The root of the problem: all for-profit prison corporations are in the very business of generating the greatest possible profits, by any means necessary. Providing safe and humane conditions of confinement to the human beings in their custody is — at best — a distant secondary goal. The private prison industry has been a key player over the past two decades in driving the explosion of mass incarceration in the U.S. Families, communities and state and local government have suffered terribly from the mass incarceration binge; the only clear winner is the private prison industry and its stockholders, making billions in revenues.

GEO’s chairman and CEO claimed that it was backing out of the Mississippi contract because EMCF was “financially underperforming;” GEO said it had expected the contract to generate about $21.7 million in annual revenue. Evidently, even starving mentally ill prisoners — an ACLU medical expert documented case after case of inmates losing upwards of 10 and as many as 30 pounds after a few months in GEO custody — did not make the contract adequately profitable. The next for-profit corporation that gets the contract will have no more incentive than GEO to provide adequate security staffing, medical and mental health care, nutrition, or decently safe sanitary housing — if it can figure out a way to squeeze more profit out of the prisoners by cutting per-capita expenditures.

Private prisons are the problem, not the solution. Mississippi should throw out the prison profiteers for good, and take responsibility for providing decent treatment to the men, women and children it chooses to incarcerate.

Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant (R), in defending his decision to sign a bill that could shut down Mississippi’s only abortion clinic, told conservative radio host Tony Perkins on Tuesday that Democrats’ “one mission in life is to abortion children.”

“Even if you believe in abortion, the hypocrisy of the left that now tried to kill this bill, that says that I should have never signed it, the true hypocrisy is that their one mission in life is to abort children, is to kill children in the womb,” he said. “It doesn’t really matter, they don’t care if the mother’s life is in jeopardy, that if something goes wrong that a doctor can’t admit them to a local hospital, that he’s not even board certified.”

“We passed that bill and I think you’ll see other states follow, and when that happens, at least these fly-in abortionists are going to be regulated under the state laws of the Medical Procedures Act here in the state of Mississippi as they should be across the nation,” he said.

The bill in question, HB 1390, requires that all physicians who perform abortions in Mississippi have admitting privileges at the local hospital and be board certified in obstetrics and gynecology.

While all of the physicians at the one clinic in the state are currently board certified OB-GYNs, only one of them has admitting privileges at a local hospital. The other two physicians can’t get privileges because they live out of state, and the owner of the clinic has said it can’t operate with only one doctor on staff.

Following Bryant’s comments on the bill, Perkins took a dig at the Democrats who opposed it.

“Well, the driving factor is profit for many of them,” he said.

ITworld -- April 6, 2012

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About 100 community college students, teachers and administrators gathered at the state Capitol on Tuesday to ask Mississippi legislators for more money to meet the needs of a student population that has grown as the economy has struggled.