It’s popular to say that there’s “no place to hide” in the current economic crisis. There is one industry, however, that is riding high: the private prisons. CorpWatch reports that “Detaining immigrants has become a profitable business, and the niche industry is showing no signs of slowing down."

The company GEO Group Inc., for example, saw their annual income climb by $38 million in 2008, with $20 million of reportedly quarterly earnings in February of 2009. The company, which has contracts with federal immigration authorities to lock up undocumented immigrants and other federal inmates, has also been the target of various lawsuits and investigations. Inmates blame GEO Group for civil rights violations, inadequate and sometimes rotten food, overall neglect, and even death.

“The more we looked into the situation the more we realized it was a systemic problem,” Deborah Golden, an attorney with the DC Prisoners Project told CorpWatch. “I suspect that it’s a pattern all over. When you try to run prisons as money makers what you do is cut back on the most expensive thing you can, which is medication and medical care.”

Image by  Nonie , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: CorpWatch 

In the wake of International Women’s Day comes a study suggesting that access to reproductive healthcare for incarcerated American women not only varies widely but also often replicates the barriers to healthcare that they face in their home communities.  Michelle Chen cites for RaceWire the current issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health, which surveyed correctional health providers across the country.  The study found that access to reproductive health differs from state to state and that state politics plays a major role in the variation:

“...providers from states with a Republican-dominated legislature or with a Medicaid policy that severely restricted coverage for abortion were more likely to indicate that availability of abortion services was limited than were those whose state had a predominantly Democratic legislature or a Medicaid program that covered all or most medically necessary abortions.”

Furthermore, the study points out that women in prison “disproportionately represent marginalized sectors of our society; they are predominantly women of color, poor, unemployed and undereducated and thus may not have adequate access to health care in general, and reproductive health services in particular...their involvement with the correctional health system may represent one of their few opportunities to access medical care.” 

Thus, by denying standardized, comprehensive reproductive healthcare to prisoners, a system that has already barred them from decent medical care fails them once again. 

The study invokes both the Eighth Amendment, which guarantees all prisoners the right to healthcare, and the Fourteenth, which prohibits states from depriving a person privacy without due process of the law, thus protecting a woman’s right to choose abortion even under incarceration.  It concludes that to uphold these rights the prison system must directly address its healthcare policies through further study and interventions.   

Sources: RaceWire, Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health 

  Image by Still Burning, licensed under Creative Commons

Utne Reader librarian Danielle Maestretti shares the highlights (and occasional lowlights) of what’s landing in our library each week in 'Shelf Life.'

Utne’s library is abuzz with a steady flow of 1,300 magazines, newsletters, journals, weeklies, zines, and other lively dispatches from the cultural front that are rarely found at big-box bookstores, or newsstands.

Featured in this week's episode:

- The "Jobless in America" feature in the February 23 issue of The Nation

- Dollars &Sense on "The New Political Economy of Immigration"

- The Texas Observer on Janet Napolitano and the border fence

- "Entertaining in the Recession" from Houston's My Table (not available online)

-Alpacas. That's right, Alpacas. From Radish

Sources: The Nation, Dollars & Sense, The Texas Observer, My Table, Radish