I'm still here! Just distracted by real life...

How prisons profit.

We must move humanity to Mars.

An apple a day will actually do you a world of good.

Biking across Africa.

Saving our post offices one by one.

The reason we don't privatize

It has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with profit.

Private prisons demand states maintain maximum capacity or pay fees

Falling crime rates are bad for business at privately run prisons, and a new report shows the companies that own them require them to be filled near capacity to maintain their profit margin. 

 A new report from the advocacy group In the Public Interest shows private prison companies mandate high inmate occupancy rates through their contracts with states – in some cases, up to 100 percent.

The report, “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations,” finds three Arizona prisons must be filled to capacity under terms of its contract with Management and Training Corporation. 

If those beds aren’t filled, the state must compensate the company. 

The report found that occupancy requirements were standard language in contracts drawn up by big private prison companies. 

One of those, The Corrections Corporation of America, made an offer last year to the governors of 48 states to operate their prisons on 20-year contracts. 

That offer included a demand that those prisons remain 90 percent full for the duration of the operating agreement.

Fools, Fanatics, Faith, and Fungus

NRA Ridicules Congresswoman Whose Husband Was Shot and Killed in Mass Shooting

Dick Cheney, Ahmed Chalabi Contemplated Value Of Iraqi Oil To U.S., David Frum Writes

Depleted uranium, a gift of war that keeps on giving....

MUST WATCH: A Politician Loses It And Restores My Faith In Humanity

White-nose bat fungus. So now we kill off the bats and wonder why we are being inundated with insects.

Prison Profiteers Are Neo-Slaveholders and Solitary Is Their Weapon of Choice

Droning on....

The deadliest war the U.S. has ever had is the war we waged against ourselves.

Tell gun owners to get gun insurance:

Seven states – California, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and Colorado – have, in the past month, introduced bills to have gun owners put their money where their mouth is: liability insurance for their firearms, codifying that responsibility if their firearms are used incorrectly – used by children who find them, by criminals who easily steal them; by people to whom they sell them without requiring a background check.

All things Richard III.  The timeline for the hunt for his grave site and the miraculous find.

Sea urchins save the world!

We aren't the greatest nation in the world.

Prisons in private hands go badly

Drone killing memo

Monday Monday....

Good morning, Monday!

The NRA: dead children are a cost of doing business.

Finally, a good use for dryer lint!

Underwater crop circles.

A good section of Obamacare kicks in.

When you chase all the immigrant workers away, you have to work with prisoners... prisons that are run by corporations who are demanding of states to guarantee a steady stream of prisoners.  What is wrong with this picture?

National Geographic photo competition 2012.

Black holes:  engines of the universe.

Armed volunteers to guard schools.... what on earth could go wrong?

A giant squid in the deepest parts of the ocean.

Oil and gas companies want to stop residents from speaking about local drilling at rule hearing.

Asteroid Apophis is trying to kill us.

When you privatize prisons

You'll do anything to fill your cells.

Arrest more people!

Prison companies are making money!

Private Prison Management Company Seeks Guaranteed 90% Occupancy From States

Bobbles...

An awesome dad.

Why printers don't cancel printing right off...

The secret behind the empty chair.

Prisons for profit. Why change the system to serve justice when people are making money?

We are killing everything....

And after that, I need some animals:

Confetti News

A gay couple's take on the Chik-Fil-A rumpus.

Chris Hayes and his show UP with Chris Hayes.  One of the best ones out there.

Texts from Hillary.

What's involved with the newest Mars landing.

What has Romney NOT lied about?

Private prisons, public money.

Boiling in a vat of stupid

SCOTUS: Total Betrayal of Democracy

Kansas Board of Health Revokes License of Doctor for Not Forcing Ten-Year-Olds to Give Birth

Shocking Interglacial Shift to Hot Arctic Tied to Rapid Antarctic Ice Melt



Saudi Arabia beheads woman for 'sorcery'

 What privatizing prisons brings us... money over people. Man Dies After Prison Tries To ‘Cut Costs’ By Denying Him Care

 The Big Ag companies, poisoning workers in the fields so they can bring us poisoned food. Poisoning Workers at the Bottom of the Food Chain

 


 The United States of America... not the greatest country in the world anymore.

 

Bisphenol A exposure linked to brain tumor diagnosis.

What war does to soldiers.

Why am I in this handbasket and why is it getting so warm?

Drowning in our own garbage.

Let the United States Holy Wars begin!  Lo, the Lord sayeth, smite them, smite them, smite them!!

Surviving the flesh eating virus, lightning, and boobs.

The dangers of for-profit schools and prisons, and why the Republicans are embracing them wholeheartedly: More bodies, more money to wring out of them, and no oversight! Such a deal! Quality of schooling and dedication to returning prisoners to society are not involved:

Leonard invokes the “numerous lawsuits” against a company called Corinthian Colleges, including one in which a former admissions officer described high-pressure, even bullying recruitment tactics at one of the company’s schools, Everest: “The ultimate goal was to essentially make [potential students] wallow in their grief,” the admission officer’s affidavit says, feel that pain of having accomplished nothing in life, and then use that pain as their “reasons” to compel the leads to schedule an in-person meeting with an Everest admissions representative. A spokesman for Corinthian denied this account of its recruiting, but, as Leonard writes, “there’s little question that an obsessive focus on constantly boosting enrollment is crucial to survival in the for-profit college world. Sky-high withdrawal rates plague the industry.”

