Profits up for prison contractor, not state (Florida)

[Judi Lynn]

Home » AP Florida News

Published Tuesday, April 5, 2005

Profits up for prison contractor, not state

The Associated Press
TALLAHASSEE, Fla.
Profits went up for a prison contractor when the state Department of Corrections raised the monthly spending limit for state inmates, but the state didn't get any more money out of it.

"Obviously, it looked like a pretty sweetheart deal to me," state Rep. Susan Bucher, D-Royal Palm Beach. She is a member of the Joint Legislative Auditing Committee, which is looking into the no-bid contract awarded to Keefe Commissary Services following a review by the state auditor general.

Keefe pays 82 cents per inmate per day for the contract to run the 240 prison commissaries. Four months after the three-year contract was signed in 2003, the corrections staff raised the inmate's spending limit from $65 to $90 a week.

The Keefe contract has been amended three times in ways that "may increase DOC costs related to canteen operations" without a cost analysis or "other written justification," the auditor general report found.
(snip/...)

http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050405/APN/504050562

[Voltaire99]

1. Misery is a growth industry...

...behind the bars in Jesusland.

These Bastilles, stuffed with drug-war victims and dregs whom capitalism can't put in Wal-Mart uniforms, cast their shadows at the intersection of Puritanism and market economics. It's the commodification of punishment. To call it shameful is barely to get started.

And what have the guardians of the people to say about this matter, including Royal Palm Beach's own Susan Bucher, sporting the big D behind her name? Pffft! Merely mad the state isn't getting its cut.

Suffering? Exploitation? Rape? Slave labor? A racist justice system?

Screw that! The government just wants a bigger piece of the action!