Good

Private prison firm GEO has been disavowed by all of its banks, because their business has finally become too toxic even for the likes of JP Morgan Chase:

All of the existing banking partners to private prison leader GEO Group have now officially committed to ending ties with the private prison and immigrant detention industry. These banks are JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust, BNP Paribas, Fifth Third Bancorp, Barclays, and PNC.

This exodus comes in the wake of demands by grassroots activists — many under the banner of the #FamiliesBelongTogether coalition — shareholders, policymakers, and investors. Major banks supporting the private prisons behind mass incarceration and immigrant detention have now committed to not renew $2.4B in credit lines and term loans to industry giants GEO Group and CoreCivic.

This shift represents an estimated shortfall of 87.4% of all future funding to the industry, which depends on these bank credit lines and loans to finance their day to day operations. Together, these banks commitments — alongside a federal judge’s block on the Trump administration's plans to expand family detention this weekend, new policy initiatives such as California ending all contracts with private prisons, and Democratic primary candidates publicly raising the idea of a federal ban on for-profit incarceration — lead many to speculate a threat to the survival of the private prison industry all together.

One can only hope.  This is an industry that profits on misery and cruelty, and the sooner that these people need to work

As a note if you patronize the following banks, you might want to move your accounts:

Five banks have not yet made the commitment to stop extending their credit lines and term loans to CoreCivic: Regions (headquartered in Birmingham, AL), Citizens (Providence, Rhode Island), Pinnacle Bank (Nashville, TN), First Tennessee Bank (Memphis, TN), and Synovus Bank (Columbus, GA). In response to an inquiry, Pinnacle President and CEO Terry Turner said “while we don’t discuss details of client relationships, we base commercial credit decisions on several factors. In general we lend to businesses based in our markets that have strong leadership teams, sound credit histories and good operating leverage so they can create jobs and enhance the economic health of our markets.” Additionally, a spokesperson from Regions wrote “we recognize that people have differing views about the private sector’s involvement in prisons. This is a complex issue that government officials and policymakers are in the best position to address directly.”

I would note that private prisons are a new phenomenon, and they are hip deep in the creation of our carceral state:

As a brief historical recap: the American private prison industry is a relatively new phenomenon, with the first private prison opening in 1984. Given their business model depends on keeping a consistent and increasing number of people incarcerated, it's been speculated and critiqued that this is why GEO Group and CoreCivic have spent $25M on lobbying over the past three decades to push for harsher criminal justice and immigration laws. A cycle emerges when one follows the money: everyday people put their money in banks, banks lend that money out to the private prison industry, the private prison industry uses that financing for their day to day work including lobbying, which successfully funnels more detainees into their facilities, and banks reap a payoff from their loans.

These companies need to be ended before their thirst for profits leads them to give IG Farben a run for their money.

About F%$#ing Time

After years of corruption, brutality, and abuse, a movement to ban private prisons is growing:

Alex Friedmann, 50, was transferred to a Tennessee public prison in 1998 after having spent the previous six years incarcerated in a private facility. Everything was different: There were more blankets, the toilet paper wasn’t as cheap, and correctional officers were everywhere.

“First thing I noticed was there’s a heck of a lot more staff or boots on the ground in the public prisons,” he told Vox. “There was not such an emphasis on cutting costs.”

After being released in 1999, Friedmann — now the associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center — began fighting for the abolishment of private prisons, and has spent the past two decades doing so. The arguments against them, according to Friedmann, are clear: Their for-profit model encourages the business to cut corners, affecting inmates’ safety and quality of living.

Increasingly, these criticisms of private, for-profit facilities have been reflected in policy and spending. Fueled in part by opposition from their constituents, lawmakers of states like California and Nevada have banned private prisons from operating. Businesses are also increasingly cutting ties with the industry following pushback from their customers.

