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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.

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Shane Bauer’s Four Months As a Private Prison Guard

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Hillary Clinton Continues to Not Be a Shady Character

by JoFMNzorbmdirn Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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Reporters sure are desperate to demonstrate some kind of shadiness on Hillary Clinton’s part. Here’s a headline in the LA Times today:

House Democrats mistakenly release transcript confirming big payout to Clinton friend Sidney Blumenthal

Sounds shady! I clicked immediately, wanting to know who gave Blumenthal a big payout. The answer, it turns out, is Media Matters, for which he works. This is in no way shady and in no way connected to Hillary Clinton anyway. And here’s an AP headline from this weekend:

Clinton’s State Dept. calendar missing scores of entries

This also sound shady! But no. It turns out that on Hillary Clinton’s official State Department schedule, she sometimes had private meetings and didn’t list the participants. “No known federal laws were violated,” the article says.

Sheesh. Is this the best they can do? I know that we’re all desperate for balance given the tsunami of lies and sleaze coming from the Trump campaign, but surely there’s something a little more concrete we can lay at Hillary’s feet? This is lame.

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Hillary Clinton Continues to Not Be a Shady Character

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

by LannyIsabel51 Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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“Do the birds get what they want?” Perdue executive Bruce Stewart-Brown asked. We were surrounded by 20,000 squawking chickens in a vast indoor facility in Maryland. I was in the midst of reporting a Mother Jones deep-dive on the meat industry’s over-use of antibiotics crucial to human medicine, and how Perdue had moved decisively away from that practice.

At the time, Stewart-Brown’s rhetorical question sounded a bit silly, coming from a company that slaughters and packs 650 million chickens per year, making it the nation’s fourth-largest poultry company. Yet as I found during my reporting, Perdue isn’t just any chicken producer. Unlike all of the other industry giants, the company had quietly begun to move away from antibiotics around a decade ago.

Now Perdue has announced an animal welfare program that seems as ambitious as its move away from drugs. The company has committed itself to following the Farm Animal Welfare Council’s “five freedoms” for farm livestock, the most notable of which are the “freedom from discomfort,” “freedom to express (most) normal behavior by providing sufficient space, proper facilities and company of the animal’s own kind,” and “freedom from fear and distress.”

“Our goal is to double the rate of play/activity by our chickens in the next three years,” the company states in a newly released “Commitment to Animal Welfare.” Moreover, acknowledging that modern chickens have been bred to grow rapidly, causing leg injuries and making it very difficult to walk late in their lives, Perdue says it’s considering moving to “breeds of birds that grow slower.”

In concrete terms, the facilities that house Perdue’s birds will eventually be outfitted with windows, giving them access to sunlight, and be less densely stocked, giving the birds more room. The company so far hasn’t released details on how much more space birds will get (the current industry standard is eight-tenths of a square foot per bird). As for the windows, the company plans to install windows in 200 of the 6,000 existing poultry houses that supply it. They’ll be used as a kind of controlled experiment, to “compare bird health and activity to enclosed housing.” If the windows prove effective in increasing activity among the flock, “we will establish annual targets for retrofitting houses with windows,” Perdue states. All new chicken houses will be required to have windows.

New York Times reporter Stephanie Strom got a look at one of the the window-equipped chicken houses, run by an operation that contracts for Perdue:

Sunlight floods the floor at one end of the chicken house here at Ash-O-Ley Acres, and spry little Cornish game hens flap their wings and chase one another. At the other end of the barn, where the windows are covered as part of a compare-and-contrast demonstration, the flock is largely somnolent and slow to move.

In addition to responding to long-simmering animal-welfare complaints about factory-scale farming, Perdue is also openly discussing another highly controversial topic: Big Poultry’s reliance on nominally independent farmers to grow their chickens, under contract terms that largely favor giant processing companies like Perdue. (See my piece on a particularly presumptuous contract term that Perdue quickly nixed when I exposed it.)

