February 1, 2010

Schwarzenegger: Outsource CA Prisons to Mexico

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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Last week, California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested that the state could save $1 billion by building prisons in Mexico to house California’s undocumented prisoners. Said the governor during the press conference:

We pay them to build the prisons down in Mexico and then we have those undocumented immigrants be down there in a prison. … And all this, it would be half the cost to build the prisons and half the cost to run the prisons.

If that idea sounds half baked, it’s because it probably was. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the idea caught his prisons czar offguard, and a spokesman said he hadn’t a clue where the governor got the billion-dollar savings figure.

No doubt California (and the rest of the US, for that matter) could use some creative thinking about our astronomically expensive and inefficient prison system, but it’d be much more effective to consider prison reform ideas that are actually proven to work. For example: In the current issue of Mother Jones, Beth Schwartzapfel writes about a program that hooks prisoners up with green jobs—and saves taxpayers money at the same time. Through the Sustainable Prisons Project, inmates at four prisons in Washington state compost cafeteria waste, sort recycling, work on organic vegetable gardens, keep bees, and help local scientists with environmental research. (Who has time to watch moss grow? Well, prisoners.) Beats the heck out of making license plates, and all their work is paying off:

The Department of Corrections has provided Evergreen with a $300,000 grant to administer and run the newly christened Sustainable Prisons Project. It’s led to savings that Pacholke is happy to rattle off: By conserving water, Cedar Creek avoided a previously planned $1.4 million expansion of its wastewater treatment facility; by recycling and composting, another facility sent two-thirds less waste to landfills this year—garbage can cost upwards of $100 per ton to haul.

Read Mother Jones‘ in-depth coverage of America’s broken (and broke) prison system here.

 

 

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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