CBS Sports reports that Florida Atlantic University has sold the naming rights for their new stadium to the GEO Group, which just happens to be the second largest private detention company in the nation. According to the company's annual report, The GEO Group pulled in 1.6 billion in total revenue for 2011.

The U.S. prison system has steadily increased in population and funding in recent decades. Following closely behind Medicaid as the largest state expenditure, states like Texas, California and Florida are paying an annual rate for prisoners that is comparable to one full year of university tuition in the Ivy League. As the Fiscal Times' Adam Skolnick says, "It costs $44,563 to incarcerated a prisoner for a year in California—nearly the same price as a year at Harvard University with room and board…Typically parole programs cost taxpayers $7.47 per day per parolee, while prisons cost $78.95 per day per inmate nationwide."

While California's budget deficit rests around $2.7 billion, prisons are filled to overcapacity at 160 percent. How's that for priorities?

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Aaron Sandusky was sentenced to ten years in prison for owning and operating three medical marijuana dispensaries in southern California. Despite complying with state laws, he got nabbed because of a competing federal ban on medical pot. District Court Judge Percy Anderson gave him the mandatory minimum sentence.

Since the annual living cost for California inmates is roughly $45,000 per person, the total cost of Sandusky’s ten-year incarceration sentence will amount to about $450,000 in today's dollars. That's in a state with the worst budget deficit in the country. Sound like a good use of money to you?

The price of incarceration in some states reaches as high as $50,000-$60,000 per person. And Sandusky's not the only man in America with such a case; check out three similar ones.

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The Mexican Congress was presented a bill in November that would legalize marijuana use, production, and sale from within the country. Government leaders told Reuters that they are one of multiple Latin American countries unhappy about the U.S. policy of prohibition:

"The prohibitionist paradigm is a complete failure," said Fernando Belaunzaran, the author of the bill from the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), who presented the proposal in Mexico's lower house of Congress..

"All this has done is spur more violence, the business continues. The country that has paid the highest costs is Mexico," he said in a telephone interview…

A conflict between drug gangs and security forces has killed more than 60,000 people during the six-year rule of outgoing President Felipe Calderon, who has repeatedly demanded the United States to do more to curb demand for illegal drugs…

Still, there is little popular support for marijuana legalization in Mexico. Recent polls show two-thirds or more of Mexicans are opposed to making it legal. Several other bills to legalize the drug have been rejected in recent years…

In September, Calderon and the leaders of Colombia and Guatemala - historically three of the most reliable U.S. partners on drug interdiction - called on world governments to explore new alternatives to the problem.

While there has been little apparent benefit from the "war on drugs," Mexico has seen the worst of its collateral damage. Can the U.S. government lead the way toward a saner policy or wait until other governments address the issue?

Having more than 40 inmates share a toilet is no fun for the inmates. Turns out overcrowding is no fun for the prisons either. Huffington Post’s Michael McLaughlin reports on how prison officials and guards are fearing riots due inmate agitation:

Wardens may see a spike in violence as more inmates are squeezed into tight living quarters, researchers warned. The overcrowding contributes "to increased inmate misconduct, which negatively affects the safety and security of inmates and staff," according to the report…

With more prisoners confined to limited spaces . . .  [t]wo and three inmates are bunked in rooms designed for one prisoner or in common areas that were never meant to be used as cells…

"Once they get frustrated enough, we're looking at another riot. And that's what scares me," said Dale Deshotel, president of the Council of Prison Locals, which represents about 32,000 federal prison employees…

As the prison population boomed, Deshotel said the government in 2005 reduced the average number of guards stationed in prison housing units. "There's no way that they can monitor that many prisoners," he said of the guard-to-inmate ratio…

California is scrambling to comply with a Supreme Court order that said severe overcrowding was unconstitutional. By mid-2013, the state must reduce its inmate population by 30,000.

Reducing the number of guards is, of course, no solution. If anything it makes matters worse. Meanwhile, cash-strapped states don't have the money to build more and more prisons and jails, particularly given that most incarcerated people are in for nonviolent offenses. So what's the solution? Might we start thinking about other ways of achieving public safety than a reflexive commitment to incarceration?

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The problem of mass incarceration doesn’t stop with American citizens, and some states are spending in the millions each year on detained immigrants. BBC’s Valeria Perasso discusses a report by the US Government Accountability Office, which says that U.S. jails are filled with foreign prisoners—seven out of ten being Mexican:

In total, foreigners make up more than 25% of the US prison population…           

The GAO estimates that foreign prisoners cost US taxpayers up to $1.6bn per year...                                                                                                                                                            

Tim Donnelly, a Republican in the California State Assembly, says California spends $885 million each year on "undocumented prisoners"…

He argues that "the federal government is not doing its job of deporting these criminals to their countries of origin"…

"Some are detained simply because of [a] traffic misdemeanour," Jennifer Allen, of the NGO Borderaction, told the BBC…

"In some states, such as Arizona, a traffic misdemeanour may result in deportation."