Normally, when a big chicken company decides it wants to change something about the enormous barns where its birds are grown, it merely changes the terms of its contracts, forcing farmers to upgrade their facilities or risk losing their market. In this case, Perdue will pick up the cost of retro-fitting the 200 pilot houses, a company spokeswoman told me. As the windows program expands, the company says it will continue to pick up at least part of the cost. “We’ll determine how it will get paid for,” the spokeswoman said, “whether we will pay for it directly or compensate the grower through a premium for upgraded housing or…a cost-share or financing approach.”

And the company’s “Commitment to Animal Welfare” document even includes a pledge to “do a better job listening to farmers and communicating with them.” Rather than set pay solely based on factors like efficiency and output, contracts will include incentives for “care of the birds and welfare performance,” the document states. A Perdue spokeswoman added that the company is consulting with farmers to figure out the best way to compensate them for making the birds’ lives better.

Of course, as with all voluntary corporate initiatives, Perdue sets the terms of the program and controls the information that emerges from it. As Maryn McKenna notes on the National Geographic website, “For most of its initiatives, the company has not disclosed a timeline.” But as I discovered in my reporting, Perdue’s anti-antibiotics effort proved to be the real deal, and it has pulled the bulk of the poultry industry in the same direction. Perhaps its animal-welfare reforms will do the same.

Leah Garces, executive director of Compassion in World Farming, which released a video in 2014 exposing harsh welfare conditions on a Perdue-contracted farm, thinks they just might. “Just as Perdue led the way on antibiotics, they are laying out the inevitable direction of the market,” she said. “I’m confident every poultry company today is thinking hard about steps they also need to take to improve the lives of chickens in order to keep up.”

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A Huge Chicken Company Wants its Birds to Play More Before They’re Slaughtered

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Britain Is a Total Mess Right Now

by WiltonMacKillop Posted on June 27, 2016

Mother Jones

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The day before the Brexit vote, Nick Clegg, the former leader of the Liberal Democrats, wrote a piece titled “What you will wake up to if we vote to Leave…” It’s astonishingly prescient and worth a read. Apparently not very many people believed him, though.

But he was totally right, and no one knows what the hell is going on anymore. The process of leaving the EU officially starts when Britain invokes Article 50 of the EU charter, but oddly enough, no one seems to be especially eager to do that. David Cameron, the caretaker prime minister, has announced that he doesn’t plan to do this anytime soon, and Boris Johnson, the leader of the Brexit forces, seems to be OK with that:

Mr. Johnson offered no details about when or how Britain should invoke Article 50 — the formal process for leaving the European Union — nor did he lay out a plan for how Britain could maintain free trade with the European Union, the world’s largest common market, without accepting the bloc’s demand for the unrestricted movement of workers.

Meanwhile, the pound continues to fall and the financial community continues to panic. Tomorrow the Labor Party will hold a vote of confidence on its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, which he’s expected to lose by a landslide. Scotland is threatening to secede yet again. And the EU is saying that if Britain wants to retain access to the common market, then they have to accept free immigration too:

If it wants access to the bloc’s single market, post-Brexit Britain must accept EU freedom of movement rules and the supremacy of the European Court of Justice, EU diplomats have warned ahead of a vital summit. The idea that Britain could have access under a European Economic Area style deal and impose border controls was a non-starter, diplomats said.

Well, who knows? Maybe that’s just their opening negotiating position. But the Brexiteers are in for some serious trouble if it turns out that the price of access to the European market is the very thing that prompted their victory in the first place.

What a mess. And all for nothing.

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Britain Is a Total Mess Right Now

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How Should We Talk About Racism?

by KristeeJehle Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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Steve Randy Waldman picks up today on a brief Twitter disagreement from a few days ago. Here’s (part of) his response to my contention that racism was at the heart of Britain’s vote to leave the EU:

It may or may not be accurate to attribute the political behavior of large groups of people to racism, but it is not very useful. Those people got to be that way somehow. Presumably they, or eventually their progeny, can be un-got from being that way somehow. It is, I think, a political and moral error to content oneself with explanations that suggest no remedy at all, or that suggest prima facie problematic responses like ridiculing, ignoring, disenfranchising, or going to war with large groups of fellow citizens, unless no other explanations are colorable.