The number of inmates in these facilities are also seeing a downward trend: In comparison to its peak in 2012 of about 136,220 people, the private prison population has decreased about 12 percent in the past five years as more facilities are closing. Given private prisons rely on facilities being full to remain economically viable, there is concern among executives that these falling numbers could eventually drive these businesses to their demise.

It cannot happen fast enough.

These ghouls are a plague on the entire justice system.

What Happens When You Put a Fox in Charge of the Hen House

An investigation by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that the certification of prisons in the United Sates by the American Correctional Association (ACA) is ineffective and corrupt.

This should surprise no one, the ACA is the primary lobbying organization for the prison industry.

Also, the entire fact that I am unironically using the term, "Prison Industry," is an indication of just how morally bankrupt the current state of affairs is. 

Our carceral state needs to be reformed:

The organization responsible for accrediting US prisons, jails, and detention centers runs a “corrupt” process that puts a “rubber stamp” on dangerous facilities while taking in millions from the private prison industry, according to a scathing report from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), shared exclusively with Mother Jones.

The report, the result of a nearly 19-month investigation by the senator’s office, examined the American Correctional Association (ACA), a nongovernmental organization that acts simultaneously as a professional association and an oversight body for prison and detention systems. Federal, state, and local governments pay the ACA to audit the facilities where they keep people incarcerated and issue its stamp of approval on their operations. Qualifying facilities must meet the standards ACA spells out in its published manuals, covering everything from fire code compliance to officer gun training. Private prisons and detention centers, meanwhile, are often required to get accredited by the ACA to access lucrative government contracts, according to Warren’s report—and when scrutinized, they point to their accreditation status as a defense. After all, the ACA’s website says, accreditation is awarded to the “best of the best.”

The problem, Warren’s report found, is that the “best of the best” includes virtually every facility that pays its accreditation fees. The ACA currently counts over 1,200 accredited facilities; since 2007, only four have been denied accreditation. The groups provides three months’ notice and preparation tools for audits, “essentially providing the answers to the test in advance,” as the report puts it. And the ACA’s seal of approval lasts three years, with facilities conducting “self-reporting” in the interim.

“A review of available evidence suggests that that accreditation has little to no correlation with detention facility conditions and practices, and therefore little to no value whatsoever,” the report states. “The result has been the rubber-stamping of dangerous facilities and the waste of millions of taxpayer dollars.” Warren recommends that the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security stop paying the ACA for accreditation and instead establish a “rigorous, independent, and transparent” oversight process.

………

“The ACA’s private prison accreditation system is riddled with conflicts of interest, lacks transparency, and is subject to zero accountability even though millions in taxpayer dollars…flow to the ACA and private prison companies,” Warren’s report states. “These problems put the health and wellbeing of incarcerated and detained individuals, the staff and employees who work in those facilities, and our communities at risk.” (In his letter, Gondles wrote that criticizing the ACA for problems at accredited facilities “misunderstands” the purpose of its accreditation program: “ACA accreditation does not mean that there will never be an incident of violence, or that there will never be noncompliance with a health-related, safety, or other ACA standard,” he said.)

The report’s description of a lax ACA auditing process lines up with what my colleague Shane Bauer observed in 2015 while working undercover as a guard in a prison run by CoreCivic, then known as the Corrections Corporation of America:

………
 
But why is the system so broken? Warren’s report suggests that it all comes down to money. In addition to being “the closest thing we have to a national regulatory body for prisons,” as Bauer put it, it’s also a professional association that lobbies Congress on criminal justice issues and serves as a “voice for corrections.” That dual role presents an “irreconcilable conflict of interest” when the time comes to evaluate conditions inside prisons and detention centers, Warren’s report argues.

