Private prisons take their cut

In response to the evident “leak” following the round of private phone conferences among Denver leaders resulting in the decision to fire Great Hall Partners as principal contractor on the botched and delayed airport renovation project, Mayor Michael Hancock is requiring city appointees and other officials to release their own private phone and text records for city investigation.

As a citizen, I strongly object to any expenditure of city payroll time and effort in such an un-American activity.

The city attorney, who prepared a release of information form for specified employees to sign, deserves a front-line place in the hall of shame for bowing down to the mayor’s demands, and even worse if, in fact, she championed this approach.

I was surprised to see the article on the prisons and the plan to retire for-profit prisons in Colorado. When state budgets are discussed, I rarely find anything on what we as taxpayers pay for prisons. So this article prompted me to check out the site where stats are available.

Amazing! Would a person be able to do a full year at one of our state universities for $36,000? Well, maybe instead of per capita spending on isolating them to be useless, we could just pay for college instead!

Nowhere in the article did they mention the costs to us of the system, public or private.

I hope this new plan to eliminate for-profit prisons will bring lots more attention to a system we all pay for and know nothing about.

So let’s call things by their real names: not private prisons but big corporations making money on the incarcerated at taxpayer expense. And let’s be creative on how to eliminate them.