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Prison-Industrial Complex Morphs Into Treatment-Industrial Complex

Prison-Industrial Complex Morphs Into Treatment-Industrial Complex

Nancy Reagan’s recent death was a reminder of the shallow moralizing of the Just Say No anti-drug campaign she once championed.

Thankfully, attitudes have changed. We’re more attuned to the fact that untreated mental health issues are often a precursor to drug use. Nancy’s slogan to fight peer pressure won’t help much there.

Most people realize that the War on Drugs, begun under Nixon, has failed.

And there’s growing public awareness that we’ve let our jails and prisons become warehouses for people who need treatment — and who needed it long before they took a criminal turn.

Mandatory sentencing guidelines have been changed, and the days of presidential administrations following the whims of a drug czar are over.

Incarceration rates are dropping. To most, this is good news. But it’s not if your business model revolves around keeping people locked up.

The for-profit prison industry has kept one step ahead of the trend. They got wise quick, sensing the winds shifting away from mass incarceration and toward the need to address mental health issues within the nation’s prisons and jails.

For those familiar with the term “prison-industrial complex,” meet its offspring — the “treatment-industrial complex.”

A report released in February by Grassroots Leadership, a civil and human rights organization, rings some warning bells. The report, “Incorrect Care: A Prison Profiteer Turns Care into Confinement,” is part of a series of reports that has focused on reducing the nation’s dysfunctional criminal justice system.

This latest installment takes an in-depth look at the privatization efforts in Texas, Florida and South Carolina. In particular, it goes after the shifting business models of for-profit prison operators Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, as well as spinoff rehabilitation companies like Correct Care Solutions.

The charge is that just as prisons are often not about rehabilitation, these new for-profit treatment places are not about helping people regain their mental stability and, therefore, their release. The report also challenges the quality of care being offered, citing cases of violence and patient deaths.

One startling figure from the report: 50 percent of people in correctional facilities suffer from mental health and substance abuse disorders. This compares to estimated rates of only 1 percent to 3 percent within the U.S. population. Prisoners represent a huge market for mental health care. If the prison operator also has a side business in mental health care, a conflict of interest presents itself.

Under normal circumstances, a person can get out of prison after serving his sentence. In fact, 90 percent of people who are sentenced do just that. But inmates can be placed by a judge into a for-profit mental health program in a prison — say, under civil commitment laws now on the books in about 20 states — and be detained there past the end of the sentence. The operator has a clear incentive to keep a person there indefinitely, to increase the return on its investment.

The Grassroots Leadership report points out that these private operators offer cost savings to a state when the facility is full: Thus the cost per head goes down. Assigning inmates to these facilities can be very appealing to lawmakers trying to balance tight budgets. Potentially, it becomes even more alluring when a lobbyist with the industry is making a hefty donation to a re-election campaign.

A basic set of circumstances and decisions has set the stage in many states. Legislatures have cut public mental health budgets, resulting in understaffing and poor conditions in state-run facilities. Community-based mental health programs are also being shorted. That leads to more untreated people who act out and then find themselves in a criminal justice system.

By virtue of their mental state, many of these people are not in a position to self-advocate for better care. Locked up, they are easily forgotten. One question must continuously be asked by legislators, advocates and the taxpayers whose dollars are being spent: In a for-profit model — in which more inmates equals more revenue — what possible incentive does a rehabilitation company have to help people regain stability and rejoin society? If such an incentive doesn’t exist and outweigh the profit motive, it’s hard to see how private-sector rehab programs won’t make matters worse.

(Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star. Readers may write to her at: Kansas City Star, 1729 Grand Blvd., Kansas City, Mo. 64108-1413, or via e-mail at msanchez@kcstar.com.)

(c) 2016, THE KANSAS CITY STAR. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC

Photo: U.S. President Barack Obama speaks to reporters during his visit to the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution outside Oklahoma City in this July 16, 2015 file photo.  REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/Files

What Do We Make Of Hillary Clinton’s AIDS Gaffe?

What Do We Make Of Hillary Clinton’s AIDS Gaffe?

Back in 2008, when she was first running for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton apologized for claiming during a speech in Washington, D.C. that she had come under sniper fire upon arriving at an airport in Bosnia during her days as first lady, a dozen years earlier. She blamed sleep deprivation for the embellished account, which videotapes had contradicted. Her opponent, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, said Clinton had exaggerated the dangers of her journey to bolster her foreign policy credibility. “So I made a mistake,” she admitted to reporters. “That happens.”

