Tag Archives: america

Shane Bauer’s Four Months As a Private Prison Guard

by JarrodCerda Posted on June 28, 2016

Mother Jones

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What is life like in a medium-security private prison? MoJo’s Shane Bauer applied for a job at the Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana to find out. Winn is run by the Corrections Corporation of America, which earned over $150 million running 61 prisons across the country last year. Why is running prisons so profitable? After four months working at Winn, Bauer reports that one reason is simple: the pay for guards is abysmally low and the facility was chronically understaffed. This certainly helped CCA’s bottom line, but it also produced persistent violence that the tiny staff was barely able to control:

On my fifth week on the job, I’m asked to train a new cadet….”It’s pretty bad in here,” I tell him. “People get stabbed here all the time.” At least seven inmates have been stabbed in the last six weeks….Three days later, I see two inmates stab each other in Ash. A week after that, another inmate is stabbed and beaten by multiple people in Elm. People say he was cut more than 40 times.

….If I were not working at Winn and were reporting on the prison through more traditional means, I would never know how violent it is. While I work here, I keep track of every stabbing that I see or hear about from supervisors or eyewitnesses. During the first two months of 2015, at least 12 people are shanked. The company is required to report all serious assaults to the DOC. But DOC records show that for the first 10 months of 2015, CCA reported only five stabbings. (CCA says it reports all assaults and that the DOC may have classified incidents differently.)

Reported or not, by my seventh week as a guard the violence is getting out of control. The stabbings start to happen so frequently that, on February 16, the prison goes on indefinite lockdown. No inmates leave their tiers. The walk is empty. Crows gather and puddles of water form on the rec yards. More men in black are sent in by corporate. They march around the prison in military formation. Some wear face masks.

This is a long piece, and it’s not easy to summarize. Its power comes from the relentless, detailed buildup of Bauer’s record of daily life at Winn. Do yourself a favor and put aside some time to read it.

And if you also want to watch the video version, we have that too: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Parts 4-6 to come later in the week.

Originally posted here:  

Shane Bauer’s Four Months As a Private Prison Guard

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Now Tesla Wants to Buy a Solar Company

by Eldon9341hrlsbq Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Elon Musk—future Mars settler, founder of Tesla—stepped into the solar business earlier this week with Tesla Motor’s $2.5 billion bid to buy SolarCity, the top home solar company in America.

Shareholders from both companies still have to approve the deal. And if they do, Tesla promises the results will be awesome. Musk says that he never wanted Tesla to be just a carmaker. Buying SolarCity will turn Tesla into a company that will sell you an electric car and the power to charge it. “This would start with the car that you drive and the energy that you use to charge it, and would extend to how everything else in your home or business is powered,” Tesla wrote in its company blog.

Then Wall Street frowned. The day after the announcement, Tesla’s stock slumped 10 percent, and Morgan Stanley cut its rating on Tesla’s shares.

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So what gives? Does Wall Street not have the vision to get with Musk? Is the most futuristic car company in America about to drive off a cliff?

Here are a few ways of looking at it:

This whole thing is really a family drama.

Lyndon Rive, SolarCity’s co-founder and CEO, is Musk’s cousin. Is there some kind of family power struggle taking place? According to Eric Weishoff, founder of Greentech Media, Rive “didn’t sound happy enough for a man that just got $77 million dollars wealthier.” And why should Tesla buy Solar City when the two companies have been collaborating on batteries for half a decade now?

Tesla’s stock is sinking because Wall Street doesn’t get Silicon Valley.

Tesla was born in the startup culture of Silicon Valley, where it’s all about taking bold stands and getting big or going home. In Silicon Valley, companies eat other companies for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and late-night snack.

Worriers, however, have good reason to wonder why Tesla wants to get into the solar business so badly when it has 375,000 pre-ordered Tesla Model 3s that it’s supposed to be making. There’s the also the example of Sun Edison, an actual energy company that went bankrupt after a massive company-buying spree.

This smushing together could actually work, because, you know, synergy!

Tesla’s current clientele is, to put it mildly, loaded. Three-quarters of Model S buyers make more than $100,000 a year. It’s entirely possible that they are exactly the kind of people who might wander into a showroom, order a car, and impulse-purchase an entire solar installation to go along with it.

Solar City sells 100,000 solar installations a year to a wide demographic. If the price of the Tesla Model 3 manages to drop from the current sticker price of $35,000 and keep dropping, it’s imaginable that SolarCity’s current customers could be persuaded to choose a Tesla for their next car.

What we really need are lots of little Teslas, not a bigger Tesla

It’s been clear for a long time that Musk is a crazy dreamer of the Steve Jobs variety. But building a big company, even a really cool big company, cannot get America to low-carbon car heaven alone. The Big Three automakers—GM, Ford, and Chrysler — arose out of a Cambrian stew of automotive experimentation in the workshops of Detroit. Many have made the point (including me) that three still wasn’t enough to create the kind of competition that the American automotive industry needed to avoid getting its ass kicked by automakers in Germany and Japan.

