You'd think that would be a nonsensical question, that basic constitutional guarantees apply whether the other party is the government or a corporation serving in lieu of. But our business-boosting Supreme Court has already ruled that such businesses cannot themselves be sued as the government can; now they will be deciding if their employees can be, either.
Remember that, next time someone talks about how much money we'd save if only we'd outsource some government function into private hands. Part of the (hypothetical, and often not demonstrated) savings comes from not having to follow the Constitution the way the government has to.
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Supreme Court To Decide Whether Corporate Prison Employees Are Immune To The Constitution
Richard Lee Pollard was a federal inmate when he slipped, fell and broke both his elbows. Prison officials then allegedly forced him into a jumpsuit and wrist restraints, despite the fact that these r…
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Shouldn’t the state or nation be liable? The corporations didn’t sentence them to incarceration, the courts did.
I would think so, if the state/feds have entrusted their incarceration to a private body.
The SCOTUS is likely to kick this out because there are better remedies in the State courts.
That said, privitized prisons are ridiculous on their face. Mea Culpa: I work for my state’s Department of Corrections, so I can be seen as biased, but I also have some on the ground knowledge. My state used to send inmates to private prisons in other states to ease over crowding. The volume of lawsuits, and the eggregious nature of the violations perpetrated by the private prisons were staggering. The State’s fiscal loss due to the lawsuits FAR exceeded any cost avoidance achieved by outsourcing. This was the primary impetus to a building program that allowed us to bring all of our prisoners back into State run institutions.
It seems to me that there are already enough issues with safety and prisoner treatment in governmental penal institutions. Farming it out to private firms whose interest is primarily in making a buck seems like it’s guaranteed to only make matters worse — except for the legislators and executives whose campaign coffers benefit from those private firms’ donations.
I hope things go as Artillery_MKV surmises. I’m not one to coddle prisoners, but brutality is not supposed to be part of the sentence, even though we know it pervades the system (I seem to be channelling a MP peasant–by the violence inherent in the system…), and if you’re not Christian, you can, at least in CA prisons, fare even worse (and that’s not just the inmates).
I think prisoners should have decent food and health care–probably better than they’d be able to afford outside, but I’d hope, not better than folks with insurance can get. Richard Ramirez, aka The Nightstalker, from CA in the mid-80s, got a much better set of teeth than I could afford at the time, and yes, I rather resented that–and that was before trial!
They should have access to the religious or spiritual comforts of their preferred faith, and not just, as in CA, from the “official five”. Dying of cancer, alone, because your prison chaplain, if one exists for your faith (paid or volunteer), is not permitted to minister to you is Just Not Right–and this is a concatenation of the two issues. Harrassment of non-Christian staff, inmates, or volunteers by fundamentalist “Christians” is also wrong, but it happens often.
Agreed.
Prison ought not to be a pleasant experience, at least not in comparison to the outside (and, if we have a society worth a damn, then even with prison health care, etc., it wouldn’t be). Provision of basic needs, physical, mental, spiritual, should be what we, as the state, make sure they have while they serve out their sentence (whether the basis for our penal system is punishment, rehabilitation, or simply separation from the rest of society).
What happens to prisoners in our prisons isn’t (broadly speaking) their fault — it’s ours.