Clinton’s now the frontrunner in her second race for the nomination, against Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, her only remaining rival. Before voters reached the polls today for primaries in five states, she had already apologized twice for claiming at Nancy Reagan’s March 11 funeral that the former first lady and her late husband President Ronald Reagan had started a “national conversation” about the deadly AIDS epidemic during the 1980s.

Her laudatory comments flew in the face of harsh realities from that era and drew fierce blowback from LBGT activists and varied pundits. “I’m literally shaking as I try to write this,” advice columnist and activist Dan Savage wrote in response to Clinton. “There are no words for the pain Clinton’s remarks have dredged up.”

By the time Ronald Reagan addressed AIDS publicly and made moves to combat it, tens of thousands of people were dead.

For his part, Sanders said flatly he didn’t know what Clinton was talking about. “In fact, that was a very tragic moment in modern American history,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper. “There were many, many people dying of AIDS, and in fact, there was demand all over the country for President Reagan to start talking about this terrible tragedy. And yet he refused to talk about it while the AIDS epidemic was sweeping this country. So, I’m not quite sure where Secretary Clinton got her information.”

Within hours of her mystifying gaffe — one particularly odd for a dedicated policy wonk like the former Secretary of State and New York senator — Clinton issued her first mea culpa. “While the Reagans were strong advocates for stem cell research and a finding cure for Alzheimer’s disease, I misspoke about their record on HIV and AIDS. For that, I am sorry,”

Her second prepared apologia was a far more expansive retraction in which she acknowledged making a mistake, “plain and simple.” She noted: “To be clear, the Reagans did not start a national conversation about HIV and AIDS. That distinction belongs to generations of brave lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people, along with straight allies, who started not just a conversation but a movement that continues to this day.”

Clinton cited groups like ACT UP, Gay men’s Health Crisis and others “who organized and marched, held die-ins on the steps of city halls and “vigils in the streets.”

She also mentioned early legislative efforts to secure AIDS funding by now retired Democratic congressman Henry Waxman of California, a long unsung hero of the crisis who had represented parts of Los Angeles, including West Hollywood, where an outbreak of a fatal disease among young gay men was first identified in 1981 by a medical investigator for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. He passed his information on to one of Waxman’s staffers.

Waxman, then chairman of the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment, called the first hearing on the “gay plague” and the need for a federal response in April 1982, despite huge budget cuts imposed on health spending by the Reagan administration, and continued to hold others during the worst of the Los Angeles epidemic. He did so at time when Republican animosity against gays was so extreme that members of Congress proposed creating registries of gay men and getting them quarantined on a South Pacific island.

Some of Waxman’s colleagues read explicit descriptions of gay sex into the Congressional Record. Another, Republican Representative Dan Burton of Indiana, brought his own scissors to the House barber for fear of catching AIDS. But, Waxman found allies in the Reagan administration, among them the president’s surgeon general, C. Everett Koop.

Waxman also came up with creative ways to advance legislation, like naming a bill after a 13-year-old hemophiliac who had contracted the virus, Ryan White, and thereby securing the critical vote of White’s home-state senator for the Ryan White Care Act of 1990. It has since funded health and support services for hundreds of thousands of uninsured people living with HIV.

Clinton and her team must have had some contact with Waxman and knowledge of his success in fighting the disease, now a global pandemic. What happened in her first take on the Reagan response to AIDS?

“She’s clueless,” opined a Sanders supporter on Facebook. “You would think she would know. Or if not, her speech writer should have checked. And it’s not even April Fool’s Day yet.”

Clinton’s supporters put a gentler spin on her attributing “quiet advocacy” to Nancy Reagan during the early AIDS crisis. She was, after all, eulogizing a fellow first lady to Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC.

“I’m Gay, Hillary Clinton misspoke while being nice to a dead woman,” wrote Spandan Chakrabarti last Friday. “Get it over it.”

While Chakrabarti noted that while Hillary Clinton was “wrong” to give credit to Nancy Reagan for being an advocate for HIV/AIDS causes, he claimed she was “technically accurate” because “Nancy Reagan had some influence on this issue within the Reagan White House. “What does seem to be true is that when the Reagan administration eventually did decide to respond to the AIDS crisis, Nancy Reagan was among the influential administration figures pushing for that decision.” Could be.

Photo: U.S President Ronald Reagan and first lady Nancy Reagan return to the White House after spending a weekend at Camp David in this February 15, 1982 file photo. REUTERS/Mal Langsdon/Files

Savvy White House Wives and Tales They Could Tell

Savvy White House Wives and Tales They Could Tell

First lady Nancy Reagan will be laid to rest Friday in California, leading to a hard look at White House walls, with tales they tell. For we don’t know the better half of it.