For one thing, the ACA gets nearly half its revenue from accreditation fees paid by the very entities it audits, including top private prison companies, her investigation found. Over a five-year period from 2014 to 2018, the GEO Group spent $1,429,599 on ACA accreditations, while CoreCivic spent $867,580, according to the report. The Management and Training Corporation, a smaller competitor, paid $501,850. The companies pay the ACA tens of thousands more in conference costs, certification fees, training, and for other services. Meanwhile, current or former private prison employees sit on each of the ACA’s governing boards and committees. (“The fact that one representative of a private correctional company sits on ACA’s Executive committee and two such representatives sit on the ACA’s Board of Governors and Delegate Assembly could not even begin to suggest that ACA is somehow beholden to those private interests or that the decisions of ACA’s governing bodies are driven by persons with conflicts of interest,” Gondles wrote in his letter to Warren, adding that the organization was governed by volunteers.)

Self-regulation is to regulation as self-importance is to importance.

A Good Start

The Department of Justice has announced that it will be ending its use of private prisons:

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote.

Note that this only applies to federal prisons run by the DoJ, not state and local prisons or immigrant detention facilities maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.

As to whether this policy will move quickly enough, my guess is that we'll have to wait for the next President.
Memo after the break.

Another Reason to Support Bernie Sanders

In a rally a few days ago, the distinguished gentleman from Vermont has said that he will be introducing legislation to ban private for profit prisons:

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is taking his criminal justice reform platform from the campaign trail to the Senate with a plan to introduce legislation outlawing private prisons when Congress returns from August recess.

Daily Kos first noted that at his Reno, Nevada, rally on Tuesday night, the Independent senator told a gathered crowd of 4,500 supporters that “when Congress reconvenes in September, I will be introducing legislation, which takes corporations out of profiteering from running jails.”

Sanders, who is opposed to building any new prisons, has long advocated against draconian sentencing laws, voting in favor of investments in alternative sentencing and telling the Nevada crowd that he also plans to tackle mandatory minimums for certain crimes:

We want to deal with minimum sentencing. Too many lives have been destroyed for non-violent issues. People that are sent to jail have police records. We have got to change that. Our job is to keep people out of jail, not in jail.

Our system of private gulags is deeply and ineluctably evil.

They serve to create a system where taxpayer money goes to increased incarceration by private companies, who then use political contributions to secure their rents.

It is thoroughly corrupt, and it needs to end now.

These have Epic Fail Written All Over Them

In order to deal with budget issues, Mayor Daley of Chicago is considering selling its water system to private operators, and allowing them to charge whatever they want.

So he gets the money, and succeeding generations get the revenue loss and more expensive water.

Also, the state that has so many bad ideas that it gave us both Barry Goldwater and John McCain is looking to turn over operation of their prisons to a private firm.

This one is a little different though, because private prisons have already been tried, and failed, with some of the institutions going so far as to bribe judges to send children to them for minor crimes.

This will not end well.

This is a Natural Result of Private Prisons

We now know that hundreds, perhaps thousands of children were sent to private juvenile detention facilities because the judges got kickbacks, more than 2.6 million dollars, from the operator of two private facilities.

The judges in question, Mark A. Ciavarella Jr. and Michael T. Conahan have pled guilty, with a recommendation from the prosecutors for a term of 87 months.

It should be 87 years.

The particulars are an indictment of our culture of privatization of government services:

With Judge Conahan serving as president judge in control of the budget and Judge Ciavarella overseeing the juvenile courts, they set the kickback scheme in motion in December 2002, the authorities said.

They shut down the county-run juvenile detention center, arguing that it was in poor condition, the authorities said, and maintained that the county had no choice but to send detained juveniles to the newly built private detention centers.

So, private players get into the system, pay off the right people, and these people shut down the government run facilities, and take kick-backs.

It's worth noting that these kick-backs are called "consultancy fees" when the IMF and the World Bank do this in 3rd world nations, and have frequently involved basic human needs like a municipal water supply.

It should be noted that Robert J. Powell, the owner of the two facilities involved, PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care, is claiming that he did not bribe anyone, but rather that he was shaken down by the judges:

Robert J. Powell co-owned PA Child Care and Western PA Child Care until June. His attorney, Mark Sheppard, said his client was the victim of an extortion scheme.

