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Management & Training Corporation (MTC)
Private prisons are often pitched to small rural areas desperate for economic development and jobs as a great way to create both. Unfortunately though, when contracts don’t come through as expected, those claims rarely materialize. Raymondville, Texas found this out the hard way.
Management and Training Corporation (MTC) runs an ICE detention center in town, which recently had to lay off 120 employees because it could not secure the contracts it had intended on getting, meaning they would have less prisoners than anticipated. As a now former employee said, “That’s a lot of people… It’s a small town, that’s a heavy blow.”
But what’s even worse is that MTC for years had not been paying these employees their required wages. They were being paid $8-9 an hour (basically minimum wage, to supervise criminals) for nearly 5 years, during which time they were supposed to have been paid at least $14.50 per hour. MTC has not paid these back wages and is delaying as long as possible in doing so, also refusing to pay other wages due and 401Ks.
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It’s even worse.
At a privately run women’s prison in this state for example, there was a security breech in 2008 if I recall, where a guard brought a loaded gun into the facility and killed herself with it and then, let’s see, the same facility was finally shut down and converted to a men’s facility, because, as my room mate at the time so succinctly put it: “Guards is fuckin’ the inmates.”
I am just absolutely shocked to hears this! I have an idea that will help them out. Everyone LOVES cheap labor? Especially immigrant cheap labor? You know where I am going right? RIGHT? Follow me here?! Okay, let me spell it out: Have the illegals WATCH THEMSELVES FOR FREE!!
They already get to do that; it’s called Detention. Or servitude. Not at all good.
prison is just another part of the MIC. ripping off the taxpayers, using fear to stuff the pockets of corporations. US has the largest number of inmates in the west, and we love putting people in prison except the criminal cartel on wall street and in dc
Yeah, those do not qualify….Most need to be Black & poor; or immigrant. Tragedy here.
we’re the largest incarcerator in the world, not just the west. we’ve got somewhere between 500,000 and a million more people in prison than China; way more than any other country in both real numbers and percentage of the population.
But I tend to think of the prison industry as its own beast, the prison industrial complex, parallel alongside the MIC. They’re their own entities but very similar in how they’re self-perpetuating and screw over the average taxpayer by funneling our money to inefficient, inhumane corporations that lobby with our tax dollars to defeat public opposition
or we could just not spend literally billions of dollars to incarcerate people, most of whom have never committed a criminal offense, and most of whom are simply seeking to make the same lives for themselves that our parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents were able to
What a concept!
http://newmexicoindependent.com/39009/private-prison-developer-behind-montana-fiasco-involved-in-construction-of-nm-private-prisons
Some smaller, usually rural, towns put up a lot of money to build privatized prisons – mainly in the hopes of creating jobs for the locals – and then, surprise surprise! the venture never comes through.
Above is just one example from Montana. I know that I’ve read articles about other such failed “privatized prisons” in other states. Once again: the taxpayers are on the hook to *pay* to build these expensive facilities. *Someone* makes money from it, but the taxpayer never realizes the alleged gain from it.
It’s all three card monte all the time anymore.
Our libertarian friends love to wax lyrical about the free market and the ever-so-more-efficient private sector. It’s a frickin’ joke. It’s all about highway robbery of the peons, who buy this libertarian fairy tale nonsense for reasons beyond my understanding.
Agree. Not really part of the MIC, but the private prison *industry* definitely operates in a parallel and similar fashion to the MIC. They are out to ROB as much from the US middle & lower class taxpayer as possible in order to *benefit* the super wealthy, whilst providing ever more *degraded* and crappy services, if at all (see my comment below, where some of these crooks get towns to pay to build private prisons, and then they never open).
Frickin’ joke, and the whole US “justice” system is RIGGED to ensure that the poor, esp minorities, are available as prison slave labor… again another BOON to the super wealthy, who’ve regretted the Thirteenth Amendment forever.
It is so shocking to hear about a huge corporation ripping off it’s employees. I’m literally beside myself. To think that even a company that makes money locking up people for coming here to eek out a better life would underpay and over work their employees. What is this Wal-Mart nation coming to?
exactly. A free work force. Imagine that?
And a little sex now and then…hey! They’re just inmates, right?
But (here’s the spin) it is not ripping people off for free labor…they’re helping people to take responsibility and build character, right?
Like building character in Iraq when they brought out the dogs and other humiliations. What good character examples…./s
Chain gang movies seem to be out of fashion – although work gangs along roads in Georgia seem to still exist. The “arrest a black skin person to work in US Steel’s mines and have their wages sent to the county until they die (average of 3 years to date of death)” seems to have ended (indeed ended in the 30′s).
So we instead have a more direct use of the “justice system” tax funding – we contract out justice. A bit more expensive because the county does not get the contract labor fund flow – but it avoids media review.
Got to love low tax on the rich Capitalist greed politics. /s
This system and the “Pan_data
opti_con” that underpins it are completely beneath our human dignity.you’re right; there are like a half dozen empty private prisons/jails sitting around the country right now that have never been filled because the companies could never find the contracts to fill the beds. Corplan corrections, which works most often with CCA, was behind the pitch and design of many of these facilities; after the construction, which is often financed through bond sales, it’s up to the companies to find contracts to fill the beds. If they can’t secure contracts, the beds go unfilled and the prisons unstaffed. The Hardin case is one of the worst, and the town has essentially been brought to near financial ruin after spending tens of millions on bonds to finance the jail which has never been occupied
fortunately for prisoners, in many states there are laws that make it a felony to engage in sexual conduct with a prisoner, because the power dynamics between staff and inmate make it such that there’s always a weird level of non-consent. But many private prisons hire staff that have been cast off from the state system for various reasons, among them being that staffers have been found to have sexually harassed or assaulted prisoners in the state system
Given the priority for unpaid wages in our legal system, why haven’t these workers sued?
Maybe they want to keep their shitty job.
f.e.a.r.