This sale — if it goes through — might lead to great things. But what the world really needs are many Teslas, enough to create a large ecosystem of entrepreneurs working on cars, batteries, and solar. We need this a lot more than we need to buy solar panels from a car company.

Read article here – 

Now Tesla Wants to Buy a Solar Company

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Listen: Reveal Takes You Inside Shane Bauer’s Immersion Reporting

by FletchePipkin Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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For four months in late 2014 and early 2015, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer worked as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second-largest private prison company. Read his gripping firsthand account of his experience here.

Bauer’s investigation is also the subject of the latest episode of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX. Listen to “The Man Inside” below.

Reveal can be heard on public radio stations across the country and on the Reveal podcast.

See more here – 

Listen: Reveal Takes You Inside Shane Bauer’s Immersion Reporting

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From Brexit to Climate, Little Engagement From Young People

by Myrna Posted on June 24, 2016

Britain’s “Brexit” vote was likely tipped by disengagement among young voters for whom the consequences matter most. Climate disengagement exists, as well. This article –  From Brexit to Climate, Little Engagement From Young People ; ; ;

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From Brexit to Climate, Little Engagement From Young People

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Inside Shane Bauer’s Gripping Look at the Workings of a Private Prison

by JadeChatman3601 Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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In December 2014, Mother Jones senior reporter Shane Bauer started a job as a corrections officer at a Louisiana prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s second largest private-prison company. During his four months on the job, Bauer would witness stabbings, an escape, lockdowns, and an intervention by the state Department of Corrections as the company struggled to maintain control. Bauer’s gripping, revelatory investigation is the cover story of Mother Jones‘ July/August 2016 issue.

Why Mother Jones sent a reporter to work as a private prison guard

Using his real name and personal information, Bauer applied for jobs at private prisons to get an inside look at the secretive industry that holds nine percent of America’s prisoners. He was soon hired by CCA’s Winn Correctional Center, a medium-security prison that housed around 1,500 men. After four weeks of training, Bauer was placed in a unit where he and another officer were responsible for supervising more than 350 inmates. He was paid $9 an hour and routinely worked 12-hour days.

As a guard, Bauer got an unconstrained look at the workings of a private prison. Among the episodes and issues Bauer details in his article:

• Guards felt overworked and outnumbered. Metal detectors went unused. One of Bauer’s colleagues resorted to using two prisoners as unofficial “bodyguards.” Guards skipped required security checks and recorded checks that never occurred. As one guard in the segregation unit told him, “To be honest with you, normally we just sit here at this table all day long.”

• Louisiana paid CCA $34 per day for each prisoner at Winn. Staff-intensive activities such as work program and many vocational programs had been cut. Hobby shops were shuttered and the recreation yard and law library were often closed. “We just sit in our cells all day,” one inmate said. “What you think gonna happen when a man got nuttin’ to do?”

• A prisoner escaped, slipping past unwatched security cameras and guard towers that no longer had officers in them.

• “Believe it or not, we are required by law to take care of them,” Winn’s assistant warden said about inmates’ health needs. Yet one prisoner who had lost his legs and fingers to gangrene said his multiple requests for medical care had been ignored. (He’s suing CCA for neglect.) There were no full-time psychiatrists professionals on staff. Inmates with psychiatric issues often requested to be put on suicide watch, where they were held in segregation cells without a mattress or clothes.

• A rash of stabbings broke out, leaving inmates and guards fearing for their safety. Bauer witnessed incidents in which inmates attacked other inmates. CCA responded by sending in members of its Special Operations Response Team, a SWAT-like unit that kept order with shakedowns and pepper spray. These tactical officers “use force constantly,” Winn’s assistant warden told the guards, adding that, “I believe that pain increases the intelligence of the stupid, and if inmates want to act stupid, then we’ll give them some pain to help increase their intelligence level.”

• Eventually, the prison was put on an 11-day lockdown, and officials from the state Department of Corrections came in to monitor the prison. As one inmate told Bauer shortly after he came to Winn, “Ain’t no order here. Inmates run this bitch, son.”

Bauer’s article also includes profiles of guards and prisoners struggling to survive, “locked in battle like soldiers in a war they don’t believe in.” It also describes his reaction to the stress and risk of being a prison guard—a transformation that revealed the unsettling reality of one of America’s most difficult jobs. “More and more, I focus on proving I won’t back down,” he writes. “I am vigilant; I come to work ready for people to catcall me or run up on me and threaten to punch me in the face.”