….It seems to me that the alleged “good guys” — the liberal, cosmopolitan class of which I myself am a part — have fallen into habits of ridiculing, demonizing, writing off, or, in our best moments, merely patronizing huge swathes of the polities to which we belong. They may do the same to us, but we are not toddlers, that is no excuse. In the United States, in Europe, we are allowing ourselves to disintegrate and arguing about who is to blame. Let’s all be better than that.

I don’t have a good answer to this, and I’ve struggled with it for some time. On the one hand, the truth is important. If I believe that racism is an important driver of a political movement (Brexit, Donald Trump), then I should say so. It’s dishonest to tap dance around it just because it’s uncomfortable or politically unhelpful.

At the same time, it usually is politically unhelpful. Accusations of racism tend to end conversations, not start them—and, as Waldman says, implicitly suggest that our problems are intractable. What’s more, there’s a good case to be made that liberals toss around charges of racism too cavalierly and should dial it back. In fact, you can go even further than that. Politically, liberals might very well be off never using the R-word again.

So: should we tell the truth as we see it even if it rarely leads to any useful outcome? Or adopt softer language that skirts the issue but has a better chance of prompting engagement from non-liberals? I don’t know. But speaking just for myself, I generally try not to ridicule or demonize “huge swathes” of the country. Instead, I prefer to put the blame where I mostly think it belongs. In the post Waldman is referring to, for example, I said this about Brexit:

At its core, it’s the last stand of old people who have been frightened to death by cynical right-wing media empires and the demagogues who enable them—all of whom have based their appeals on racism as overt as anything we’ve seen in decades. It’s loathsome beyond belief, and not something I thought I’d ever see in my lifetime. But that’s where we are.

People are people. To some extent, we’re all prisoners of the environments we were raised in and the trials we’ve been through over the course of our lives. That might call for empathy and understanding as much as it calls for censure. But one thing it doesn’t excuse is politicians and media personalities who very much know better but cynically appeal to racial sentiment anyway, either for ratings or for votes. Calling out these folks for appealing to racism—or even just tolerating it—is almost certainly useful. It might not happen fast, but eventually they can be embarrassed into cutting it out. It sure is taking a long time, though.

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How Should We Talk About Racism?

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Hillary Clinton Is No Donald Trump

by CelestaPullen53 Posted on June 26, 2016

Mother Jones

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In the LA Times today, Barton Swaim argues that in this year’s presidential election “we are faced with a choice between two pathologically dishonest candidates.” He runs through a few of Donald Trump’s seemingly bottomless supply of obvious lies, and then turns his attention to Hillary Clinton:

Clinton’s career offers a similarly dizzying array of bogus claims—(1) that she had known nothing about the firing of White House travel office employees in 1993, though she had orchestrated it; (2) that she deplaned in Bosnia under sniper fire; (3) that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, who climbed Everest when she was 5; (4) that she was a fierce critic of NAFTA “from the very beginning” when in fact she worked to get it passed; (5) that she “did not email any classified material to anyone,” though of course she did, many times.

This is the sign of a pathologically dishonest candidate? Swaim rather easily found five clear and consequential lies from Trump’s campaign this year, but not a single one from Hillary’s. He had to go back more than 20 years to put together this list, and even so he couldn’t manage to find five clear examples. #3 was a trivial recounting of a family story that apparently wasn’t true. #4 is modestly misleading, but not much more. (Hillary was privately skeptical of NAFTA from the beginning, and became more public about it after she was no longer part of her husband’s administration.) #5 is not a lie at all. It’s true—unless you count a bunch of emails that were retroactively classified only years after she sent them.

So that leaves #1 and #2. I’ll give Swaim both of them. That’s two lies between 1993 and 2008—about as many as Trump tells each day before lunch. If Hillary is really pathologically dishonest, surely Swaim could have pretty easily found more examples more recently? Frankly, if Hillary really does average one lie per decade, it might very well place her among the most honest politicians on the planet.