"Bob Powell never solicited a nickel from these judges and really was a victim of their demands," he said. "These judges made it very plain to Mr. Powell that he was going to be required to pay certain monies."

Let's see, you build jails for kids, and then suddenly they shut down the existing facility, because they think that you might bribe them?

I don't think so.

BTW, these folks might never have been caught, but for the fact that they were doling out favors to friends in arbitration awards, and the insurance companies cried "foul," and got an investigation.

In any case, they are now reviewing thousands of cases, and the federal prosecutors have petitioned the court to expedite notification to the victims.

Interestingly enough, the thing that seems to be bothering me the most involves a person who is not going to jail:

At worst, Hillary Transue thought she might get a stern lecture when she appeared before a judge for building a spoof MySpace page mocking the assistant principal at her high school in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. She was a stellar student who had never been in trouble, and the page stated clearly at the bottom that it was just a joke.

Instead, the judge sentenced her to three months at a juvenile detention center on a charge of harassment.

Why is anyone who would criminalize a satirical MySpace page allowed anywhere near children?

Why is this person still employed? Why are the police officers and prosecutors who did not laugh him off, or better still throw him in jail for harassment?

There is so much wrong here, that I'm beyond ranting.

Oh, My F%$#ing God! This is Not the Onion

Private prison company Corrections Corporation of America, looking to expand its business. intends to open an animal shelter:

Sorry, give me a second. BREATHE JANE. BREATHE…okay. Just a few more deep breaths.

Almost there.

So Corrections Corporation of America — the people who brought you immigrant abuse in their private Texas prisons — want to get into the animal shelter business. In Citrus County Florida.

IT’S NOT ENOUGH that CCA is understaffing their people prisons to cut corners, resulting in higher levels of inmate violence and death. Which they then overbill for. And you can’t FOIA how many sexual assaults are happening there because as a private company they’re not responsive to FOIA requests.

They’ve been sued for insufficiently treating inmates who have health problems because that costs money, then they pay academics from Temple University to run “astonishingly misleading” studies that say they “save money” because they don’t take into account health care costs. Which they don’t want to pay.

They also hire people to work in prisons who have, you know, murdered people.

The most depressing thing is that we are likely to see more outrage over how CCA would treat dogs than how it would treat human beings.

Well, This is Revolting

In Alabama, jailed inmates are being forced to work at fast food franchises.

I do understand that the 13th amendment has a carve-out for, "Punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," but renting out prisoners to fast food joints, a purely private endeavor is truly awful.

It might be a good idea for federal authorities to do a complete audit of the finances and of the behavior of the Alabama Department of Corrections.

I can say with almost complete certainty that if they are doing this, then there is other shady sh%$ going on:

“Walk into a McDonald’s in Alabama, and the worker flipping your McDouble could be an incarcerated person,” warns a recent video from the digital news outlet More Perfect Union.

The idea that an inmate in the custody of the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC) might be working the kitchen at a fast-food restaurant is shocking, even to seasoned observers of the fast-food industry and the American prison system. Yet as two lawsuits filed in federal court in the last year attest, the practice is so pervasive that it’s become a reliable source of income for the state.

According to the first suit, filed by the legal nonprofit Justice Catalyst on behalf of inmates last September, ADOC transports dozens of incarcerated people per day to jobs at government agencies and private businesses around Alabama, including KFC, Wendy’s, and McDonald’s franchises. ADOC also delivers inmates to meatpacking plants run by companies like Koch Foods and Gemstone Foods. At each of their jobsites, inmates do the same work as any employee, sometimes for twelve hours or more per day. From 2018 until the suit was filed last September, one McDonald’s franchisee alone put an estimated 122 ADOC inmates to work in its restaurants.

………

As both suits allege, inmates who refuse to work on a given day can face consequences, including revocation of privileges (like time on the phone with family members), stints in solitary confinement, lengthening of sentences, or transfer to one of Alabama’s medium- or high-security prisons — some of the most violent prisons in the country. 

