Ohio selling state prison to private company for $72 million

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/44359808/ns/us_news-security/

COLUMBUS, Ohio — An 11-year-old lock-up along the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio has become the first state prison in the nation to be sold to a private company.

Lake Erie Correctional Institution in northeastern Ohio's Ashtabula County is the only one of five state prisons up for sale that will be sold, state officials said Thursday. It's going to Corrections Corporation of America for $72.7 million.

The four other prisons for sale didn't generate advantageous offers.

A liberal policy group that previously sued over Kasich's privatization of Ohio's economic development functions has filed a similar lawsuit challenging the privatization of state prisons.

The lawsuit alleges selling state-owned prisons to private contractors is unconstitutional. It seeks to prevent the state from proceeding with the sales or to block layoffs. It also wants workers at privatized prisons declared public employees.

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Where's my share of the profits from the sale? I paid into Ohio income, sales, and property taxes for about 27 years.

When a citizen is accused of a crime and stands trial, and a jury of his peers finds him "guilty," then the state and only the state can strip him of his constitutional rights by incarcerating him.

When he goes into a "private prison," then it is a "private concern" that incarcerates him. One person shouldn't be getting rich off another person's prison term.

Besides, the opportunities for corruption are too numerous...

We've sold all our public water systems to private companies. Now the prisons, what next?

privatised.

We sold out our weather preparedness to corporations already. We sold out our country's soul to the same corporations to help ramp up the war song that seems to surround us over and over and over again.

Maybe we can privatize the whole criminal justice system. That way we can avoid those pesky cases where judges are being found to take bribes for producing convicts.

On a daily basis to house inmates there?

... something is very badly fucked up.

profitable?

This is WRONG! SO damn wrong.