Shortly after Bauer left Winn in March 2015, CCA announced that it was backing out of its contract to run Winn Correctional Center. Documents later obtained by Mother Jones show that the state had asked CCA to make numerous immediate changes at the prison, including filling gaps in security, hiring more guards and medical staff, and addressing a “total lack of maintenance.” Another concern was a bonus paid to Winn’s warden that “causes neglect of basic needs.”

Bauer’s article is the result of more than a year of reporting, writing, and fact checking. Read it here.

Bauer’s experience is also the subject of the upcoming episode of Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX airing on public radio stations across the country starting Saturday, June 25, and on the Reveal podcast on Monday, June 27.

Follow this link – 

Inside Shane Bauer’s Gripping Look at the Workings of a Private Prison

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The Corrections Corporation of America, by the Numbers

by ChristoperHaverf Posted on June 23, 2016

Mother Jones

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Read Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer’s firsthand account of his four months spent working as a guard at a corporate-run prison in Louisiana.

The Corrections Corporation of America launched the era of private prisons in 1983, when it opened a immigration detention center in an former motel in Houston, Texas. Today the Nashville-based company houses more than 66,000 inmates, making it the country’s second-largest private prison company. In 2015, it reported $1.9 billion in revenue and made more than $221 million in net income—more than $3,300 for each prisoner in its care. More on CCA’s operations:

Where CCA operates

CCA runs 61 facilities across the United States.

These include 34 state prisons, 14 federal prisons, 9 immigration detention centers, and 4 jails.
It owns 50 of these sites.
38 hold men, 2 hold women, 20 hold both sexes, and 1 holds women and children.
17 are in Texas, 7 are in Tennessee, and 6 are in Arizona.

No vacancy

CCA and other prison companies have written “occupancy guarantees” into their contracts, requiring states to pay a fee if they cannot provide a certain number of inmates. Winn Correctional Center was guaranteed to be 96 percent full.

Who owns CCA?

CCA’S biggest investor: The Vanguard Group, the country’s second-largest money management firm, holds 14 percent of CCA stock, valued at $447 million as of late 2015.

Notable company figures:

Thurgood Marshall Jr.: CCA board member, lawyer, and son of the first African American Supreme Court justice.
Charles Overby: CCA board member and former CEO of the Freedom Forum, a foundation that promotes press freedoms.
C. Michael Jacobi: CCA board member and chairman of gunmaker Sturm Ruger.
Harley Lappin: CCA’s chief corrections officer and former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

CCA stock price, 1997-2016

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Getting out of prisons

A divestment movement targeting private-prison companies has convinced some major investors to cash in their CCA stocks. Some recent divestments and their estimated values:

Pershing Square Capital Management: $196 million
Systematic Financial Management: $93 million
General Electric: $54 million

“Frankly, we’re delighted to have a greater share of investors who are thoughtful about our business, can tell the difference between rhetoric and reality.” —CCA spokesman commenting on the University of California’s decision to divest in 2015.

CCA in court

CCA told shareholders it faced $4.2 million in liabilities related to lawsuits in 2015, but it said no pending cases would seriously affect its bottom line.

CCA will not disclose details about the lawsuits it faces. But data on more than 1,200 cases obtained by Prison Legal News offers a snapshot of the types of civil cases commonly filed against the company by its prisoners and employees.

Subjects of lawsuits filed against CCA

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Prisoners filed 82 percent of the more than 1,000 federal civil cases naming CCA as a defendant between 2010 and 2015. Federal prisoner suits against CCA have fallen since they peaked in 2000, perhaps due to a 1996 federal law that made it more difficult for inmates to sue prisons.

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The Corrections Corporation of America, by the Numbers

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Trump Just Gave His Sharpest Anti-Clinton Speech Yet

by DKHUwe71121 Posted on June 22, 2016

Mother Jones

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Donald Trump escalated his attacks on Hillary Clinton during a lengthy speech in New York on Wednesday, calling the presumptive Democratic nominee a “world-class liar” and potentially “the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency.”

Trump claimed Clinton had “perfected the politics of personal profit and even theft,” accusing her of taking money from banks, special interests, and “financial backers in Communist China” in return for influence. He slammed her for ignoring “radical Islam” and allowing American diplomats to be killed in Benghazi in 2012. “She lacks the temperament, the judgment, and the competence to lead,” he said.

A large chunk of Trump’s case against Clinton rested on items pulled from Clinton Cash, a book by conservative academic and Breitbart News Senior Editor-at-Large Peter Schweizer. The book alleges that Clinton used her position as secretary of state to funnel money to herself and the Clinton Foundation in return for friendly treatment for foreign governments including Russia, China, and Persian Gulf countries that Trump said “horribly abuse women and LGBT citizens.” Trump also claimed that Clinton’s use of private email server was an attempt to hide such corruption from public view.

