Ugly America: The Death Penalty, Plus Prisons As The New Profit Center

Jeralyn Merritt, as I've noted before, is a lawyer whose work I strongly respect because she has taken on some very tough cases for people many Americans would NOT like to see represented by any legal counsel, let alone decent counsel. She also runs TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime, a fantastic and relatively long-lived blog that tackles a lot of difficult legal issues and she happens to be live-blogging the Scooter Libby trial.

Noteworthy right now, Jeralyn points us to two important stories. One is a piece this past weekend in The New York Times Magazine that discusses capitol punishment in the form of lethal injection:

The New York Times Magazine has a feature article on the death penalty, The Needle and The Damage Done.

Lethal injection challenges are now underway in almost every state with a death penalty.

As a result of those cases, about 12 of the 38 states that have the death penalty have issued temporary bans on executions, and in one, New Jersey, a legislative commission recently recommended abolishing its death penalty altogether.

She's also got this on the "great" profit America's new corporate run prison system is enjoying (profits are easy when you serve inmates food you wouldn't feed cattle you wanted to kill and divorce the system from any notion of reform of prisoners, I would imagine):

Forbes reports that Corrections Corp. of America saw a 37% profit increase in the 4th quarter of 2006.

For the full fiscal year, Corrections Corp.'s profit more than doubled to $105.2 million, or $1.71 per share, from $50.1 million, or 83 cents per share in 2005.

The principal reason seems to be that demand is up at both the state and federal levels. Prison occupancy rates rose to 97%.