The California Endowment Divests from Private Prisons

Should any foundation concerned about community well-being be investing in huge corporations whose job it is to ensure as many Americans as possible are kept incarcerated?

The California Endowment evidently does not think so. Yesterday, it announced that that it is divesting from companies “that derive significant annual revenue from the operation of private prisons, jails, detention centers and correctional facilities.”

Rick Cohen wrote about a campaign to divest from private prisons in 2014 and particularly about the campaign’s efforts to try to get the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to divest. At that time, he wrote:

The Gates Foundation responded to a protest led by the Latino advocacy group Presente.org in support of prisoners engaged in a hunger strike at the GEO-operated Northwest Detention Center by saying that the positive value of its grantmaking far outweighs its investments in operators of private prisons. The foundation also contends that it somehow doesn’t actually control its own investments, which are directed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Asset Trust, which operates separately from the foundation.

The campaign to divest from private prisons is asking both public and private entities to dump their holdings in Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group, “America’s largest private prison corporations which have profited from billions in taxpayer money.” Both are publicly traded companies who spend millions on lobbying for policies that will keep our prisons full.

“Public resistance to privatization of correctional, detention, mental health and residential facilities could result in our inability to obtain new contracts or the loss of existing contracts, which could have a material adverse effect on our business, financial condition and results of operations.”—GEO Group, 2013 SEC Annual Report, “Risk Factors”

In announcing its divestment, the Endowment released a short statement.

“The California Endowment strongly supports community safety and stands with communities that experience serious disparities in incarceration rates for non-violent offenses that could be handled through drug treatment and other programs that help prevent non-violent crime,” said Robert K. Ross, MD, president and CEO of The California Endowment. “It is essential our investment strategies take into account the potential impacts they could have on the communities we serve.”

In June, Columbia University became the first university to divest, followed by Hampshire College in Massachusetts.

As Cohen wrote in 2014, “Divestment need not be an anti-corporate strategy at all. It is a pro-values strategy. But it demands that the institutions of our society that purport to be mission- and value-driven, such as private foundations, cannot stand on the sidelines with their billions in tax exempt assets and assume that their five percent devoted to philanthropic output automatically outweighs and camouflages the impacts of the investment of their 95 percent.”

By RUTH MCCAMBRIDGE

via https://nonprofitquarterly.org/2015/12/08/the-california-endowment-divests-from-private-prisons/

Meet The Companies That Just Promised To Pull 60 Million Dollars From Private Prisons

Three investment groups announced this week that they will divest from the two major private prison corporations that constitute a massive share of America’s prison-industrial complex.

Scopia Capital, DSM, and Amica Mutual Insurance have all pledged to remove their collective investments of about $60,000,000 from the Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group — the two prison companies that own 75 percent of the nation’s private prisons. The decision to divest comes on the heels of pressure from Color Of Change, a racial and economic justice advocacy group that ran a campaign asking a total 150 companies to stop investing in the private prison industry.

“In accordance with the principles of the UN Global Compact, with respect to the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights, the pension fund has divested from the for-profit prison industry,” DSM President Hugh Welsh said in a Color of Change statement. “Investment in private prisons and support for the industry is financially unsound, and divestment was the right thing to do for our clients, shareholders, and the country as a whole. DSM is committed to good corporate citizenship and operating in a way that contributes to a better world.”

Sixty million dollars is actually a drop in the bucket for GEO and CCA. The groups together earn over three billion dollars annually on private prisons, and even more on immigrant detention centers. But the move signals a growing distrust in the ballooning private prisons industry, which grew by “approximately 1600% between 1990 and 2009,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Other groups have previously reportedly divested, as well, but this may be the largest single successful divestment campaign.

“It’s an important first step,” said Carl Takei, the private prison expert in the ACLU’s National Prison Project. “To the extent that investment firms are committing themselves publicly to divestment, that is a very important step. To the extent that investment firms are deciding that private prisons are a bad investment, that’s even more important.”

CCA lost four of its prison contracts with states last year — and that combined with slowly falling imprisonment rates may actually make private prisons not just morally questionable but financially unstable, Takei pointed out.

“We’ve started to turn the corner on mass incarceration and if that’s something that makes private prisons a bad investment, that’s important,” Takei added. He said that if investment firms chose to divest for ethical reasons, it is “an important first step,” but that “the financial reasons justification would be huge.”

Studies have found that private prisons spend millions on lobbying to send more people to jail for longer periods of time. The facilities are often rife with abuse and neglect, too; accusations against the companies range from wrongful death to bad sanitation and even forcing a woman to give birth in a toilet. They do no favors for states that support them, either; Idaho was one of the places that ended its contract with CCA after the company handed over a $1 million settlement for falsifying staff hours and leaving mandatory monitoring spots unattended.

