State Rep. McFadyen Featured on PBS NOW Episode about For Profit Prisons: "Should Companies Profit From Prisons?"

Airing Friday May 9, 2008 in Colorado:
8:30 pm on KRMA, KTSC and KRMJ

(DENVER)  Colorado State Representative Liane "Buffie" McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, will be featured in this week's airing of PBS NOW "Should Companies Profit From Prisons?" (episode #419). PBS NOW has been called "one of the last bastions of serious journalism on TV" by the Austin American Statesman. Award winning senior correspondent for this episode is Maria Hinojosa.

Rep. McFadyen has been featured in Time Magazine, on Fox National News, CNN, and NPR on issues related to prisons. Rep. McFadyen has 12 prisons in her state House District including ADX at Florence, also as known as "Supermax" and the "Alcatraz of the Rockies," where infamous inmates like Terry Nichols, Zacarias Moussaoui, Ted Kaczynski, Eric Rudolph, Ramsi Yousef and Richard Reid are housed.

This episode, "Should Companies Profit From Prisons?" will center around the for profit prison industry. Rep. McFadyen is an outspoken critic of what she calls "failure factories.”

Rep. McFadyen has said, "One of government's most important roles is public safety. This job should be done by the government, not by companies whose goal it is to pay stockholders dividends for bodies in a cell.  I grew up in New York listening to stories about the Attica Riots. I watched jobs leave and go overseas. As a replacement for manufacturing jobs across rural America, we now have companies that ensure their profits from repeat customers called inmates. We have incentivized prisons with profits for CEO's and stockholders. Publicly elected officials should want to curb or at least level out the growth of prisons. It’s no coincidence that our prison population rates both at the Federal and State levels have grown out of control as long as we have had these for profit companies lobbying government. These companies are manufacturing failure for their profits, working against the will of taxpayers."

-- Posted by staff