Orange Is The New Black (Ink)…
This year Sweden closed four prisons and a detention center… there simply aren’t enough prisoners to justify them. Sweden has one of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. And they seem to mean to do even better: though the crime rate is rising, the government is investing in prevention, not detention.
Conversely, the U.S. has the world’s highest incarceration rate (not counting North Korea, on which data is not available– though the Committee on Human Rights estimates that the rate is roughly equal to America’s). And though there are a few states (like Pennsylvania) in which prison populations are falling, it’s not looking to shrink overall.
Among the reasons: private prisons. Virtually nonexistent until the 1980s, private jails have spread across the nation, as for-profit corporations have built new facilities and bought older ones from cash-strapped states, operating them on contract. Lately, these companies have prevailed on their customers– the states– to agree to minimum guarantees. Some examples: Arizona has three private prison contracts requiring 100 percent occupancy; Oklahoma has three contracts at 98 percent occupancy; Louisiana and Virginia have occupancy rate minimums at 96 and 95 respectively.
As In the Public Interest (ITPI) reports
These contract clauses incentivize keeping prison beds filled, which runs counter to many states’ public policy goals of reducing the prison population and increasing efforts for inmate rehabilitation… some worried the terms would encourage criminal justice officials to seek harsher sentences to maintain the occupancy rates required by a contract…
Bed guarantee provisions are also costly for state and local governments. As examples in the report show, these clauses can force corrections departments to pay thousands, sometimes millions, for unused beds — a “low-crime tax” that penalizes taxpayers when they achieve what should be a desired goal of lower incarceration rates. The private prison industry often claims that prison privatization saves states money. Numerous studies and audits have shown these claims of cost savings to be illusory, and bed occupancy requirements are one way that private prison companies lock in inflated costs after the contract is signed…
Read ITPI’s full report (pdf), “How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits Guarantee Profits.”
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As we rattle our chains, we might recall that it was on this date in 1916 that Margaret Sanger, fresh back from a stint in the Raymond Street jail, reopened the Brownsville Clinic in Brooklyn, NY– the first birth control clinic in the U.S. Sanger had been shut down and arrested before for obscenity (she offered a booklet called “What Every Young Woman Should Know,” explaining the female reproductive system and several contraceptive methods). This time, the police leaned on her landlord to evict her, and the clinic closed almost as soon as it reopened.
Sanger (center) at the Brownsville Clinic