Prison secretary seeks delay in inmate court order

SACRAMENTO, Calif.—California will have no choice but to move 4,000 more inmates to private prisons in other states if federal judges refuse to postpone a court-ordered population cap, state Corrections Secretary Jeffrey Beard said Wednesday.

The state faces an April 18 deadline to reduce overcrowding in its 33 adult prisons. The judges have found reducing overcrowding to be the key step in improving inmate medical and mental health care, but Gov. Jerry Brown is seeking a three-year delay.

Brown's budget proposal, prematurely leaked Wednesday, assumes that the court grants a two-year extension to meet the cap. Like Beard, the budget says that if the extension is not granted the state will have to spend more money on short-term capacity increases while likely cutting spending on rehabilitation programs in order to avoid releasing inmates early.

Beard said such a delay would give the state time to build cells for nearly 3,500 additional inmates. That would bring the state close to meeting the federal population cap while avoiding the need to send more inmates elsewhere.

It also would give time for rehabilitation programs to work, he said. Those programs are designed to reduce the number of convicts who commit new crimes after their release and then get sent back to prison. Brown's budget projects $81 million would be available for rehabilitation programs in the fiscal year that begins July 1 if the two-year extension is granted, but the money will be eaten up by incarceration costs if it is denied, according to a copy of the budget posted online by The Sacramento Bee.

"We really don't want to do more out-of-state either, so we're hopeful we get our extension," Beard said in an interview. "But if we don't get that, then our only alternative will be to increase the out-of-state (transfers)."

A panel of three federal judges has set a Friday deadline for an end to negotiations between Brown's administration and attorneys representing inmates.

The judges already postponed by nearly 10 months their original June 30, 2013, deadline for the state to reduce its inmate population to about 110,000 inmates. Beard said that gave the state crucial time to begin operating what used to be a private prison in the Mojave Desert, open a medical hospital in Stockton and send additional inmates to five community correctional facilities within California.

Without those moves, the state would be looking at sending up to 7,000 inmates out of state instead of 4,000, he said.

California already houses roughly 8,900 inmates in Corrections Corporation of America prisons in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma. The Department of Finance estimates it costs the state $29,500 a year for each inmate housed out of state, although that amount is less than the average per-inmate cost within California because mostly younger and healthier prisoners are selected for the transfers.

The judges last year ordered the state not to move more inmates out of state, but Beard said he expects the judges would lift that ban when negotiations end this week.

An additional delay would give the state time to open an expansion of the Stockton medical facility this spring to house about 1,100 mentally ill inmates. The state last week also detailed plans to build three medium-security housing units over the next 2 1/2 years at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego and Mule Creek State Prison in Ione, 40 miles southeast of Sacramento, to hold a combined 2,376 inmates. The combined cost of all the new housing is $700 million.

Beard would not say if the budget Brown will propose Friday calls for building additional prison cells.

California already has reduced its prison population by about 25,000 inmates during the last two years, mainly through the governor's criminal justice realignment plan that is sending lower-level offenders to county jails instead of state prisons. 

Yet the inmate population keeps climbing, said Don Specter, director of the nonprofit Prison Law Office and one of the attorneys representing inmates in the long-running federal case.
"It's continuing to increase, so any building would be spending billions of dollars for only a temporary fix," he said. "It also shows that realignment was only a temporary fix, as well."

Brown and lawmakers of both political parties have been fighting previous court rulings that say the state can safely release more than 4,000 inmates by increasing good-behavior credits. The judges have previously said the state also could release elderly and medically incapacitated inmates without endangering the public.

"Other states and jurisdictions use lots of other methods other than increasing capacity, and there's no reason California can't do the same thing," Specter said.

The budget also includes nearly $65 million for the Department of State Hospitals to help the agency deal with a more violent mentally ill population that increasingly comes from the criminal justice system. A federal judge last year blamed the department for part of the problems in treating mentally ill prison inmates.



via: http://www.mercurynews.com/california/ci_24871805/prison-secretary-seeks-delay-inmate-court-order

State signs deal to park prisoners in Adelanto

California has signed a contract with an international prison company to lease space for 1,400 inmates — 700 of whom will be housed in the company’s Adelanto lockup.

Florida-based The Geo Group announced Monday that it had signed deals with the state for housing prisoners in two lower-security prisons it owns in California, one in the High Desert city of Adelanto and one in the Kern County community of McFarland.

