Evidence of pot smoking weeks earlier enough for DUI charge, Arizona prosecutor says

[woo me with science]

3. "States with highest (private prison) occupancy requirements include Arizona..."

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

This Is How Private Prison Companies Make Millions Even When Crime Rates Fall

—By Andy Kroll
| Thu Sep. 19, 2013 9:43 AM PDT MotherJones

We are living in boom times for the private prison industry. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the nation's largest owner of private prisons, has seen its revenue climb by more than 500 percent in the last two decades. And CCA wants to get much, much bigger: Last year, the company made an offer to 48 governors to buy and operate their state-funded prisons. But what made CCA's pitch to those governors so audacious and shocking was that it included a so-called occupancy requirement, a clause demanding the state keep those newly privatized prisons at least 90 percent full at all times, regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.

Occupancy requirements, as it turns out, are common practice within the private prison industry. A new report by In the Public Interest, an anti-privatization group, reviewed 62 contracts for private prisons operating around the country at the local and state level. In the Public Interest found that 41 of those contracts included occupancy requirements mandating that local or state government keep those facilities between 80 and 100 percent full. In other words, whether crime is rising or falling, the state must keep those beds full. (The report was funded by grants from the Open Society Institute and Public Welfare, according to a spokesman.)

All the big private prison companies—CCA, GEO Group, and the Management and Training Corporation—try to include occupancy requirements in their contracts, according to the report. States with the highest occupancy requirements include Arizona (three prison contracts with 100 percent occupancy guarantees), Oklahoma (three contracts with 98 percent occupancy guarantees), and Virginia (one contract with a 95 percent occupancy guarantee). At the same time, private prison companies have supported and helped write "three-strike" and "truth-in-sentencing" laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.

....

http://tucsoncitizen.com/cell-out-arizona/2013/10/03/az-dept-of-corrections-wants-1500-more-private-prison-beds/

AZ Dept. of Corrections Wants 1,500 MORE Private Prison Beds
by cell-out-arizona on Oct. 03, 2013, under ADC statistics, Arizona, Arizona Department of Corrections, Corrections Corporation of America, Prison Construction, private prison, Privatization, sentencing reform

In its initial FY15 budget request to the Governor, the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) asked for legislative approval to contract out another 1,500 medium-security prison beds to a private, for-profit corporation.

This is in addition to the 2,000 private prison beds that are just beginning to come online. That contract was awarded to Corrections Corporation of America for its Red Rock Facility...

http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2012/02/15/20120215arizona-private-prisons-slammed-by-report.html?nclick_check=1

Arizona private prisons slammed by report
Group: Facilities hard to oversee, aren't cost-effective

74 comments by Bob Ortega - Feb. 15, 2012 10:10 PM
The Republic | azcentral.com

Arizona's private prisons are not cost-effective for taxpayers and are more difficult to monitor than state prisons, according to a new report by a prison watchdog group that is calling for a moratorium on any new private prisons in the state.
....
Based on public-information requests and other data, the report by the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that works on criminal-justice reform, concluded that Arizona paid $10 million more for private prison beds between 2008 and 2010 than it would have for equivalent state beds.

Arizona's pending plan to contract for another 2,000 private-prison beds would cost taxpayers at least $38.7 million a year, at least $6 million a year more than incarcerating those inmates in state prisons. Plans to add 500 more maximum-security beds in state prisons would add almost $10 million a year to the bill. The report questioned whether those beds are needed, since the state's prison population has declined over the past two years by more than 900 inmates, to 39,854 as of Wednesday.

In the past three years, private prisons in Arizona have experienced at least 28 riots and more than 200 other "disturbances" involving as many as 50 prisoners. Many of these incidents had not previously been reported to the public.

State law doesn't require the six private prisons that hold federal detainees and prisoners from other states to inform state or local authorities in the event of an escape, a riot or other disturbance, or a death in custody. The American Friends Service Committee called for requiring all private prisons to disclose the same information as state prisons.