For-profit prisons – Memphis Flyer

Last year, the Shelby County District Attorney’a office touched 153,000 cases. That’s more cases than there are people in Bartlett, Germantown, and Collierville combined.

That number is terrifying — and misleading. (More on that later.)

But it serves to conjure up notions of imminent danger, and I suspect that’s why District Attorney Amy Weirich dropped that figure two weeks ago in Nashville, when she pressed a Senate committee to kill the “75 percent” rule.

The 75 percent rule says that whatever public funding the DA’s office receives, the public defender must also get three-fourths of that amount.

There’s no corollary: If the Shelby County Commission gives the public defender $10,000, Weirich complained, it doesn’t have to give the DA a dime.

Weirich argued that each office should seek funding independently. In a just world, that makes sense. But the criminal justice system is weighted toward the prosecution, which has powers public defenders don’t. At the prosecutor’s service are police and sheriff’s departments, and state investigators who collect evidence, and experts ready to give testimony.

The public defenders must rely on the veracity of those reports, prosecutors’ integrity, and the investigators and experts it can afford. The 75 percent rule is essential to leveling the playing field and protecting the indigent’s constitutional right to effective counsel.

Although the rule has been in effect for decades, it hasn’t been enforced. According to a 2011 report by the Tennessee Administrative Office of Courts, public defenders get 60 percent of state funding. Previous attempts to kill the 75 percent rule failed, and the most recent bill was shipped to a summer study committee.

In the meantime, Senator Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) has come up with a budget amendment that would gut funding for public defenders.

“If a local government provides a funding increase or supplement to the office of the public defender in the judicial district,” the amendment reads, “the appropriation made by the provisions of this act to the local government or District Public Defenders Conference for the office of the public defender in that district is reduced by the amount of the local funding.”

In English: If the county commission gave the local public defender’s office an additional $100, the state would decrease by $100 the amount of state funding for that public defender’s office. This would freeze the public defender’s budget, punish indigent clients, and boost the advantage district attorneys already enjoy.

McNally could not be reached to explain the problem his amendment solves. But the amendment is consistent with conservatives’ narrative about the poor, whose deprivation is the result of their own failings. If the poor stand accused of a crime, it’s because they’re guilty.

To right-wingers, the volumes of evidence showing racial disparities in arrest rates, conviction rates, and sentences are figments of liberals’ imaginations.

Another reason to wreck public defenders’ offices lies in prison privatization. How do you maintain a steady supply of people to fill Tennessee’s for-profit prisons?

The government can make new crimes out of previously legal behavior, manufacture a phony war on drugs, set mandatory minimum sentences, and hyper-police communities of color. Now we have another way: Bankrupt public defenders.

But let’s get back to the numbers. According to records, Weirich’s office handled 157,576 new cases in 2014. The number of cases doesn’t appear to be artificially inflated. For example, a suspect charged in connection with 14 separate robberies would count as a single case.

Of those 157,576 cases, 22 percent were traffic citations, 28 percent were misdemeanor citations, and 43 percent were misdemeanor defendants.

That means around seven percent were felony defendants accused of serious crimes like rape and murder. Suddenly, the numbers aren’t so scary.

Add to that the state Supreme Court’s recent rebukes of Weirich’s office and the reversal of two convictions, including last week’s overturned guilty verdict of accused rapist Frederick Herron, and the DA’s complaints seem less relevant.

If the legislature eliminates the checks and balances for the indigent accused, that should be a crime.

A once little-noticed phenomenon in public and governmental affairs is getting more and more attention these days, by no means all of it favorable. Call it “political out-sourcing,” an equivalent to the long-accustomed practice whereby governments — as in the case of prison management, say — turn over the operation of a traditional public enterprise to a private entity. The purpose of traditional out-sourcing is two-fold and reciprocal: The governmental body, which usually maintains at least some nominal amount of oversight, divests itself of an expensive obligation, while the private entity, which commonly acquires the formerly public operation via an accepted bidding process, has a potential profit opportunity.

Defenders of traditional out-sourcing, on both the giving and taking sides of the line, extol the process as a means of letting what economist David Ricardo called the “invisible hand” of the marketplace achieve efficiencies that are not possible for the clumsy and presumably visible hand of bureaucracy.

The newer practice of political out-sourcing is something superficially similar — but fundamentally different. One current instance of it is on display in the Achievement School District (ASD) now being operated by Tennessee state government on behalf of “failing” public schools via state takeovers of those instutitions. Another is the joint city/county Economic Development Growth Engine (EDGE), which is charged with charting the course of economic growth locally and customarily does so through the proffering of incentives to this or that industry that is eyeing a site for expansion and which EDGE has decided is worthy of being courted.

The out-sourcing here is different from the traditional kind, in that the administering institution is not private and its operating currency is not profit for itself but control over public policy (a short name for which is “power”). And its procedures are not the marketplace ones of Ricardo’s invisible hand, though they are, as critics are increasingly charging, “invisible” in a different sense (i.e., outside the purview of any significant public oversight). This is despite the fact that the enterprises themselves never cease being fully public in their scope and after-effect.

State ASD Director Chris Barbic’s powers are virtually dictatorial. He has been heard to boast that he has no elected school board to answer to. One result has been the perhaps predictable one of parental outrage at what, understandably, seems to them to be ASD’s arbitary co-optation of community property.

Similar reactions are now evident with respect to actions of the EDGE board, whose 11 members, mainly drawn from the business community, are almost entirely chosen by the mayors of Memphis and Shelby County, with minimal input from the city council and county commission, whose one-member reach is essentially cast in the role of observers.

Recent payment-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOT) arrangements and other incentives extended to target industries — as well as the selection of the targets — have drawn fire from the public as well as from the two local legislative bodies, where discontent has begun to simmer and calls for the overhauling or even the abolition of the EDGE board are beginning to be heard.

It might behoove the folks in positions of authority vis-a-vis these matters to pay more attention to the vox populi and less to that which is invisible.