This is almost too easy. The GEO Group, a huge, multi-billion dollar corporation, also has a political action committee so that they can essentially donate twice in every political campaign they want to be a part of (it’s called GEOPAC). But apparently, all those billions of dollars couldn’t buy them lawyers that could understand the difference between state and federal laws.

On July 1, 2011, Pelican Bay prisoners began an indefinite hunger strike to protest the conditions in the prison. Across prison-manufactured racial and geographical lines, prisoners came together behind five core demands to force the prison officials to end the use of “group punishment”; abolish a “debriefing policy and the current criteria for determining who is and who isn’t a gang member; comply with the US Commission 2006 Recommendation Regarding an End to Long-Term Solitary Confinement and end conditions of isolation.

Well that didn’t take long at all. Ohio, with its anti-union, pro-corporate governor John Kasich, is planning on selling 5 state prisons to private companies who won’t perform to the same standards as the state or save money. But the administration was convinced they offered some sort of cost-savings (despite a plethora of research to the contrary), and initially said the state would earn $200 million from the sale of the prisons. But it turns out they now only expect to earn about $50 million, 1/4 of what the originally thought they’d get.

A recent report by the Arizona Republic, which reviewed audits, correspondence, and interviews from the Department of Corrections reveals that many of the security lapses that led to the escape of 3 murderers from the MTC facility in Kingman last year have not been resolved.

The FBI is currently investigating the circumstances that led Florida to give a multiple hundred-million dollar handout to a company with a long track record of human rights abuses and contract noncompliance.

Across the country, politicians have been selling off public assets to private businesses in exchange for hefty campaign contributions and sweetheart deals. The politicians claim they are saving tax dollars, but when the real costs are examined, it’s only the corporations – who back them financially at election time – who are making a financial killing on the deals. This kind of corrupt pay-back to wealthy corporate-CEOs has produced numerous disasters for taxpayers, who end up paying more in the long run.

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. 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.

New Sheriff Al Neinhuis of Hernando County, Florida is actually saving the county more than a million and a half dollars just this year, compared to what CCA would have charged to operate the facility. And he’ll do it better.

The Supreme Court ruled in a long-standing case in California, ending an odyssey that has spanned two governors. They said today that the state is violating the Constitutional rights of prisoners by holding them in overcrowded lockups without adequate medical care. It upheld the ruling by a federal appeals court that California must release some of those prisoners.

Florida’s legislature just passed a budget that will privatize the correctional services of 18 counties, basically 20% of its prison population. Though the decision has been criticized by both side of the aisle (the quote I used for the title comes from a Republican legislator, Mike Fasano), and despite the fact that private prisons in Florida, as elsewhere, have a long history of abuse and failure to perform up to contract, the deal went through.