Privatized subcontracted Prisoner Mental Health and Medical Care
What Marbut didn't tell NPR listeners is that Subcontracted Prisoner Mental Health and Medical Care along with for-profit homeless containment is the largest and fastest-growing private sector in the 'treatment industrial complex' that has emerged in the US within the last few years --- a sector that Marbut Consulting heartily supports.
Research shows that 25-50% of the homeless population have a history of incarceration. Sub-groups within the homeless population--namely individuals with mental health issues, veterans, and youth have even more pervasive incarceration histories (http://www.nhchc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/infocus_incarceration_nov2013.pdf).
This is all good news for Wall Street.
We usually think about for-profit prison corporations, such as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation), as benefiting from dramatic increases in incarceration and detention in the United States.
While this is true, these corporate, Wall Street traded companies are accomplishing much more: they are greedily watching with a callous and yellowed eye the rising homelessness and mental illness and benefiting from the expansion of the incarceration industry away from warehousing and into areas that have been traditionally focused on treatment and the care of individuals involved in the criminal justice system.
For instance, these areas include prison medical care, forensic mental hospitals, civil commitment centers, and 'community corrections' programs such as halfway houses, homeless shelters and home arrest (http://afsc.org/sites/afsc.civicactions.net/files/documents/TIC_report_online.pdf).
In the US, total average state spending on correctional healthcare rose from $4.2 billion in 2001 to $6.5 billion in 2008 (the last year available for comprehensive review). The beneficiaries of the government largess are private companies that have contracts and receive public subsidies for close to 1/3 of all correctional healthcare spending in the US, or a whopping $3 billion per year.
'Community corrections', as it is has been baptized comprises a titanic segment of the criminal justice system. It includes a variety of treatment services historically delegated to probation and/or parole, halfway houses, homeless shelters, day reporting centers, home arrest, surveillance, and electronic monitoring.
Overall, two-thirds of individuals involved in the criminal justice system are in privatized community corrections systems.
And what is not well-known is that within this sordid labyrinth of privatized misery the destitute and mentally ill are being used as human rats for and by Big Pharma. This represents the increasing commodification and exploitation of destitution and is hardly new to America.
In the notorious drug research scandals of the 1960s and '70s, the common component was human exploitation.
In the Tuskegee syphilis study it was exploitation of poor black men in Alabama; with the Willowbrook hepatitis study it was exploitation of disabled, institutionalized children; with the Holmesburg Prison experiments it was exploitation of prisoners.
In each case, researchers with power took advantage of vulnerable populations (https://medium.com/matter/did-big-pharma-test-your-meds-on-homeless-people-a6d8d3fc7dfe).
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