The Attorney General shall not renew Department of Justice contracts with privately operated criminal detention facilities, as consistent with applicable law.
— Executive Order by President Joe Biden
The United States, the “Land of the Free,” leads the world in the per capita incarceration rate. Nine percent of that prison population is handled by private prisons.
On January 26, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to discontinue using private prisons, stating, “There is broad consensus that our current system of mass incarceration imposes significant costs and hardships on our society and communities and does not make us safer. To decrease incarceration levels, we must reduce profit-based incentives to incarcerate by phasing out the Federal Government’s reliance on privately operated criminal detention facilities.”
It is move that the American Civil Liberties Union has applauded as “an important first step,” but the organization said that the government still has a long way to go.
The executive order does not apply to private prisons used by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
According to the federal Bureau of Prisons, slightly more than 14,000 federal inmates are currently in privately managed facilities. A 2016 Department of Justice inspector general’s report determined that private prisons are “less safe, less secure and arguably less humane” than state and federal facilities.
The report found that contract prisons had more frequent incidents per capita of contraband finds, assaults, uses of force, lockdowns, guilty findings on inmate discipline charges, and selected categories of grievances. Two out of three private facilities visited were improperly housing new inmates in special housing units that normally are used for disciplinary or administrative segregation.
Day 1 Alliance, a trade association that represents private detention facilities, called Biden’s action “a misguided attempt to blame longtime government contractors for a ‘mass incarceration’ problem they actually play zero role in driving.”
Facebook Reviews Political Content
In the face of criticism about the political content on Facebook, the company set about to explain how content reaches its audience. On a blog addressing the issue, the Facebook team explained that most of what people see is in their News Feed, where very little is about politics.
“In fact, based on our analysis, political content makes up about 6% of what you see on Facebook. This includes posts from friends or from Pages.”
“Engagement” shows what content gets “likes,” comments, and reshares, but does not indicate what gets seen the most, the company states, because engagement does not predict “reach.”
“There has been a lot of interest in Facebook’s impact on civic discourse and reasonable requests for us to share more data so it can be studied more fully. … In response to those requests we are partnering through the Facebook Open Research and Transparency (FORT) project with a group of researchers from a number of preeminent universities. They are leading a series of privacy-protected experiments and conducting analysis into what happened on Facebook during this election cycle,” the post stated.
Gates Conspiracies
Bill Gates, the billionaire founder of Microsoft who stepped down as its chairman in 2014, through his philanthropic Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has committed more than $1.75 billion to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The foundation has supported some of the vaccine makers, diagnostics, and potential treatments.
Since the pandemic began, millions of conspiracies have spread over the Internet, including claims that Gates and Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, created the pandemic to try and control people, that they want to profit from the virus’ spread, and that they want to use vaccines to insert trackable microchips into people.
“But do people really believe that stuff?” Gates asked.
Apparently they do, given the number of times the claims show up on social media. When Gates’ daughter, Jennifer, got her coronavirus vaccine, she joked about the rumors, saying on Instagram, “Sadly the vaccine did NOT implant my genius father into my brain — if only mRNA had that power.....!”
Gates is not letting the conspiracy talk bother him, going on a speaking tour to promote his new book, “How To Avoid A Climate Disaster.” In the book, he discusses how changing energy, food, transportation, and other forms of production can help to reduce greenhouse emissions.
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