Lax Private Prison Medical Care and the Obsolete Vision of Israel

I. Private Prison's Lax Medical Care
"The Adams County Correctional Center is a 2,500-bed federal prison, but the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) doesn't run it. Adams is owned and operated by the Corrections Corporation of America ( CCA),  the country's largest private-prison company, and the BOP uses 12 private-prison facilities  almost exclusively to hold non-civilians convicted of federal crimes. A third of these prisons are run by the CCA." [1]

Doug Martz, the chief of BOP's private-prison contracting office, cites: "Inadequate medical care, low staffing levels, food service issues. When you put all these together, it becomes ignitable."

The Nation magazine has reported that 38 men died in the BOP's privately run prisons from 1998 to 2014 due to inadequate medical care. Most of these inmates died between January 2007 and July 2015.

A 131-page report commissioned by the BOP concluded that privatization had not saved substantially on costs, yet had eroded the quality of care. By FY 2015, the BOP's budget for private contractors was over $1.05 billion. The Obama administration recently announced that the U.S. government will soon divest itself of all privately run prisons.

Many federal prisons struggle to fully staff their medical departments; however, one of the privately run prisons, the Cibola County Correctional Center, was operating without a single doctor.

II. Progressive Vision of Israel Is Obsolete
Writing in a recent issue of "Foreign Affairs," Aluf Benn, editor-in-chief of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, has surveyed the Israeli landscape and concludes that recent transformations are rendering "the largely secular and progressive version of Israel that once captured the world's imagination, obsolete." Haaretz sees "an increasingly beleaguered opposition that is both Jewish and democratic in a country that is now Jewish if you're an Arab and democratic if you're a Jew." [2]

Benn explains: "At Haaretz, we are trying to ring the alarm bell for freedom of speech, and we are the only ones who bother to report about the occupation. But it is fair to say that most Israeli Jews, who make up approximately 75 percent of the country's population, do not much care." Benn says that the "far-right governing coalition has stepped up settlement construction and introduced a series of laws and initiatives to undermine and discredit the country's remaining voices of dissent."

Meanwhile, on the boycott, divestment and sanctions  (BDS) front, which has long been a fierce battle among academics, the latest major development occurred on June 5, when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo issued an executive order requiring all state entities to boycott businesses and divert their money from institutions that participate in the boycott, divestment or sanctions actively targeting Israel, either directly or through a parent or subsidiary.

Footnotes
[1] Seth Freed Wessler, "They Knew Something Was Going On," The Nation, July 4/11, 2016.

]2] Eric Alterman, "Uncovering the New Israel," The Nation, August 1/8, 2016.