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CCA prison expansion is good sign
Published Thursday, May 15, 2008
Sometimes bad things yield some good ones, too. Unfortunate behavior has given Adams County’s newest industry a boost.
With the construction workers feverishly working to finish the new prison in eastern Adams County, Corrections Corporation of America is working to expand the facility to house even more bad guys.
With an additional 564 beds in the works, the yet-to-be opened prison will eventually house more than 2,200 inmates.
The facility is a $135 million investment and is expected to employ approximately 300 people, too.
Word of the expansion comes as good news. As the national economy continues to rebuild after some slowdowns and the mortgage crisis, the Miss-Lou’s economy seems to keep growing.
The new prison is expected to be completed at the end of this year and begin housing inmates in early 2009.
While the mortgage crisis seems to have diminished the economy, the ever-growing number of incarcerated individuals seems to be growing day by day.
And, ironically for Adams County, that might be a good thing.
Sometimes dark clouds — even criminal ones — can have silver linings.
Comments
Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 15, 2008 at 4:46 a.m. (Suggest removal)
The only thing CCA's expansion is a good sign of is a society with a fantastically mixed set of values and poor understanding of its underpinnings.
Adams County's two newest industries represent this mix in that one industry excites the dark side of human emotions and behaviors and the other punishes the dark side.
The redirection of taxpayer dollars to Adams County, minus the lucrative profit CCA makes from incarceration, will provide 300 jobs and make Adam's County an enthusiastic stakeholder in this dubious public/private partnership.
I say it is a dubious enterprise because crimes are committed against individuals and any profits derived from incarceration rightly belong to the individual the crime was committed against. This isn't what happens with CCA and the prison industry in general though. The victim's equity is transferred to the owners of the prison and their creditors.
The use of words like "bad guys" and "criminals" elicits a strong emotional response that depersonalizes individuals and makes any act against them seem somehow justified, for we are "good" and they are "bad"; so if we, our county and town profit from a system that no longer seeks justice and equity for victims, then that is just what the "bad guys" deserve.
The comparison of the health of Adams County to the general economy further underscores the mixed value system. In mentioning the mortgage crisis how many people understand that in any other business what banks do would be considered fraud? Do you know of any other business that is allowed to sell something it does not have for a steady profit? For that is what banks do. They sell credit they call money that is a multiple of the customer's deposits they keep in reserve. They own neither the reserves, which belong to the individual depositors, nor the credit, which belongs to the people in common. The banks responsible for the mortgage crisis were not content even with this profitable arrangement, but resold the credit they had already sold and in so doing severely damaged the people. No banker faces incarceration over this though. Our society of mixed value and poor understanding instead has rewarded this fraud with guarantee of survival.
Forget that the banking system of this country is set up to perpetuate an inequitable distribution of wealth and that this inequality is one of the several reasons for the rise in crime. Let's focus on hating the bad guys the bankers invest our money and credit in incarcerating; let them make profits while we nibble the crumbs we are so happy to have thrown to us from the feast we have prepared and served up. The national and international banking systems have given us a local economy of near desperation and we are grateful for any relief.
Posted by marinefrmntz (anonymous) on May 15, 2008 at 5:33 a.m. (Suggest removal)
Prison is supposed to be about rehabilitation and Americas prison system is totally flawed.
Posted by Username (anonymous) on May 15, 2008 at 11:16 a.m. (Suggest removal)
When you have judges and lawmakers owning stock in the prisions it's a serious problem.
Education is the answer to crime not prisions and I don't mean a GED I mean real education from home. In other words parents should raise future adults not kids.
Posted by loneconservative (anonymous) on May 15, 2008 at 11:35 a.m. (Suggest removal)
I think it would be interesting to see just how many of the prisoners are non-violent drug offenders.
Posted by Username (anonymous) on May 15, 2008 at 12:04 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Loneconservative- It's more than 50%. It reached 50% in the clinton years the late 90's and look at how many prisions have been built since. Did you know that more pot smokers went to jail under Clinton than any other president in history?
Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 15, 2008 at 12:18 p.m. (Suggest removal)
About 500,000 are being held for drug offenses. I've read that 87% of all drug charges are for marijuana, but I don't know how many marijuana users are in prison.
Alcohol is currently legal, but in the time period leading up to the Prohibition opium and cocaine were legal as well. Ladies of the Temperance League would often meet to imbibe beverages containing cocaine and laudunum before going off to harrass establishments selling alcohol.
In the 80's Regan declared that he would end the drug problem by removing the demand...he meant putting the users in prison. He believed that growth in the general economy was fueled by wealth coming down from the side of supply, but growth in the drug economy was fueled by wealth coming up from the demand side. He could have asked Oliver North whether the drug economy was supply or demand side fueled, but then he needed to maintain plausible deniablity.
Regardless of economic theory, the sudden presence of crack cocaine in Los Angeles created a whole new level of criminality in the drug world. As one young black crack entrepreneur of Los Angeles says "I don't have a plane. I don't have a boat. I don't have a car that can make it to Mexico. So you tell me how it gets here."
Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 15, 2008 at 2:24 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Stories about planes:
http://www.narconews.com/Issue51/article...
http://www.narconews.com/Issue48/article...
General stories about narcotics traffic:
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/
Posted by triscuit (anonymous) on May 15, 2008 at 2:44 p.m. (Suggest removal)
EnKiKur you are nuts! Except for the deliberate goading, and the times I am just too busy to read all those paragraphs, you're pretty entertaining. I wonder if your employer knows you're not doing any work.
Posted by EnKiKur (anonymous) on May 15, 2008 at 4:04 p.m. (Suggest removal)
The industry I work in is so profitable it doesn't matter triscuit. It's almost as good as banking.
Posted by Yeahuhuh (anonymous) on May 16, 2008 at 12:41 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Ossama Benladin is less of a threat to this country than those people who cheer on the mass incarceration of non-violent offenders -- and those who eagerly try to lap up the money but never say anything in congress about the practice of mass incarceration of non-violent offenders.
Sorry, but what I said is absolutely true and never more important. EnKikur is totally right on this one.
How do you measure whether you lie about your love of freedom except by the percentage of your own non-violent citizens you jail?
And nationally, Republicans are twice as prone as the other guys to use government money to hurt someone and then portray themselves as heroes who need to be put on the national payroll. THAT is the gospel. It was Reagan that took the power of sentencing discretion out of the hands of judges and gave it to a corrupt Congress by mandating sentences that have caused prisons to grow like a cancer.
Not that Democrats are saints.....
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