Prisons are being packed full of people with marijuana charges and traffic violations. Getting those prisoners in and out, or detained and deported in a proper manner would create much needed space in U.S. prisons.   

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Teenage girls are receiving inadequate check-ups while being held in Juvenile Detention Centers. Whether they are pregnant or recovering from sexual assault, many are in serious need of proper health care. ThinkProgress’s Amanda Peterson Beadle addresses the issue:

The increasing number of teenage girls who are incarcerated in juvenile detention centers have enormous health care needs: 90 percent have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional abuse . . . according to the National Girls Health and Justice Institute. For many of them, the detention centers may be their only access to health care.

But the centers’ health systems often do not match the health care needs of teenage girls — so preliminary screenings when the girls arrive are likely to miss serious issues, according to Kaiser Health News:

The door remains open for security purposes, with guards and new residents passing by. Without privacy, girls are unlikely to reveal important health information, especially when they have previously been victimized, says Leslie Acoca, a psychologist and researcher who has studied the health care of girls in detention for more than a decade…  

. . . Acoca said her research shows that poor physical health increases the likelihood that girls would be repeat offenders, so addressing concerns early potentially could help limit recidivism.

Obamacare is addressing health care for women by providing preventative services with numerous benefits at no extra cost. Young women in incarceration also have health care needs, often in the extreme, and deserve access to the same services. 

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Yokamon Hearn, 33, was executed this year for a crime committed when he was 19. Being the 6^th person executed in Texas in 2012, he was also the first person in Texas to receive the single lethal injection of the sedative pentobarbital. According to Brian Evans of Amnesty International, his trial may have gone differently if he were 2 years younger:

Yokamon Hearn was a teenager at the time of his crime, but not a juvenile. Article 37 of the Convention on the Rights of Child lays out the international standard for not executing juvenile offenders, defined as those who were under 18 at the time of the crime. (The U.S. is the only country except for Somalia that has not ratified this treaty...

18 and 19 and 20 year-olds are not considered responsible enough decision makers to drink legally, yet they can be held fully responsible for their crimes and sentenced to the ultimate, irreversible punishment of death.  On he one hand, we seek to protect our youth from their immaturity; on the other we punish (and even kill) them for it…

Despite extensive scientific evidence of the differences between youth and adults related to culpability, decision making, and susceptibility to peer pressure, U.S. states continue to execute people for crimes committed when they were teenagers. Since 1982 Texas alone has killed at least 70 people who were aged 17, 18 or 19 at the time of their crime. This practice needs to stop immediately.

What separates an adult from an adolescent? If there's a double standard on things like drinking alcohol or renting a car, should there be a single standard for criminal responsibility?

Are We Overstating Black Progress by Ignoring Prisoners?

Sociologist Becky Pettit has created a study evaluating the growing rate of black men incarcerated at an early age. She concluded that statistics undercount prisoners and former inmates, leading to an embellishment of African American progress:

The real problem, as Dr. Pettit sees it, is that imprisoned black men aren't figured into statistics about the standing of African-Americans. The consequence, she says, is an overstatement of black progress in education, employment, wages and voting participation…

If inmates were counted, she estimates, the black high school dropout rate would soar to 19 percent and the share of dropouts who are employed would plunge to 26 percent — far more dire than the statistics usually cited. The celebrated voter turnout among young blacks in the 2008 election would drop to roughly 20 percent, about where it was in 1980.

Blacks account for nearly half of the more than 2.3 million Americans in prison or jail. Failure to include them in measures of black progress, she argues, is akin to leaving states out of national counts….

Dr. Pettit stands by her premise: "Decades of penal expansion coupled with the concentration of incarceration among men, blacks and those with low levels of education have generated a statistical portrait that overstates the educational and economic progress and political engagement of African-Americans."

Instead of patting itself on the back for distorted measures of "success," the government should adopt clear-eyed policies that foster real racial equality — partly by creating a criminal justice system that's focused less on punitive incarceration and more on crime prevention and rehabilitation. 

The Marijuana Policy Project reported that a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress yesterday that will give Washington and Colorado full control over their marijuana laws. The bill is sponsored by Reps. Diana DeGette (D-CO), Rep. Mike Coffman (R-CO), Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), and others:

The bill, known as the "Respect States' and Citizens' Rights Act," would add a provision to the federal Controlled Substances Act expressly stating that state marijuana laws shall not be preempted by federal law.

"This is an extremely significant political event. These members of Congress, motivated by the recent votes in Colorado and Washington, are expressing their opinion that federal law should not undermine the wishes of voters in these states," said Steve Fox, director of state campaigns and government relations at the Marijuana Policy Project.

"These members of Congress believe it is inappropriate for the federal government to respond by expending resources in an attempt to protect the criminal underground market. Any elected official who believes that we as a nation should be moving forward must acknowledge that it is time to allow states to regulate marijuana like alcohol, if that is what they believe is in the best interests of their citizens."

The federal government has not said whether it will intervene to stop state laws legalizing marijuana, but let’s hope the power goes to the people in Washington and Colorado to decide what's right for their communities.