California Governor Brown's Budget Cuts Private Prison Spending

This year's California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget assumes $410 million paid to for profit private prisons for housing California inmates. Next year the expenditure would drop to $224 million.

Out-of-state private prison costs, the most expensive line item in the CDCR contracted facilities budget, would go from $272 million in the current year to $148 million in 2011-12.

Click here to see details of the CDCR budget.

Read the complete article Here

California OIG finds multiple Violations at out of state CCA Prisons

California Office of the Inspector General recently inspected 5 out-of-state prisons that house California Prisoners.  These prisons are being run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) which is a for-profit corporation based out of Tennessee.

Denial Of Inmates Rights or Privileges
    These include retaining inmates on administrative segregation, overriding inmate classification scores, delaying inmate property and the list goes on....

Safety and Security Weaknesses
    Allowing inmates to wear clothing similar to custody personnel, poor screening for new CCA employees, unsupervised inmates in restricted areas, significant incidents not investigated and improper evidence handling and opening under an inner fence-line security gate just to name a few.

Unenforced Rules, Policies, Practices or Contract Provisions
    CDCR did not exercise adequate oversight of the inmate welfare fund, competitively bid state-to-state transportation services, approve CCA's use-of-force policy and timely review use-of-force incidents.

Other note-able issues
    Prescriptions being wasted and operating weaknesses on central control.

Sounds to me that CDCR is just handing out California prisoners and trying to forget about them.  According to California Code of Regulations out-of-state prisons may only house level 1 through level 3.  All the prisons that were inspected housed some level 4 inmates.  CDCR sent out a memorandum on March 17th, 2010 stating that "a level 4 inmates with low points (52-59) to be classified as a level 3 override and retain out of state".  The majority of these CCA prisons are one designed for level 1 through level 3 prisoners.

With CDCR's blatant disregard for the safety of prisoners, staff and citizens I do hope these issues brought out by the OIG are corrected quickly.

Link to letter from California Office of Inspector General to Matthew Cate Secretary of California Department of Corrections and Rehablitiation

This Is The Company That's Desperate To Keep Marijuana Illegal In California

Joe Weisenthal

The latest polls don't look good. After looking like it might pass earlier in the election cycle, California's historic Prop 19 -- which would legalize Marijuana -- is now trailing.

But it's not over yet, and there are important business implications.

We've already told you some of the ways to make money from the coming legalization of pot (Tobacco names like RJ Reynolds would probably capitalize well).

But what if the measure goes down?

Check out Corrections Corp of America -- the biggest owner of private prisons.

As Mike Riggs at The Daily Caller notes, CCA has given money to Democratic candidate Dianne Feinstein, who inexplicably and appallingly opposes Prop 19. Because the legalization of weed result in a lot fewer arrests (not just for pot, but also for real crimes that deserve incarceration), this company has a lot to lose.

Last year, hedge funder Bill Ackman presented a bull case for this company, arguing that a huge boom in this area was imminent..

Click here to see the presentation >

Read more: Business Insider