Ronald Reagan was uxorious, but not alone in being excessively fond of his wife. By my count, seven presidents adored their wives and made a show of it. If you add Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, grief-stricken widowers, a trend becomes visible.

Among these pairs are inseparable Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter, ardent Woodrow and Edith Wilson, shrewd Dolley and James Madison, rugged George W. and sweet-as-pie Laura Bush, and John and Abigail Adams, avid pen pals.

Not on my list: the Eisenhowers with Mamie in her pink bedroom while Ike played golf. The Obamas, not so much. The Nixons? Never.

Those who knew the California couple well say the genial actor’s rise never would have happened without Mrs. Reagan’s vigilant counsel. They were each other’s everything. Yet Mrs. Reagan, like other first ladies, gets classified by a crusade or a female characteristic — a fashion maven with a “gaze.” Her husband gets lionized by history; she gets clawed.

Many first ladies go to their graves with a bad rap. A lover of elegance, Mary Lincoln suffered the same as Mrs. Reagan — only worse — because she was also classified as crazy. Her husband’s law partner in Springfield, Illinois, started the smear, just as President Reagan’s aides resented Nancy’s vicarious power.

President Abraham Lincoln was made of rough prairie stuff at 30. Springfield belle Mary Todd, sassy yet refined, was schooled in politics from her family. She knew French and poetry. Mary was the catch in their match. The striving Lincoln was smitten. At the White House years later, Lincoln told someone he had never fallen out of love. The Lincolns were close, whatever “Lincolnistas” say.

Mary’s hardheaded advice helped “Mr. Lincoln” ascend in Springfield circles. As first lady, her sparkling parties showed the nation still open for business as the Civil War raged.

Lucky for Lincoln, Mary didn’t marry a rival suitor — Stephen Douglas, the great debater who defeated Lincoln in a Senate race. If she had, Douglas might have become president. And I mean that Lincoln would not have reached the ultimate prize without his wife.

President Carter conducted Cabinet and Oval meetings with Rosalynn in the room. He openly relied on her as a player, long before the Clintons came to town. Perhaps as a loner with few close friends — like Reagan — Carter invested in making his marriage a full partnership. Theirs was extraordinary.

Woodrow Wilson’s first wife Ellen died during his presidency. Not long after, he laid eyes on Edith, a glamorous widow who played golf. His love letters were as eloquent and passionate as his speeches saying the world must be made safe for democracy. Their wedding was in 1915, before America entered World War I. She stepped in when he had a stroke.

Dolley Madison was a political rock star compared to the shy, short, older James. She compensated by making the band play “Hail to the Chief” for him. She gave Wednesday night soirees. She linked his name with Thomas Jefferson. Best of all, she embellished her story of “saving” a George Washington portrait during the British burning of Washington in 1814 — President Madison’s spectacular humiliation.

President Bush, the 43rd, also faced a burning attack near the White House. Serene Laura Bush radiated strength. In a Southern lady mold, she veered far from policy, but founded the National Book Festival.

The Adamses poured out every particle on paper while John governed and Abigail minded the farm. They were first to live in the White House. Her influence waned when she wrote, “Remember the ladies,” in founding the new nation. John rebuffed her.

The Reagans had eyes — and ears — for each other. When I interviewed their daughter Patti Davis recently, she said simply: “My mother was the apple of my father’s eye.”

First ladies get lost in a maze of grace, gardens or fashion. More to the point is their political savvy in campaigning and helping their husbands shape their legacies. The Clintons and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were superb doubles players in public, if not in private.

Fancy how many presidents have unusually close marriages — indispensable to their success.

To find out more about Jamie Stiehm and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit Creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: Former U.S. first lady Nancy Reagan, who spearheaded the ‘Just Say No’ anti-drug campaign during her husband’s administration, testifies before a House Government Reform subcommittee in Washington in this March 9, 1995 file photo. REUTERS/Stringer/Files

Hillary Clinton To Attend Nancy Reagan Funeral Services

Hillary Clinton To Attend Nancy Reagan Funeral Services

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton will depart from the campaign trail on Friday to attend the funeral services of former First Lady Nancy Reagan.

The campaign on Tuesday reported that Clinton, former first lady under President Bill Clinton and secretary of state under President Barack Obama, would attend the planned services in California for Reagan, who died on Monday of congestive heart failure.

(Reporting by Alana Wise)

Photo: Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Hillary Clinton sings the U.S. National Anthem at the start of the Democratic U.S. presidential candidates’ debate in Flint, Michigan, March 6, 2016. REUTERS/Carlos Barria