I don't really know what else we're supposed to say about the legislative session. Every week is just gonna be a new load of very bad ideas cruising right on through. Today, the latest scheme for de-funding public education passed out of committee without objection.
Elected school board members also are starting to speak out against ESAs. On Thursday, just hours after the pro-ESA rally in Baton Rouge, the Livingston Parish school board discussed the bills at a special meeting.
One board member warned that a reduction in state funding could force the district to close schools and lay off teachers. Superintendent Joe Murphy said that an ESA program open to all families could guzzle up tax dollars, leaving less money for the “minimum foundation program,” or MFP, the state’s public school funding formula.
“I think this absolutely has the potential to devastate our schools from an MFP standpoint,” Murphy told the board. After all, money for the ESA program “has got to come from somewhere.”
The money coming out of the public schools' MFP will be at least half a billion dollars a year, in fact. But that's far from the only way in which our "fiscally conservative" legislature has determined to bankrupt the state this year. Keeping in mind the already much talked about half billion dollar "fiscal cliff" that approaches in 2025, lawmakers spent the special session on "crime" adding tens (growing perhaps to hundreds) of millions of dollars to the budget for throwing people in prison and keeping them there. And the current session may expand that further. Bills are advancing that would jail people for panhandling on the streets or perhaps attending professional conferences. Maybe those are the same thing. Or at least one leads to the other. I haven't quite worked it out.
Anyway, the legislature has the big checkbook out. But we know how much these fiscal hawks like to talk about prudent budgeting. So they must have some pretty great expectations of future revenues. Wonder where that's going to come from. One things for sure, it won't come from the oil companies.
House Bill 259, sponsored by Rep. Beau Beaullieu, R-New Iberia, faced virtually no pushback on the House floor, passing the chamber 86-13. It now heads to the state Senate.
With a vote of 96-6, the House also overwhelmingly passed a second Beaullieu bill, House Bill 418, which would halve the tax currently levied on oil and gas produced by wells that have been orphaned and inactive.
The Louisiana Budget Project.. or whatever the hell they call themselves now.. these NGOs "re-brand" themselves all the time for no reason.. estimates the severance tax cut could end up costing the state $80 million year. Seems bad.
The state's prison population is now under 33,000 for the first time
since 1998. The probation and parole population is also at its lowest
level in eight years, said Jimmy LeBlanc, secretary of the Department of
Public Safety and Corrections, Thursday (June 28). As of the end of
March, the state's prison population has dropped 7.8 percent since the
end of 2016.
Louisiana has also dropped below Oklahoma as the state with the
highest incarceration rate in the nation for the first time in years -- a
significant shift that was announced earlier this month.
"I made a promise that, by the end of my first term, Louisiana would
not have the highest incarceration rate in the nation," said Gov. John
Bel Edwards at a press conference. "We have fulfilled that promise to
Louisiana."
That is great news. And as the Governor is happy to point out, it is one of a few areas where the people who elected him cannot judge his first term a complete failure. (The other non-failure being his easy decision to accept the Medicaid expansion. The positive impact of that is being steadily undermined at the federal level, of course, but that's hardly John Bel's fault.)
This is the Louisiana version of Obamacare repeal. Certain Republicans who either depend heavily on law enforcement support and/or happen to be running for Governor are going to agitate against last year's very mild criminal justice reforms for as long as they can. Ideally, it will be a long time so that 1) the reforms can remain in place and 2) the demagogues can keep making hay out of that fact.
Also the reforms save the state money. And we do hear a lot about how Louisiana has a "spending problem." So frustrating the repeal effort is also a good way to keep the Fiscal Hawks who tend to be all for it from harming their own cause. It's a real #BothSides compromise.
Mack is the chairman of the House Committee on the Administration of
Criminal Justice, which has to approve the bills, and has influence over
the fate of the legislation because of his position.
You'd think a guy in Mack's position would have gotten a little more hands-on with this high profile legislation a lot earlier in the process. But no.
The criminal justice package that
has been moving its way through the Legislature is a compromise struck
by Gov. John Bel Edwards and and Louisiana's district attorneys after
weeks of negotiations. Mack said he has not talked to the governor or
district attorneys about his amendments yet.
"He hasn't really talked to anybody about his changes, which is the
frustrating part," said Rep. Joseph Marino, of Gretna, who is carrying
the three Senate bills in the House. Marino, a criminal defense lawyer,
has been involved in many of the negotiations between the governor and
the district attorneys. "The reason we've been having all the meetings
to build consensus is to avoid people doing just this type of thing."
Mack wants to write out the retroactivity stipulations of the bills meaning non-violent and some first time violent offenders currently in prison will no longer have the possibility of seeing their sentences shortened. In addition to the plain cruelty there, Mack is jeopardizing hundreds of millions of dollars in budgetary savings. Walt Leger's proposal to reinvest those savings into various crime prevention, re-entry programs, and victims' services just passed this afternoon. Why? Well, he has tried to run for DA in his district before. Maybe that's where he's headed next. But that isn't for a while. Maybe he just likes the attention.
Although Crain’s update did not reveal the name of the other reporter, he is believed to be Shane Bauer.
In 2009, Bauer was one of three Americans hikers who were detained by Iran, which alleged that the three were spies. Bauer’s 26-month long detention in Iranian prison
set off an international diplomatic firestorm and became the subject of
intense media coverage. Although he was convicted of espionage and
sentenced to eight years in prison, he was released after the Sultan of
Oman arranged a half a million dollar payment, whisking him out of Iran
in a private jet.
