like today go by without some mention.  Today, CCA [...]

New Hampshire’s legislature and governor have been looking to privatize much, if not all, of the state’s prison system for the past few months. The state submitted a request for proposals in April , and in May announced a new proposal to send all male prisoners to private facilities . Apparently not content with just considering prison privatization [...]

Secondarily published on WhyIHateCCA (First published on NationofChange.org) Another article from guest author Christopher Petrella (reprinted with permission of the author) Death, Taxes, and Alcatraz By Christopher Petrella (The following piece has been adapted from a talk given at Alcatraz in January, 2012.) I find it more than a bit serendipitous that we gather here today in the [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA Just a quick follow up on some of the news coming out of New Zealand regarding its Mt. Eden prison, which is run by Serco, probably the largest non-US based private prison operator in the world.  The prison and the company have come under tremendous scrutiny in recent months for its poor operation of [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA Florida’s leadership is among the most aggressive in the nation in trying to bring private prisons to the state .  The governor, speaker of the house, former speaker of the house, and a host of Republicans in the legislature repeatedly attempted to force through what would have been the largest wholesale privatization of prisons in US history .  Though [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA

First published on WhyIHateCCA After the state of Mississippi announced it was not renewing its contract with the GEO Group (or that the GEO Group bailed on the state , depending on how you see it) following a litany of abuse and mismanagement issues at the prisons it ran for the state, the Department of Corrections needed to bring in another company [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA   Following fresh on the heels of the announcement that the citizens of Crete, IL had successfully defeated a proposal from ICE and CCA to build a private prison there, Southwest Ranches and Pembroke Pines, FL residents got their own bit of great news : CCA isn’t going to build there either !  After the mayor [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA Last week, a CCA prison in Woodville, MS became the site of the latest private prison riot.  At least 23 prisoners were injured in the disturbance to the point where they required medical attention.  Fights raged for nearly an hour before the prison staff got the facility back under [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA Residents of Crete, IL have accomplished the (near-)impossible feat of successfully rejecting a plan by CCA and ICE to build an immigration detention center in their town.  The plan had come under heavy fire from residents practically from its inception, but CCA and ICE pushed hard to get permission to build the facility despite overwhelming [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA OSHA has fined the GEO Group more than $100,000 for occupational hazards present in the East Mississippi Correctional Facility, one of the prisons it had operated for years before losing its contract with the state in the wake of some terrible abuses that took place in the juvenile detention center they also ran.  Some of [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA That’s basically the conclusion of this analysis , which says that Attorney General Mike DeWine’s ruling that the Ohio State Police would still be responsible for investigating crimes at the Conneaut prison the state sold to CCA was a politically-motivated, and possibly illegal, action.  Essentially, the author claims that DeWine overruled a couple of career [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA In the interest of fairness and accuracy, I apologize for rushing to judgment on CCA without getting the full story of what happened in the beating death of Micheal Minick in Tennessee .  He was not beaten by CCA guards and to my knowledge had no direct interaction with CCA employees.  However, since CCA [...]

First Published on WhyIHateCCA A few weeks back, the Obama Administration finally got around to releasing new regulations governing sexual abuse in correctional facilities, as mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) of 2003.  PREA initially only applied to DOJ facilities and agencies, but the Administration has expanded its scope to include immigrants in detention here in [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA By Jenny Landreth The news that GEOCare, a private for-profit company, is hovering around the prisoner mental health honeypot in North Carolina is an extremely worrisome development. Mental health in prisons tends to fall at or near the very bottom of the list of priorities in prison management– and likewise in prison budgets– not [...]

First published on WhyIHateCCA About three weeks ago, the ACLU challenged CCA to a public debate on the merits of prison privatization , a timely request given that it came on the day of CCA’s shareholder meeting where it faced a proposal from a shareholder that would have required the company to report on its efforts to curb sexual [...]