………

In their suits, CCR and Justice Catalyst cite a 2022 amendment in the Alabama constitution that prohibits slavery or involuntary servitude in all circumstances. This standard goes beyond the Thirteenth Amendment of the US Constitution, which permits slavery “as punishment for a crime.” An Alabama judge recently dismissed CCR’s suit on jurisdictional grounds, though Jessica Vosburgh, a Birmingham-based lawyer for the organization, told Jacobin it is currently weighing options for an appeal. The Justice Catalyst case is ongoing. In the meantime, Vosburgh says, ADOC continues to transport workers to private businesses around the state, including fast-food restaurants, just as before.

The FBI and the DoJ should be on the ADOC like white on rice, and when corruption is found, these guys need to be prosecuted to the fullest extant of the law, and then sent to those prisons that they used to run, the maximum security ones.

Private Prisons

In Estancia, New Mexico, a private prison is threatening to close unless the authorities throw some more people in prison:

The company that has operated a private prison in Estancia for nearly three decades has announced it will close the Torrance County Detention Facility and lay off more than 200 employees unless it can find 300 state or federal inmates to fill empty beds within the next 60 days, according to a statement issued Tuesday by county officials.

“This is a big issue for us,” Torrance County Manager Belinda Garland said in a phone interview Tuesday. “It’s going to affect Torrance County in a big way.”

Jonathan Burns, a spokesman for CoreCivic — formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America — had this to say about the closure:

“The city of Estancia and the surrounding community have been a great partner to CoreCivic for the last 27 years. CoreCivic is grateful for the support the community has shown through the years and we’re honored to have been a part of that community. Unfortunately, a declining detainee population in general has forced us to make difficult decisions in order to maximize utilization of our resources.”

Garland said the prison’s imminent closure will affect the county in a number of ways, not the least of which is that the county, which does not have its own jail, will have to find another place to house the 40 to 75 inmates it sends there each month.

Seriously, holding a town for ransom in an attempt to get law enforcement to lock up more people.

That is pretty f%$#ing cold.

Judge Who Accepted Bribes to Jail Children is Convicted

Mark Ciavarella, Jr. who took kickbacks from private prisons to sentence children to confinement, has been found guilty of racketeering, money-laundering conspiracy, fraud and filing false income tax returns, though not of bribery:

A federal jury on Friday found a former Pennsylvania judge guilty in a so-called kids-for-cash scheme, in which he took money in exchange for sending juvenile offenders to for-profit detention centers.

………

The jury found him not guilty, however, of seven counts of extortion and 10 counts of bribery.

The former judge faces a maximum sentence of 157 years in prison. The jury also ruled he must forfeit $997,600.

I think that the jury felt that they had to find proof that he would not have sent these kids away if he hadn't been paid, i.e. what was in his head at the time, which is impossible.

Maybe I'm a bit old fashioned, but the fact that hid the money, that whole money laundering and racketeering bit, is pretty good evidence that he knew what he was doing is illegal, but I wasn't in the court room.

Here is hoping that the judge sentences him to the max.  What Ciavarella did was truly beneath contempt.

Linkage

• Apple Inc. staffers reportedly rebelling against open office plan at new $5 billion Apple Park headquarters (Silicon Valley Business Journal) It doesn't work, but it's pretty.  Apple in a nutshell
• On Charlottesville: Why the Center Is Okay with Nazis but Hates the Left (Ian Welsh) Short answer:  Because they make money from private prisons and selling armored vehicles to cops.
• Mike Godwin, Creator of Godwin's Law, Says You Can Compare Charlottesville Protesters to Nazis (Esquire) God damned Illinois Nazis!
• Federal Court Strips Immunity From Sheriff Who Tried To Silence A Critic By Having Him Arrested (Techdirt) Sheriff objects to muckraking involving his relationship with sweetheart insurance deals, and he files a criminal defamation charge, which is clearly unconstitutional.  As the court noted, "Some qualified immunity cases are hard. This case is not one of them."
• Stonewall Jackson's Family Wants His Monument Removed (Esquire) His closest relatives know what the statues are about.
• Two Sides to Every Issue: the Tedium Twins Debate the Crucifixion, Slavery and Cannibalism (Counter Punch) A spot on parody of the PBS NewsHour, with Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer.
• Thieves steal 20 tons of chocolate in German town (Deutsche Welle) I have already interrogated my wife: She was not involved, but she is considering changing her career to bounty hunter.

