Mesa Budget Crunch Creates Demand For A Private Prison?

Last week at the Mesa City Council Study Session on Thu 16 March 2017 - with few members of the public attending and less than a dozen viewing the uploaded video - Interim Mesa Police Chief Mike Dvorak made his pitch for a city-owned municipal detention facility to be operated by private prison contractor CCA Corrections Corporation of America now re-named CoreCivic. The reason: saving the city 1 or 2 million?

Let's put the presentation by the Mesa Police Department into some context, very little of which was provided during a Power Point presentation with some questionable assertions made numerous times as well as variable finance projections. More importantly it is a break-away from Maricopa County where Law-and-Order Sheriff Joe Arpaio's successor Paul Penzone has stated clear objections to federal apprehension and detention policies.

The last time Mesa got slammed in the media was for conservative Republican-Mesa politician Russell Pearce's SB1070 fiasco to apprehend and detain immigrants, championed and shamed alike with Governator Jan Brewer - both now out-of-office. Former Gov Janet Napolitano refused to get local police involved in this 'unfunded mandate' but the political sands - and funding - have shifted since then.

CoreCivic, formerly the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), is a company that owns and manages private prisons and detention centers and operates others on a concession basis.
Controversies related to the company include: poor treatment of inmates and disclosure of oversight, lobbying efforts to conceal details of operations and substantial falsification of records to hide understaffing.
CCA's revenues in 2015 were $1.79 Billion

In March, 2017 President Donald J. Trump announced he would increase immigrant detention, although this was announced under the guise of national security. The administration decided it would be in the best national interest to radically expand the United States' detention capacity, specifically for women and children, by over four-hundred fifty per cent (450%). U.S. immigration chief stated that he plans to expand the number of mother-child "beds" in immigration centers near the border from the current 3,500 beds up to 20,000 beds. This signals the largest increase in immigrant detention since World War 2.
WATCH AND LISTEN to the Mesa City Council Session, especially the remarks and presentation by Interim Mesa Police Chief Mike Dvorak, the finance slides provided, and especially the banter by both City Manager Chris Brady and Mayor John Giles.

The Trump administration released its Skinny Budget, or a general outline of the upcoming fiscal year's budget proposal.
The budget suggests highlights significant expansion in ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] and criminal alien capacity, . . The Department of Homeland Security proposal includes an increase of about $1.5 billion to the 2017 annualized continuing resolution [ACR] for the specific expansion of detention, transportation, and removal of illegal immigrants.
Source: Finance Yahoo! 


With DOJ Reversal on Private Prisons, Corporate Jailers Get What They Paid For
Fri 24 Feb 2017 By Deirdre Fulton, staff writer
Reflecting the influence of big donors and corporate interests on the Trump administration, Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday rescinded the Department of Justice's (DOJ) 2016 directive to scale back the use of for-profit, private prisons.
CoreCivic gave $250,000 to support Trump's inauguration recently filed congressional reports show.

In a one-page memo to the acting head of the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), Sessions wrote that the August 2016 guidance from former deputy Attorney General Sally Yates—praised at the time as "an important and groundbreaking decision"—would hinder the bureau's "ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system."
Sessions instructed the BOP to "return to its previous approach," though that approach was deemed as flawed and dangerous by multiple advocacy groups as well as the department's own Inspector General last year. The ACLU called the memo "a further sign that under President [Donald] Trump and Attorney General Sessions, the United States may be headed for a new federal prison boom."

Experts predicted that private prisons would experience a "comeback" under Trump, with the Brennan Center for Justice's Lauren-Brooke Eisen writing in January that the president's "racially charged law-and-order rhetoric, and his promise to deport or incarcerate millions of immigrants—with the help of a like-minded attorney general, Jeff Sessions—have breathed new life into the industry."
Now, those predictions have come to pass, with reports of private prison stocks soaring in the wake of Sessions' announcement as well as directives from the Department of Homeland Security earlier this week that called for the construction of new jails along the southern border to hold an influx of undocumented detainees.
Source: Common Dreams