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August 05, 2019 11:49 PM UTC

Tuesday Open Thread

  • 15 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

“Farce treats the improbable as probable, the impossible as possible.”

–George Pierce Baker

Comments

15 thoughts on “Tuesday Open Thread

  1. In a stunning vote Monday repudiating the private prison industry and their inhumane treatment of immigrant detainees, the Denver City Council declined to renew contracts with the GEO Group and CoreCivic.

    The rebellion was led by District 9's Candi CdeBaca, and joined by not only the other 4 new councilmembers, but also Jolon Clark, Robin Kniech and Stacie Gilmore.

    “I am blown away,” CdeBaca said after the meeting. “I have a newfound respect for my colleagues who showed immense courage and determination tonight in one of the most challenging votes possible.”

    For her, the choice was always clear.

    GEO and CoreCivic, she said during the hearing, “are market failures, and we as a government have an obligation to intervene.” 

    Congratulations to Councilwoman CdeBaca for her vision, morals and leadership!

    1. Encouraging news, harry. Now for PERA board to divest from private prisons, as well. According to this Indy article, the Colorado legislature would have to approve divestiture.

      That's because PERA's president decided to punt decision making on divestiture there, which baffles me. As a new PERA retiree, I think that my legislators – and the PERA board – need to hear from me, and others like me, about divesting from the baby jails and family separation bureaucracy.

      1. If one reads the link provided by MJ, in its entirety, which I just did, one can see that divestiture in general is not a good idea. If there is divestiture for one reason, why not other reasons?

        1. Divestiture should be discussed in open meetings and disseminated to PERA members for votes. PERA has already divested from Iran, and from other countries critical of Israel.

          It's my **ing money, to parrot the usual conservative line – I should have a say about what is done with it.

          1. "I should have a say in what is done with it…." Or, you can take control of your own destiny, as I did some years ago, when I rolled my PERA into some Vanguard IRAs. 

            And you're assuming that all PERA members will be smart enough to make intelligent decisions about how their money is managed? As I recall, PERA's actuarial status isn't that good either.

            "usual conservative line……."  Depends. My approach is that my financial security knows no ideology.

    2. Voting to end a system WITHOUT a plan for replacement seems hugely dysfunctional. 

      “If these contracts do not pass,” warned Greg Mauro, the director of the city’s Division of Community Corrections, “the only option is to return (the 500) to custody, into the Denver jail, until the court could review their cases. … They’d all be returned to custody in very short order.”

      As the Colorado Independent put it

      For now, Hancock, the Department of Corrections, the state parole board and others likely have a lot of brainstorming to do.

      So, 500 back into prisons and 200 left in prison until there is an uncertain outcome of review of cases, perhaps development of some sort of acceptable alternative with one or more unknown organizations. 

      The council voted their convictions — but they are not the ones who will be bearing the consequence of their existing court convictions while courts consider what to do with a reduced set of options until some new system is created.

  2. Now the secondary effects of this decision need to be addressed before they become a crisis.  Do 500 convicts go back into the county jail (which might cause a bed crisis),get paroled, or can they be channeled into the alternative sentencing program?  Should Denver open up their own halfway houses which would be a multi-year effort? 

    How does Denver open up a halfway house since the NIMBY shitheads in the city scream and wail about any zoning change that takes away their precious single family houses and vision of neighborhoods being just for single households?

    This is a noble decision to get private prisons out of the county system, but I'm concerned that it's going to be a chaotic exit that's going to hurt the convicts that have benefited from this alternative option.

    1. CdeBaca and all the councilmembers acknowledge this is a tough decision, and it will challenge the Hancock administration to come up with alternatives.  That's what we elected them to do — to offer visionary leadership and effective solutions.

      But doing nothing, accepting the status quo as inevitable, is not leadership.

      “I think there is some element of risk, and that is what we were tasked with tonight: weighing the risk of people who are in these specific facilities, versus getting better outcomes in the long run,” CdeBaca said afterward. “What we heard tonight is that all of the outcomes have been subpar and we’ve renewed (the contracts) over and over.”

    2. The solution is to bring the remaining private facilities (Colorado is mainly a public prison, unionized-employee state) under the public umbrella. It should bring costs down, for one thing, and require better outcomes. Private prisons in Colorado are shutting down.

      But all of the drug rehab, the immigrant detention facilities, the places where unemployed felons must come up with $300-500 a month for pee testing and heartrate monitoring – those are now private for profit institutions, but could be brought into the public system.

      GEO, which is the private for-profit immigrant detention facility in Aurora, has been reported for multiple abuses. No reason for PERA or Denver City Council to subsidize that. The only thing these people care about is their bottom line. Threaten that, and conditions will improve, or separating families and indefinitely incarcerating non-criminal immigrants will suddenly prove less profitable.

    1. He needs to go sit in a small room and think about what he did for about ten years. Let that child finish growing up knowing he's safe from the jerk.

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