John Oliver explaining the affection of Nazis for Donald Trump:

Nazis are a lot like cats: If they like you, it's probably because you're feeding them. Also, cats are like Nazis, but that's a whole different subject.

Yes, Some of these Folks are Actually Guilty of Bad Things

But it's right to dismiss charges against all the kids that the cash for kids judges sent up:

A judge brought in to clean up after a "kids for cash" scandal has expunged every juvenile court case decided by a Pennsylvania jurist convicted of corruption.

Senior Judge Arthur Grim was selected almost three years ago to review juvenile court cases decided by former Luzerne County Judge Mark Ciavarella, who's serving time in jail for his involvement in the corruption case.

As a result of Grim's efforts, records have been expunged for more than 2,000 juveniles sentenced by Ciavarella.

Ciavarella and another ex-judge are serving federal prison sentences for sending juveniles to for-profit youth detention centers in return for money.

Grim called the handling of juvenile cases in Luzerne County a judicial process "run amok," and he gave recommendations to prevent such renegade justice again.

Pennsylvania State Supreme Court Chief Justice Ron Castille said Thursday that Grim has suggested many reforms that require legislative action, but the courts have already changed certain rules to treat kids more fairly.

When the checks and balances fail so badly that judges manage to get kickbacks for sending kids to private prisons, and no one says anything for years, expunging every conviction is least that we owe them as a society.

Background here.

Convictions Reversed in Pennsylvania - NYTimes.com

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has reversed hundreds of convictions of children made by judges who took kickbacks from privately owned detention centers.

Obviously, it's nice to see their records expunged, but some of the damage will be permanent.

As I said 6 weeks ago, old post This is a Natural Result of Private Prisons.

And the White House is on the Wrong Side of the Drug War Internationally

We have a leaked document from UN negotiations on how to deal with illegal drugs, and the United States has decided to advocate for the Military-Prison-Industrial complex instead of sanity:

Major international divisions over the global “war on drugs” have been revealed in a leaked draft of a UN document setting out the organisation’s long-term strategy for combating illicit narcotics.

The draft, written in September and seen by the Observer, shows there are serious and entrenched divisions over the longstanding US-led policy promoting prohibition as an exclusive solution to the problem.

Instead, a number of countries are pushing for the “war on drugs” to be seen in a different light, which places greater emphasis on treating drug consumption as a public health problem, rather than a criminal justice matter.

It is rare for such a document to leak. Normally only the final agreed version is published once all differences between UN member states have been removed.

The divisions highlighted in the draft are potentially important. The document will form the basis of a joint “high-level” statement on drugs to be published in the spring, setting out the UN’s thinking. This will then pave the way for a general assembly review, an event that occurs every 10 years, and, in 2016, will confirm the UN’s position for the next decade. “The idea that there is a global consensus on drugs policy is fake,” said Damon Barrett, deputy director of the charity Harm Reduction International. “The differences have been there for a long time, but you rarely get to see them. It all gets whittled down to the lowest common denominator, when all you see is agreement. But it’s interesting to see now what they are arguing about.”

The current review, taking place in Vienna at the UN Commission on Narcotic Drugs, comes after South American countries threw down the gauntlet to the US at this year’s Organization of American States summit meeting, when they argued that alternatives to prohibition must be considered.

