Meet your new Prison Company

The despicable move to privatize prisons, a move I am 1000% opposed to, grinds on as this Government is forced to live up to their raw meat election campaign promises of public floggings and neon orange jumpsuited chain ganged prisoners singing Negro spirituals alongside motorways while a mirrored glass wearing Simon ‘bossman’ Powers stands over them with a shotgun resting on his hip.

The problem of promising such ridiculous over the top lynch mob justice is that it costs a bloody arm and a leg, so what’s a big tough hard on crime Government to do? Why privatize the entire industry and get someone else to worry about overcrowded and beatily violent prisons, so who are our new Private Prisons going to be? GEO, who are GEO, well Frogblog has some pretty disturbing things to say about them…

The GEO Group, Inc. is part of the The Wackenhut Corporation, the owner of 13 correctional facilities, 11 of which are operated by GEO. They have immigrant detention centres, youth facilities and adult prisons. GEO’s value now apparently exceeds a billion dollars. This from CorpWatch

• settled a case where they placed a woman in a cellblock with male inmates who raped and beat her, she later took her life;
• had 125 inmates removed from a prison by state authorities for inadequate staff training and inadequate health care;
• served rotten food;
• knowing made false and misleading statements to state officials;
• failed to complete criminal record checks on at least 100 guards;
• violated domestic and international laws on due process and humane treatment;

And this is the company that the Sensible Sentencing Trust has been accused of taking money from. I don’t know about you, but having a private prison company fund victims rights groups to manipulate an angry electorate into voting for harsher sentences so that the private prison company can more people in more prisons for longer an abomination of the entire justice system.

The Lynch mob may have won, and we may have a homophobic drunk MP trying to change our bill of rights to allow this, but rational NZers can’t let this go on. We’ve got an election in 2 and a half years.