Privatized prison services in Michigan finally declared an utter failure after four years

Privatized prison services in Michigan finally declared an utter failure after four years of indisputable proof

http://www.eclectablog.com/2018/04/privatized-prison-services-in-michigan-finally-declared-an-utter-failure-after-four-years-of-indisputable-proof.html

And throughout it all we had food service employees having sex with inmates, rotten, rodent-chewed food being served to prison inmates, and drugs being smuggled into prisons by prison employees. Since 2014, I have written roughly 30 posts about the privatization of prison food services in Michigan and they all tell the same story:

Privatizing essential state services is a terrible, terrible idea.

Finally, after four long years of the obviousness of this concept staring us in the face, the state of Michigan is finally abandoning this failed experiment in handing over our prison kitchens and mess halls to private, for-profit corporations to get rich on. The experiment was supposed to prove that the state could save $16 million a year while improving services. What it really showed (which was not only predictable but actually PREDICTED) is that these for-profit corporations would cut corners and try to deliver services on the cheap so they could put more tax dollars in their pockets. And the people who paid the price for this failure are people with the least amount of political capital in the country: prisoners. Sadly, even “good” liberals often find it hard to feel sorry for prisoners. And when one prisoner sued after being served food unfit for consumption, the judge dismissed his complaint saying, “the food need not be tasty or aesthetically pleasing, so long as it suffices to allow the prisoner to maintain normal health.”