 The problem here is that the "war on drugs" has been demagogued in the United States for decades, and when juxtaposed with the aggressive lobbying of private prisons and the US Military (which gets a cut of the border protection action) have made it next to impossible.

Or at least it is impossible for politicians unwilling to take a political risk to do the right thing.

What Has Happened to America?

It appears that one of the consequences of privatizing prisons is that these private companies are renting out prison labor for a profit:

Sweatshop labor is back with a vengeance. It can be found across broad stretches of the American economy and around the world. Penitentiaries have become a niche market for such work. The privatization of prisons in recent years has meant the creation of a small army of workers too coerced and right-less to complain.

Prisoners, whose ranks increasingly consist of those for whom the legitimate economy has found no use, now make up a virtual brigade within the reserve army of the unemployed whose ranks have ballooned along with the U.S. incarceration rate. The Corrections Corporation of America and GEO, two prison privatizers, along with a third smaller operator, G4S (formerly Wackenhut), sell inmate labor at subminimum wages to Fortune 500 corporations like Chevron, Bank of America, AT&T, and IBM.

These companies can, in most states, lease factories in prisons or prisoners to work on the outside. All told, nearly a million prisoners are now making office furniture, working in call centers, fabricating body armor, taking hotel reservations, working in slaughterhouses, or manufacturing textiles, shoes, and clothing, while getting paid somewhere between 93 cents and $4.73 per day.

Seriously, our country is becoming something profoundly disturbing.

Michael Kinsley* Disease Outbreak at Harvard

It appears that some social scientists at Harvard have decided to cherry pick dubious data in order to justify a counterfactual argument, because even if arguing counterfactuals is stupid, it makes a stupid person look smart:

Two Harvard professors recently published an article called “The Injustice of Under-Policing in America” in the American Journal of Law and Equality. The Harvard professors call for 500,000 more armed cops, who will arrest 7.8 million more people per year.

In other words, these two professors are proposing the greatest expansion of militarized police and surveillance in modern Western history, and they call it “the only way” to live up to “progressive” and “egalitarian” commitments.

………

The entire article makes bad arguments with material omissions, lacking rigor that one would expect from serious academic writing. I’ll try to write a longer analysis of how every key claim in the article is either wrong, unproven, or unimportant. Here, I focus on a few egregious things though.

To start, the premise. The Harvard professors claim: 1) the U.S. has way more prisoners than other countries and 2) way fewer cops. This is bad, they say, because: 3) prisons bring little benefit for their costs and 4) cops bring big benefits for their costs.

Let me first address some initial falsities. I was particularly skeptical of claim (2), and the article’s presentation of claim (4) was ludicrous. I don’t want journalists repeating them uncritically. So, I emailed the professors to try to understand the basis.

Their response was alarming. I pointed out my skepticism of the primary claim that the U.S. has fewer cops than other rich countries. (It’s notoriously fraught to count cops, and to count them across countries with very different systems.) I asked for the data.

Setting aside other problems with trying to compare cops across countries that have different local/national approaches to civilian and criminal law enforcement (as well as to whether police are armed), I suggested to the Harvard professors that their U.S. data source appears to exclude all federal policing agencies (e.g., border patrol, ICE, FBI, DEA, ATF, capitol police, Park Police, military police, etc...), potentially many non-local state agencies, and ALL private police forces.

One of the professors responded that they chose to use the number 697,195 from the UCR (an FBI reporting survey) even though they knew many local agencies weren’t included. So, he admitted that the number may be much higher, like 900,000. (Note: Wikipedia, for example, says 900k based on a major police non-profit source).

The professor then admitted privately over email that the U.S. census count is actually 1,227,788 police. That’s 76% higher than the number they chose to use in their public article. What’s the significance of this? Using this number, they admitted to me, would mean the U.S. truthfully has “1.1 times the median rate in rich countries.”

The two authors, Christopher Lewis and Adaner Usmani, appear to be assistant professors at the Harvard Law School and the Department of Sociology and Social Studies respectively.