Back in May, Gambit ran a cover story on Louisiana's plan to privatize much of its prison management.
Entry-level officers start at about $25,000 a year, or $11 an hour
based on an 86-hour biweekly pay schedule. The average salary is about
$38,000, according to Wilson, but in an interview with Gambit, Louisiana Department of Safety and Corrections (DPSC) Secretary James LeBlanc placed the figure at $43,000.
As Gov. Bobby Jindal's administration sees it, that's too much. With
the state facing a deficit of more than $200 million this year (and much
more next fiscal year), Jindal hopes privatization will reduce expenses
at AVC by about $8 million per year, savings that LeBlanc says he hopes
can be reinvested into rehabilitative programs. He says AVC is a
perfect candidate for the plan because it's so similar to privately run
Winn and Allen.
At Angola it seems this program has gone, perhaps, a step further.
NEW ROADS — A state judge granted a reprieve Tuesday to a wolf dog hybrid he ordered destroyed for aggressive behavior, instead “sentencing” the animal to serve a life term as a guard dog in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola.
According to this blurb highlighted by Gambit, it looks like Governor Jindal has failed to push a prison privatization initiative through the legislature for the second year in a row. Last week's Gambit cover story on this is well worth your time. It notes, among other problems, the perverse incentives inherent in the private prison business model.
Louisiana already has the highest rate of incarceration in the country,
one that state officials claim they are trying to reduce. Current state
contracts with GEO and CCA, however, guarantee minimum occupancy rates
of 95 percent. During the last push for privatization in 2011, the state
released a request for information — seeking statements of
qualifications from prospective operators — based on a guaranteed 96
percent occupancy rate.
The nation's largest private prison company made an enticing offer to 48 states that went something like this: We will buy your prison now if you agree to keep it mostly full and promise to pay us for running it over the next two decades. Despite a need for cash, several states immediately slammed the door on the offer, a sign that privatizing prisons might not be as popular as it once was.
I'm not so sure we can draw the conclusion that the privatization movement is dying out simply because it's been slightly harder to do than proponents first thought it would be. That AP article notes that Bobby Jindal's plan to sell off three Louisiana prisons under terms similar to those described above failed last year. But Jindal is still the Governor having been reelected by a huge margin and selling prisons is right back on his legislative agenda for this year.
Surprising immigration news from the New York Times. The US recession is so bad now that it's actually bucking the migration trend we're used to hearing Republican Presidential candidates tell us needs to be combated with electrified fences and "aviation assets" and really big magnets or something like that anyway.
Douglas S. Massey, co-director of the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton, an extensive, long-term survey centered in Mexican emigration hubs, said his research shows that interest in heading to the United States for the first time has fallen to its lowest level since at least the 1950s. “No one wants to hear it, but the flow has already stopped,” Mr. Massey said, referring to illegal traffic. “For the first time in 60 years, the net traffic has gone to zero and is probably a little bit negative.”
I happened upon this article because I read Mark Moseley's column where he references his own hit-or-miss "Superman series" of immigration policy satire. Personally, I've enjoyed the Superman columns although I can understand why some may feel that they were presented by a "dude who needs to learn to write for the internet".
Last Wednesday night Stephen Colbert, another satirist of some note, addressed the labor shortage caused by Alabama's new tough immigration law and its effect on this year's tomato crop. (Tomatoes, I should remind you, are a key ingredient in Beefy Mac.)
What's important to note here is Colbert's "modest proposal" about replacing poorly treated and underpaid migrant workers with prisoners is more than just a joke. Captive labor is a very old and well-established means of doing business in Alabama and the whole of the American south for that matter. I highly recommend Douglas Blackmon's Slavery by Another Name which describes the system of labor that neatly replaced slavery in the south between Reconstruction and just the time of the Second World War.
In Alabama alone, hundreds of thousands of pages of public documents attest to the arrests, subsequent sale, and delivery of thousands of African Americans into mines, lumber camps, quarries, farms, and factories. More than thirty thousand pages related to debt slavery cases sit in the files of the Department of Justice at the National Archives. Altogether, millions of mostly obscure entries in the public record offer details of a forced labor system of monotonous enormity.
Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers.
One of the worst lies conservative lawmakers tell when they propose "tough-on-immigration" legislation like Alabama's is that they're interested in protecting American jobs and living standards. Instead, they've been pushing in a very different direction. Remember ALEC? The conservative model legislation mill whose Summer meetings in New Orleans occasioned an embarrassingly stupid protest march? Prisons and prison labor have been at the front of their agenda for quite some time.
Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.
Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin's truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.
That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peak—and at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website. The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials—yet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program.
It's interesting to me that both Colbert and Moseley have taken a recent shine to fraudulent Republican Presidential candidate Buddy Roemer. Phony as ever, Roemer is currently attempting to glom his campaign onto whatever momentum the Occupy Wall Street Protests could potentially generate. Buddy could probably get himself elected President of Twitter right now. But when one's memory extends to whatever was contained in the most recent 140 character outburst, one tends to forget that during the 1990s push to expand prison labor, Buddy was at the head of the movement. Here's an ad from Buddy's 1987 campaign for Governor where he promises to "put the prisoners to work"
If the numbers in that Times article are correct and the flood of cheap illegal migrant labor into the US market has slowed to a negative creep, then the confused rhetoric Republican Presidential candidates have been blurting about the need to fence it out is even more absurd than first thought. Maybe it's time to pay closer attention to their plans to fence it in.