Further down in the same article:

Chang’s series in the Times-Picayune, meanwhile, took a close look at how it is that Louisiana nearly doubled its prison population in the past twenty years, to become the state with the highest per-capita incarceration rate in the country—the highest in the world, in fact. (Adam Gopnik has written for The New Yorker about our mass-incarceration culture.) What Chang finds is a system under which the state began housing the majority of its inmates in for-profit facilities, many of them run by cash-strapped local sheriffs and some by private prison companies. Both have a financial incentive to keep the prisons full— like hotels, prisons in Louisiana don’t want any vacancies. “If the inmate count drops, sheriffs bleed money,” writes Chang. “Their constituents lose jobs. The prison lobby ensures this does not happen by thwarting nearly every reform that could result in fewer people behind bars.”

We could see it coming...

But nobody could be bothered to do anything about it. People are making money.

Private Prison Corporations Are Modern Day Slave Traders

Update 5/2:  Steve Bates in comments connects me to this horribly excellent article on the subject.

Stuff I read today....

Radiation detected 400 miles off Japanese coast

Radioactive contamination from the Fukushima power plant disaster has been detected as far as almost 400 miles off Japan in the Pacific Ocean, with water showing readings of up to 1,000 times more than prior levels, scientists reported Tuesday.

300 million year old forest

Netherlands Closing 8 Prisons Due To Plummeting Crime Rates

DEAR ENTREPRENEURS, ATHLETES AND LOTTERY WINNERS: Here's How To Keep All That Money You Made

 SwedishMealTime chef

 The great escape: the bath toys that swam the Pacific

When 28,800 bath toys fell off a cargo ship in the Pacific 20 years ago, they began an incredible journey. While some washed up in British Columbia and Hawaii, countless others circumnavigated the globe.

Tiny 'Soccer Ball' Space Molecules Could Equal 10,000 Mount Everests

Opus Dei: Neofascism Within the Catholic Church

Teaching science and evolution to religious rural kids.

Returning to their roots....

Alabama brings back slavery for Latinos: Here's how: pass a draconian immigration law, lock up 'illegals' in private prisons, then get the new inmates to work in the fields

No better than Argentina

America's Disappeared. Our very own concentration camps. Right here in the US. Someone somewhere is making a lot of money.

From here to there, from near to far...

From Digby: Xe (Blackwater) turning into mercenaries for the rich Arab countries.... after all the taxpayers' billions we gave Erik Prince, too!

And a quote from this article about making money off jailing illegal immigrants:

...this is the right's idea of a jobs program --- building prisons for illegal immigrants and charging the taxpayers for it. And the Feds are ruining it by shipping their "product" back to Mexico.

Boehner has gone nuts:

After having been sensible for quite a while, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has adopted a remarkably dangerous position on the debt ceiling. His approach remains a hostage strategy — he’ll hold a gun to the American economy, until Democrats give him a series of spending cuts.

The Speaker’s position has been criticized by the White House, Wall Street, American business leaders, the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and independent economists, all of whom want the debt limit issue resolved quickly and efficiently. For his part, Boehner told “Face the Nation” this morning that he doesn’t necessarily want to wait until early August.

Japan widens evacuation zone around Fukushima nuclear plant

Wisconsin Governor Moves To Block Hospital Visitation Rights For Same-Sex Couples

An amazing speech appropriate even now, made in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting:

The reason why the Republicans are afraid of Gitmo prisoners...

Is because we'll finally find out that most of 'the worst of the worst' detainees have been a bunch of Afghani farmers, foot soldiers of the Taliban, or confused impressionable teenagers along with a few hardened criminals.

We'll find out these scary terrorists are nothing to be afraid of and that all this time... for eight long years... the real terrorists were in the White House.

Bryan of Why Now? explains the US prison system to those poor terrified Republicans.

Tiny Tim would recognize this place

And Charles Dickens would be horrified that we haven't come any farther after more than one hundred years....

The New Debtors’ Prisons

Our own concentration camps

Outed.

There's been no rise in crime

But there has been a huge rise in prison inmates:

For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 American adults is in jail or prison, according to a new report tracking the surge in inmate population and urging states to rein in corrections costs with alternative sentencing programs.

The report, released Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the 50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was six times greater than for higher education spending, the report said.

Using updated state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258 adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the start of 2008 — one out of every 99.1 adults, and more than any other country in the world.

[snip]

The report said prison growth and higher incarceration rates do not reflect a parallel increase in crime or in the nation's overall population. Instead, it said, more people are behind bars mainly because of tough sentencing measures, such as "three-strikes" laws, that result in longer prison stays.

"For some groups, the incarceration numbers are especially startling," the report said. "While one in 30 men between the ages of 20 and 34 is behind bars, for black males in that age group the figure is one in nine."

The nationwide figures, as of Jan. 1, include 1,596,127 people in state and federal prisons and 723,131 in local jails — a total 2,319,258 out of almost 230 million American adults.

The report said the United States is the world's incarceration leader, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which make up the rest of the Top 10.

We beat Russia! We're number one!

But wait... just why are we number one? Besides taking our resources to fight the unwinable War on Drugs, who else is getting rich off this? Who could it be?....

And with just a tiny scratch or research those billions can be followed right into the pockets of companies tied intimately to republicans.

The nation’s largest private prison company, Corrections Corporation of America, and most of its senior officers, give nearly all their political money to Republicans, according to federal election filings through August.

CCA’s political action committee has given 96 percent of its money to Republicans so far this election cycle.

[SNIP]

CCA, the nation’s largest private prison company, has credited the Bush administration’s expansion of federal police for creating new business for the firm.

Three times, the Corrections Corporation of America Political Action Committee made $15,000 donations to the National Republican Senatorial Committee. A number of $5,000 donations went to the Bush-Cheney campaign, the New Republican Majority Fund, and other GOP money groups.

Wherever there is money, there will soon be a politician. Now if we could just get the right people to serve some jail time....