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Hillary Clinton Is No Donald Trump

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Let Us Now Figure Out Who to Blame for Brexit

by NorineAlison Posted on June 25, 2016

Mother Jones

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Brexit has passed, and now it’s time to find someone to blame. Sure, you can go with the pack and blame David Cameron or Nigel Farage, but that’s not much fun. Here are four plausible but not entirely obvious choices:

Ed Milliband

In order to keep peace within his own party, Prime Minister David Cameron promised a vote on Brexit in 2013. It seemed fairly harmless at the time: Cameron’s Conservative Party was about 20 seats short of an outright majority in Parliament, so he was governing in a coalition with the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems opposed the referendum, and as long as they remained in the coalition, there would most likely have been no vote. To maintain this status quo, neither the Lib Dems nor the opposition Labor Party even had to gain any seats in the 2015 election. They just had to hold their own.

But Ed Milliband proved to be such a hapless leader of the Labor Party that he lost 26 seats in the election. This was just enough to give the Tories a bare majority, and that paved the way for Brexit.

Alternatively, you could blame Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, who managed his party’s coalition with Cameron poorly and lost an astounding 49 of its 57 seats in the 2015 election. But Labor was the primary opposition party and should have been able to pick up most of those seats, so let’s stick with Milliband on this one.

Angela Merkel

For all the praise she gets, Angela Merkel has been one of the most disastrous European leaders in my lifetime. She’s as responsible for Brexit as anyone I can think of, thanks to two catastrophic decisions she made.

The first was her insistence on punishing Greece following its collapse after the Great Recession. There’s plenty of blame to go around on all sides for the Greece debacle, but as the continent’s economic leader Germany held most of the high cards during negotiations over Greece’s fate. Merkel had a choice: (a) punish Greece for running up unsustainable debts and lying about them, or (b) accept that Germany bore much of the blame itself for the crisis and that Greece had no way of rescuing itself thanks to the straitjacket of the common currency. The former was a crowd pleaser. The latter was unpopular and would have required sustained, iron-spined leadership. In the event, Merkel chose to play to the crowds, and Greece has been a basket case ever since—with no end in sight. It hardly went unnoticed in Britain how Europe treated a country that was too entangled with the EU to either fight back or exit, and it made Britain’s decision to forego the common currency look prescient. And if that had been a good choice, maybe all the rest of “ever closer union” wasn’t such a great idea either.

Merkel’s second bad decision was more recent. Here is David Frum: “If any one person drove the United Kingdom out of the European Union, it was Angela Merkel, and her impulsive solo decision in the summer of 2015 to throw open Germany—and then all Europe—to 1.1 million Middle Eastern and North African migrants, with uncountable millions more to come.” It’s hard to fault Merkel for this on a humanitarian basis, but on a political basis it was a disaster. The barely-controlled wave of refugees Merkel encouraged has caused resentment and more all over Europe, and it unquestionably played a big role in the immigrant backlash in Britain that powered the Leave vote.

Paul Dacre

Paul Dacre is the longtime editor of the Daily Mail, and he’s standing in here for the entire conservative tabloid press, which has spent decades lying about the EU and scaring the hell out of its readership about every grisly murder ever committed by an immigrant. In a journalistic style pioneered by Boris Johnson—who we’ll get to next—the Mail and other tabloids have run hundreds of sensational stories about allegedly idiotic EU regulations and how they’re destroying not just Britain’s way of life, but its very sovereignty as well. These stories range from deliberately exaggerated to outright false, and they’re so relentless that the EU has an entire website dedicated to debunking British tabloid myths from A (abattoirs) to Z (zoos). The chart below, from the Economist, tots up all the lies, and the Mail is the clear leader.

The EU is hardly a finely-tuned watch when it comes to regulations, but the vast majority of the outrage over its rulings is based almost literally on nothing. Nonetheless, the outrage is real, and it was fueled largely by Dacre’s Daily Mail and its fellow tabloids.

Boris Johnson

Why Boris? After all, it was Nigel Farage, the odious leader of the openly xenophobic UKIP party, who led the charge to leave the EU. This is, perhaps, a judgment call, but I’ve long had a stronger disgust for those who tolerate racism than for the open racists themselves. The latter are always going to be around, and sometimes I even have a little sympathy for them. They’ve often spent their entire lives marinating in racist communities and are as much a victim of their upbringing as any of us.