Trump also blamed Clinton for toppling friendly governments in the Middle East and allowing the rise of ISIS by (unsuccessfully) supporting military action against the Syrian government. “In just four years, Secretary Clinton managed to almost single-handedly destabilize the entire Middle East,” Trump charged. “ISIS threatens us today because of the decisions Hillary Clinton has made.”

The presumptive GOP nominee made a direct plea to Bernie Sanders supporters, casting Clinton as a corrupt insider being challenged by another pro-working class, anti-Washington populist. The speech was filled with Sanders-like references to a “rigged system” and attacks on Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street firms and her support for major trade deals including NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership, both of which Trump said harm American workers and enrich large banks and corporations. “The insiders wrote the rules of the game to keep themselves in power and in the money,” Trump said. “That’s why we’re asking Bernie Sanders’ voters to join our movement, so together we can fix the system for all Americans.”

For all of the sharp attacks on Clinton, the speech was maybe Trump’s most measured public appearance of the campaign. Trump stuck to his prepared text and included the kind of standard-issue political platitudes—”everywhere I look, I see the possibilities of what our country could be”—that he rarely employs at his rallies and press conferences.

Yet the speech contained numerous falsehoods. Trump claimed again that the United States was the highest-taxed nation in the world; lied about opposing the war in Iraq before it started; claimed the government spends “hundreds of billions” on bringing refugees to America; said hundreds of immigrants have been convicted of terrorist activity; charged that Clinton would “end virtually all immigration enforcement;” and said that Clinton’s email server had been hacked by foreign governments.

The speech seemed to represent the dramatic shift that’s apparently taken place in the Trump campaign this week since Trump fired campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who reportedly encouraged Trump’s penchant for offensive, off-the-cuff remarks and blocked attempts to expand Trump’s staff. Reporters noted an immediate change in the campaign’s tactics on Tuesday, with Trump’s staff sending out fundraising appeals and hitting back at comments by Clinton with “rapid response” email blasts to reporters rather than tweets by Trump himself. Both are considered standard campaign actions, but Trump hadn’t used either before this week.

Original article:

Trump Just Gave His Sharpest Anti-Clinton Speech Yet

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The Future of Zoos

by Myrna Posted on June 21, 2016

Is there any ethical way to keep apes, elephants and other intelligent animals in captivity given growing understanding of their emotional life — and rights? Original article: The Future of Zoos ; ; ;

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The Future of Zoos

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Illegal Immigrant Tries to Kill Donald Trump!

by JarrodCerda Posted on June 21, 2016

Mother Jones

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An illegal immigrant who is apparently mentally ill tried to grab a policeman’s gun yesterday so that he could shoot Donald Trump. I gather that it was a fairly half-hearted effort, but still: “Illegal Immigrant Tries to Kill Trump”! Where are the headlines? Jim Geraghty comments:

The recent chaos on the Trump campaign, as big a story as it is, shouldn’t cause this event to disappear from the public’s attention. It illuminates the disconcerting fact that once legal temporary immigrants enter the country, the authorities have no real way to keep track of them. And a lot of them take advantage of that fact….We need border security. But even if you completely sealed the southern border, America would still have a significant number of illegal immigrants walking its streets.

Quite so. But forget the media. We all know they’re in thrall to political correctness and won’t print anything that might cast Mexican immigrants in an unfavorable light. But what about Trump? His Twitter feed is empty. Why isn’t he shouting about this from the rooftops? I mean, it totally vindicates his point about building a wall and—

Wait. What? I should read the whole story. Fine. Here’s the BBC:

A British man arrested while trying to grab a policeman’s gun at a Donald Trump rally in Las Vegas has been described in his home town as “a strange one”….Surrey Police said it was “providing family liaison support on behalf of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office”….The BBC understands he lived with his mother Lynne in Dorking, Surrey until about 18 months ago.

Surrey police? Dorking? A British man? What’s that all about?

Ah, I get it. Michael Sandford is white. And he’s from Britain. A wall wouldn’t keep him out. And anyway, Trump’s base doesn’t hate residents of Dorking who overstay their visas. He’s not the right kind of illegal immigrant. So we’ll all ignore him.

POSTSCRIPT: On another note, Geraghty, like many conservatives, complains that we have “no real way to keep track” of visitors who overstay their visas. That’s true. But what exactly do they expect? GPS tracking collars? It’s not as if someone who’s illegally overstaying their visa is going to voluntarily check in at their nearest consulate. And even if we did track them somehow, what good would it do? I’m puzzled by this whole thing.

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Illegal Immigrant Tries to Kill Donald Trump!

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Remember the Ozone Layer?

by Myrna Posted on June 20, 2016

It’s still there, NASA tracks it, and scientists are still worried about it, though atmospheric levels of chemicals that damage it are slowly declining. Excerpt from –  Remember the Ozone Layer? ; ; ;

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Remember the Ozone Layer?

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