This means that they are tenure track professors, but they do not have tenure.

If they put out more crap like this, I don't think that they should get tenure.

^*Michael Kinsley founded Slate, and is known for making batsh%$ insane arguments unsupported by the data as a rhetorical technique to demonstrate that they are iconoclastic free thinkers, and totally not complete morons.

Linkage

• On dating men with “potential” (Medium) Sort version: Men with "Potential" are affable f%$#-ups.
• The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book (Crummy) How the NYPL fixed ebook checkout for basically every library in America by going with established non-commercial standards, and not hiring for profit outside guns.
• Want to know if your relationship will work? Try the 'IKEA rage' test (Daily Express) If you can handle assembling an 825 quid flat pack monstrosity, a psychologist says that your relationship will probably last.
• Five-storey Blue Screen Of Death spotted in Thailand (The Register) Heh.
• 'Human chimera': Man fails paternity test because genes in his saliva are different to those in sperm (The Independent) Nature in all its glory.
• What Does It Mean When War Hawks Say ‘Never Trump’? (War Is Boring) Makes the obvious point, that the Republicans endorsing Hillary Clinton are some of the worst war criminals in the history of the United States.
• Ramen is displacing tobacco as most popular US prison currency, study finds (The Guardian) This is happening because prisons, particularly private ones, are increasingly starving their inmates.

To go along with the Ikea link:

Not a Single Occurrence of the Word "Genocide"

The New York Times has a blockbuster using leaked documents showing that China is using mass detentions in an attempt to eradicate the culture of its citizens in western China, most notably the Uighurs. (Long read)

Acting on this scale, there are somewhere around a million people in detention, one can only conclude that that this is a deliberate attempt to eliminate the ethnic character of the population that they are likening to a disease.

Why not a single quote from someone who would describe it as a "genocide"?

The students booked their tickets home at the end of the semester, hoping for a relaxing break after exams and a summer of happy reunions with family in China’s far west.

Instead, they would soon be told that their parents were gone, relatives had vanished and neighbors were missing — all of them locked up in an expanding network of detention camps built to hold Muslim ethnic minorities.

The authorities in the Xinjiang region worried the situation was a powder keg. And so they prepared.

The leadership distributed a classified directive advising local officials to corner returning students as soon as they arrived and keep them quiet. It included a chillingly bureaucratic guide for how to handle their anguished questions, beginning with the most obvious: Where is my family?

The directive was among 403 pages of internal documents that have been shared with The New York Times in one of the most significant leaks of government papers from inside China’s ruling Communist Party in decades. They provide an unprecedented inside view of the continuing clampdown in Xinjiang, in which the authorities have corralled as many as a million ethnic Uighurs, Kazakhs and others into internment camps and prisons over the past three years.

………

The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. The key disclosures in the documents include:  

• President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

 ………

• The crackdown encountered doubts and resistance from local officials who feared it would exacerbate ethnic tensions and stifle economic growth. Mr. Chen responded by purging officials suspected of standing in his way, including one county leader who was jailed after quietly releasing thousands of inmates from the camps.
  
  The leaked papers consist of 24 documents, some of which contain duplicated material. They include nearly 200 pages of internal speeches by Mr. Xi and other leaders, and more than 150 pages of directives and reports on the surveillance and control of the Uighur population in Xinjiang. There are also references to plans to extend restrictions on Islam to other parts of China.

………

Since 2017, the authorities in Xinjiang have detained many hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs and other Muslims in internment camps. Inmates undergo months or years of indoctrination and interrogation aimed at transforming them into secular and loyal supporters of the party.

………

The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.

“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”

I would note that the CCP already has a policy of aggressive immigration of Han Chinese into non-Han regions, so this is actually stage 2 of a policy that fits the UN definition of Genocide.

At the very least, the reporters could have brought in an export to bring up the genocidal aspects of what Beijing is doing.