This is the second in-state contract with a private prison operator, said state Department of Corrections spokesman Jeffrey Callison. Separately, the state has contracts for 8,500 prisoners kept in privately owned prisons in other states.

Monday’s contracts come before Gov. Jerry Brown learns whether federal judges will grant his request for a three-year delay in the court’s orders to cap the state’s prison population. That decision is expected before Friday.

“We are thankful for the confidence placed in our company by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation,” said George C. Zoley, chairman and CEO of GEO, in a statement. “The reactivation of our Central Valley and Desert View Modified Community Correctional facilities will play an important role in helping meet the need for correctional bed space in the State of California.”

It was just last year when the state reportedly said it would end a contract with Geo to house parole violators in McFarland, but Brown later extended the contract through fiscal 2016.

The state had another contract in 2011 for space at the Adelanto facility, but it too was terminated, only to be brought back now.

Callison said that the CDC ended its contract in Adelanto with The Geo Group in 2011 because the contract expired and “at that time determined that we didn’t need the space. Now we have decided that we do. That is one of the advantages of leased facilities, you can expand or contract according to need.”

With the new deals, Geo said the contracts total $30.7 million annually for five years.

The Adelanto facility will begin to accept inmates by the end of the year.

And that’s a good thing for local law enforcement leaders in Southern California, who say they’ve been feeling the burden of the state’s realignment program.

Prison realignment, implemented on Oct. 1, 2011, aims to reduce the state’s prison population after a federal three-judge panel found the overcrowded conditions in prisons kept inmates from receiving adequate health care.

Under Assembly Bill 109, lower-level offenders, those convicted of non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual offenses, are monitored and housed by county institutions.

Police chiefs are upset that some inmates released in the name of overcrowding in the county are committing the same kinds of crimes for which they were first sentenced.

“Anything we can do to free up pressure on the county jail and allow them to stop this revolving door is to our advantage,” San Bernardino Police Chief Robert Handy said.

But not all agree that private prisons are a solution to the state’s inmate housing issues.

State Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, has been outspoken on the issue of realignment.

“I don’t believe simply expanding capacity will provide a durable solution to our prison overcrowding crisis,” Lieu said Monday. “I hope the federal court will extend the prison reduction cap by two or three years. If they do that, then I hope we don’t need to complete the private prison contract.”

Lieu said California has one of the highest recidivism rates in the nation — between 60 and 70 percent.

“For every 100 prisoners we release, 60 or 70 commit more crimes and end up back in prison. Simply expanding capacity doesn’t address that problem.”

For the city of Adelanto, which has been hard-hit by the recession, the 140 jobs that will be created at the Desert View Modified Community Correctional Facility, will be well-received, officials said.

“Any time we can put more people back to work, that’s a move forward,” said Mayor Cari Thomas.

But Victoria Mena, coordinator of a program that coordinates visits with immigrant detainees at Adelanto, said her first reaction to the news was concern.

“Adelanto has three of the largest detention centers in the country — a federal prison, the county jail and the Adelanto Immigration Center, but there are no (Adelanto) high schools, and the elementary schools are failing. It says a lot about the community and says a lot about where their priorities are,” she said. “There are no after-school clubs and no community centers. Instead it’s the hub of mass incarceration.”

Mena said she’s also concerned about the isolation of the city.

“What happens when people are released?” she asked.

The contract signing completes a prison complex owned by Geo in Adelanto. Two other nearby buildings are leased to the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

San Bernardino County sheriff’s office spokeswoman Jodi Miller said the new prison contracts will have no effect on department operations.

The county is working on an application to receive $80 million in state assistance for expansion of the Glen Helen Rehabilitation Center in Devore.

California signs private-prison deal

SACRAMENTO -- California has signed a contract with private prison contractor Geo Group to lease space for 1,400 inmates in overcrowded state lockups.

The company announced the contract early Monday morning, even before Gov. Jerry Brown learns whether federal judges will grant his request for a three-year delay in the courts' orders to cap the prison population. The governor's lawyers have asked judges to make their own decision by Friday.

Geo Group issued a news release Monday from its Florida headquarters announcing the company had inked deals with the state for two lower-security prisons it owns in California, in Adelanto and McFarland. The company said the contracts are for five years, and it expects to begin receiving inmates by the end of the year.

It estimated its annual revenue from the deal at more than $30 million.

Brown has asked federal judges to delay its order to remove some 9,600 inmates from state prisons by the end of December, in trade for promising to restore $150 million to a grant that funds community probation and rehabilitation programs.

Brown's lawyers have said the state will go ahead with some private prison leases within California even if the delay is granted. The state corrections department has already begun the process of identifying inmates to be moved.