Pubdate: Tue, 16 Apr 2002
Source: Capital Times, The  (WI)
Copyright: 2002 The Capital Times
Contact:  http://www.captimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/73
Author: Ed Garvey
Note: Ed Garvey is a Madison lawyer who was the Democratic candidate for 
governor in 1998.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)

CONSERVATIVES GEARING UP TO PUSH FOR PRIVATE PRISONS

Saturday morning would not be complete without listening to Scott Simon on 
National Public Radio - even while on vacation. Last Saturday he dealt with 
the prison industrial complex, and Wisconsin had a star role. Simon exposed 
those behind the "tough on crime" policies that have filled our prisons.

Audiences are amazed when told that we are spending more on prisons than we 
are on our university system while tuition caroms out of control. How did 
it happen? Simon took us by the hand and revealed the quiet but effective 
corporate effort to promote the "tough on crime" hysteria that helped 
create our budgetary problem.

It turns out that legislators and governors have been receiving lots of 
help, research, and campaign contributions from profit-oriented 
corporations in defining how we should deal with those who break the law, 
and, indeed, which laws to enact.

Once we believed that loss of freedom was not only a significant punishment 
but also an opportunity to reform the prisoner. We called it 
rehabilitation. And we believed that if prisoners behaved themselves, they 
should be released early for good behavior. We had prisons where inmates 
built furniture, made license plates, learned to read, farmed and were told 
that they could regain their precious freedom if they demonstrated that 
they were ready to return to society.

Prison was a means to an end, not an end in itself. And profit was not in 
the equation.

A couple of decades ago, Wisconsin was a leader in innovative efforts to 
effectively rehabilitate prisoners. But that was then and this is now.

Fox Lake Correctional Institution was an example of that progressive 
thinking, with a secure perimeter but freedom within the institution. 
Inmates ate together, went to shop training, talked, watched television, 
and acted like normal citizens with the notable exception that they could 
not go down the street for a burger and a beer or hug their kids.

The guards were unarmed and mingled with the prisoners. There was an 
incentive for the guards to treat inmates as human beings, and for 
prisoners to treat the guards in a similar fashion or find themselves on 
the way to a more restrictive environment in Waupun or some other facility. 
(Even the alternative maximum security prison in those days would not 
approach the absolute nonsense of a supermax.)

I visited Fox Lake several years ago with an associate and we walked among 
the inmates and there was little tension between unarmed guards and 
inmates. I left with the feeling that we were on the right path to a 
sensible approach to treatment of the nonviolent offender.

Today those concepts are out the window. The Legislature wants to punish 
inmates, violent or nonviolent, take away television and books, isolate 
them from their families, extend their sentences, add crimes, eliminate all 
judgment by the judges in sentencing. And with the Legislature 
micromanaging the sentencing decisions with "one size fits all," common 
sense is eliminated.

It is the judge, following a presentence report from experts, who is in a 
position to determine if he or she is facing a hardened criminal or a young 
person who drove after his license was revoked or perhaps was arrested for 
driving while black. Should he get probation or incarceration? Should the 
alcoholic get treatment or prison?

But those decisions are now almost computerized. The question arises why we 
have judges involved at all. Let Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, Scott 
Walker and other "experts" make the decisions. Why permit pussyfooting 
judges to make choices when demagogues, coached by the profiteers, can do 
it better without ever seeing the person or his family?

What was fascinating about the Simon radio program were the public 
confessions of Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker, the latter holding the 
chairmanship of the Assembly committee with jurisdiction over our prisons.

They made his point. Thompson, speaking to a thousand people at a dinner 
for a lobbying group, began with his familiar cheerleading roar: "Isn't it 
great to be a conservative." It was not a question. The crowd of corporate 
representatives who profit from prisons and prisoners loved it. Phone 
companies, health care delivery and drug companies, those hawking the 
latest laser weapon and, of course, Corrections Corporation of America, the 
private prison company that takes most of Wisconsin's prisoners sent out of 
state at an annual cost of $50 million. They love long sentences, 
overcrowded prisons, and the Thompson decision to effectively end parole. 
Each prisoner is a profit center for these corporations.

Thompson said he loved coming to these annual meetings because, and I'm not 
making this up, "I always got new ideas, took them home to Wisconsin, 
disguised them as my own and got them enacted." The lobbyists must have 
been bursting with pride.

But never mind the usurpation; the ideas that the profiteers push is what 
we should focus on: truth in sentencing, three strikes and you're out, and 
privatization of our prisons.

Sound familiar? The more prisoners there are, the more phone calls they 
make, the more food they devour, the more profit for those corporations 
that have figured out the game.

As Professor Walter Dickey said on the program, those who stand to profit 
from policy decisions should not participate in the decision-making. But 
Scott Walker said that he was pleased to get research from the prison lobby 
and was proud of "truth in sentencing," which they pushed.

The only thing missing in their research, of course, is truth. They 
cleverly focus on time for crime rather than cost to taxpayers or effective 
results.

Get ready for the next push - privatization of prisons. Private prisons 
have zero incentive to educate or rehabilitate. No incentive to release 
prisoners early, because they lose a customer with every decision to 
parole. Guards? Non-union, of course, and fewer of them. Private prisons 
don't educate, they warehouse.

The next time you read about our fiscal crisis, demand real truth in 
sentencing. Ask who is behind the screen.
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MAP posted-by: Ariel