But then there are those who should know better, and Boris Johnson is very much one of them. The usual caveat is in order here: I can’t look into Johnson’s heart and know what he really thinks. But he’s had a long journalistic career, and an equally long history of tolerating racist sentiments. As a longtime Euroskeptic—though probably more an opportunistic one rather than a true believer—it’s no surprise that he campaigned for Brexit, but in doing so he knowingly joined hands with Farage and his UKIP zealots, providing them with a respectability they wouldn’t have had without him. He knew perfectly well that the Leave campaign would be based primarily on exploiting fear of immigrants, but he joined up anyway.

Johnson is hardly the only British politician to act this way, of course. But he’s the most prominent one, so he gets to stand in for all of them.

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Let Us Now Figure Out Who to Blame for Brexit

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Watch: What It’s Like to Become a Guard at a Private Prison

by JadaWentworth49 Posted on June 25, 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. Read Bauer’s gripping firsthand account here.

Bauer’s investigation is also the subject of a six-part video series produced by Mother Jones senior digital editor James West. In the first episode, Bauer gets a job with CCA and begins four weeks of training at Winn Correctional Center, which one former guard describes as “hell in a can.” Bauer also explores why a dangerous job that pays $9 an hour is attractive in an area with few employment options.

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Watch: What It’s Like to Become a Guard at a Private Prison

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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.

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

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Don’t Worry Super-Rich, Paul Ryan’s Tax Plan Still Has Your Back

by GrazynaMcWilliam Posted on June 24, 2016

Mother Jones

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House Republicans rolled out a roadmap for tax reform Friday that drastically cuts corporate taxes and benefits high-income taxpayers—but not nearly as much as the plan proffered by the party’s presumptive presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

House Speaker Paul Ryan unveiled the GOP proposal—the sixth and final policy blueprint that the House GOP has issued this month under Ryan’s direction—at a news conference in Washington. The plan would slash corporate rates from the current 35 percent to 20 percent and lower the top individual rate from 39.6 to 33 percent. (Trump has proposed cuts to 15 and 25 percent, respectively.) The blueprint also eliminates the estate tax, long a target of Republicans in Congress, and lowers the tax rate on income from investments.

“The way I’d sum it up is: We want a tax code that works for the taxpayers—not the tax collectors,” Ryan said. “We want to make it simpler, flatter, fairer…Make it so simple that the average American can do their taxes on a postcard.”

Since taking the House in 2011, Republicans have repeatedly promised to overhaul the tax system, which hasn’t seen a major update since 1986. But they have stumbled over a political roadblock: Every major deduction or tax credit has a devoted constituency who would be enraged were it to be eliminated. The last comprehensive Republican proposal was submitted in 2014 by retired Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.), former chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. His scheme varied significantly from the new blueprint. It lowered the corporate rate to 25 percent rather than 20 percent and cut the top individual rate just to 35 percent, while at the same time sacrificing popular deductions on charitable giving and mortgage interest. It failed to attract much support within the party and never received a vote.

The new blueprint is more circumspect, maintaining the mortgage and charitable deductions, as well as the Earned Income Tax Credit, a key poverty-fighting tool, and a deduction for spending on higher education. It leaves it to the Ways and Means Committee to reform these programs. Otherwise, the plan makes an effort to simplify the system, replacing itemized deductions with a higher standard deduction and eliminating most business tax breaks. It also reduces the number of income tax brackets from seven to three.

It is not yet clear whether the plan would add to the deficit. But as Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center writes, “It is hard to imagine how these tax cuts could pay for themselves.” The House GOP’s scheme is bound to cost less than Trump’s tax cuts. Experts estimate that the presumptive nominee’s plan would shrink revenues by $9.2 trillion over 10 years, forcing draconian cuts in government spending.

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Don’t Worry Super-Rich, Paul Ryan’s Tax Plan Still Has Your Back

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