Private prisons are making a comeback:
The Trump administration is rolling back an Obama-era plan to phase out the federal government's use of private prisons. Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a memo Thursday to the Bureau of Prisons rescinding the Obama administration's Aug. 16 order advising the bureau not to renew any contracts with private prisons, according to a copy of the letter. Then-Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates had instructed officials to either not renew private prison contracts or substantially reduce the scope of such contracts to ultimately end the department's use of privately operated prisons altogether.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions's four-sentence memo rescinding Justice Department guidance to reduce the use of private prisons sent stock soaring for the two companies that dominate the industry, Geo Group and CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America). That's not necessarily because the memo will lead to a ramp-up in Geo- or CoreCivic-run federal prisons. As of December 2015, about 12 percent of all inmates in federal prisons were housed in private facilities, representing only 22,660 inmates. That certainly won't decline under Sessions, but he didn't promise to increase it substantially. "I direct the [Bureau of Prisons] to return to its previous approach," Sessions wrote. Anyway, DoJ renewed a pair of contracts with CoreCivic despite the now-scuttled order, so it's unclear if the status quo ever stopped.
Also at CNN Money.
Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons' Monitoring of Contract Prisons (August 2016).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 26 2017, @02:38PM
Since we are nitpicking here: No, even if they tell us what they believe, we cannot know it. We cannot know whether they really believe what they say, or whether they just claim it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by aristarchus on Sunday February 26 2017, @09:38PM
No, even if they tell us what they believe, we cannot know it. We cannot know whether they really believe what they say, or whether they just claim it.
This will confuse Runaway, but definitely they could be lying. But even worse, when it comes to the alt-right, the Trump-right, and all the basically wrong-right, when they say they believe it, they may actually believe it, even though they know for a fact that it is wrong. It's a river in Egypt, cognitive dissonance, Dunning-Kroeger; they might be lying to themselves, as well as to us.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 26 2017, @09:46PM
It's called doublethink.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Monday February 27 2017, @07:37AM
I got modded "flamebait"! Oh, the humanity! It is so sad the people strike out at those who are just trying to help them! All you who think you might be alt-right, this is just orientation confusion, and you do not have to be a conservative to make up for the fact that you are attracted to members of your own gender! Let go of the hatred and abuse, let love be love, and vote Democratic. We know you can do it.