In a major shift promoted by the Obama administration, the United States federal government is poised to end its use of private prisons, concluding that they are less secure and not cost effective. What does this shift mean for Latin America, where in recent years governments have been increasingly interested in prison privatization?

On August 18, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released alandmark memo instructing federal personnel to phase out their reliance on private prisons. The announcement was based on a report comparing 14 prisons operated by private companies and 14 prison facilities operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). The findings are staggering. Researchers found that private prisons had significantly higher incidents of violence than their government-operated counterparts. According to the report, private prisons saw nine times as many lockdowns due to emergency security situations, roughly 30 percent more incidents of inmates assaulting each other, and over 50 percent more incidents of assaults on prison staff. Private prisons also seized larger numbers of contraband like drugs, weapons, and cell phones. The report also identified major pitfalls in overseeing healthcare provision at private prisons, corroborating multiple press reports in recent years.

At the same time, these private prisons were found to be no more cost efficient than those run by the BOP. This element of the report is crucial, as it undermines a principal tenet of the drive to privatize prisons in the first place. Beginning in the 1980s, the private prison industry expanded rapidly with the promise that it could provide authorities with the same level of service as government-operated facilities, but at less cost. But the DOJ has concluded otherwise. In the August 18 memo, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates asserted that private prisons “simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs.”

In fact, the cost efficiency of private prisons in the United States has been put into question a number of times in recent years. Other studies have had similar findings. A 2011 study by the Arizona Department of Corrections found that public prisons were not significantly more expensive, and in some cases were as much as $1,600 cheaper per inmate per year than private facilities. A University of Utah analysis conducted in 2007 found that savings from private prisons were “not guaranteed and appear minimal.”

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Private prisons: a questionable model across the Americas

By Jeerawat Na Thalang And Paritta Wangkiat

Thirteen years ago Saksiri Vanichanon was one of tens of thousands of addicts caught up in Thaksin Shinawatra's "war on drugs".

Then aged in his mid-twenties, he had first tried heroin when he was 15. He turned toya ba in 1996 after the government shifted methamphetamine on its drug schedule from Category 2 -- which allows medical use -- to Category 1, which carries the most severe penalties, including the death sentence.

Thaksin's crackdown on the drug trade had led to stricter police surveillance and the price of ya ba shot up from 30 baht a pill to more than 200 baht.

Mr Saksiri, now aged 39, said he had to steal money from family and friends to buy ya ba. The Thaksin government's extreme measures made him afraid, but he needed to feed his habit.

"Fear and needs are different matters," he recalled, saying the threat of imprisonment never stopped him from seeking out dealers.

Meth in the madness

Crystal meth is a popular drug in Indonesia. Recent years have seen an increase in the number of meth users, locally known under the street name shabu. However, so far, harm reduction services don’t target meth users. Mainline and local partner Karisma started an innovative pilot in Indonesia to change this.

The reason why Mainline finds it important to develop interventions that target this group of people who use drugs (PWUD) is that the research conducted by the Atma Jaya University in Jakarta shows that Shabu users are at increased risk of HIV infection and other STIs. This is true whether people snort, smoke or inject their drugs. The research also showed that Crystal meth users avoid existing HIV intervention programmes in Indonesia. They associate these services with heroin users and don’t identify with them.

The aim of the new harm reduction pilot is to reach this hidden population and address their health needs. A special peer-driven outreach team will experiment with different outreach strategies to reach the often hidden subgroups of crystal meth users. One can think of Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), sex workers and their clients, people who work night shifts or even students. Experimenting with new ways of outreach work will help to develop best practices on how to provide harm reduction to meth users. By documenting the lessons learned and strong data collection, we hope to develop a set of specific harm reductions interventions that can be replicated in other regions in Indonesia.

Crystal meth: piloting harm reduction for shabu users in Indonesia

Faced with stark numbers of brain trauma and psychological distress cases among combat veterans, the nation’s largest active veteran’s organization has thrown its weight behind the growing movement to push for relaxing federal restrictions on marijuana.

The American Legion, the nation’s largest wartime veterans organization, took a position on medical marijuana for the first time last week. At its national convention, it passed a resolution calling on Congress to amend its laws to “at a minimum ... recognize cannabis as a drug with potential medical value”.

Marijuana is currently classified by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) as a Schedule 1 drug, putting it alongside drugs such as heroin and cocaine. The designation, which the DEA reaffirmed last month, means that the federal government officially believes there is no “accepted medical use” for the drug.

“It’s a tool in a toolbox,” said William Detweiler, who serves as the chairman of the American Legion’s traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) committee and who is a past national commander of the organization. “We’re not advocating the use of marijuana or any other drugs,” but he said veterans “have a right to anything that may help them”.

Darrin Harris Frisby/Drug Policy Alliance

Veterans group pushes to ease marijuana restictions to treat PTSD

CapeTalk/702's Eusebius Mackaiser spoke to Shaun Shelly of Addiction Division, Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at University of Cape Town, about the possibilities of decriminalising the use of recreational drugs.

Recreational drugs are mind-altering chemical substances that are used for non-medicinal, leisure purposes. Among them are methamphetamine, cocaine, crack cocaine, heroin, phencyclidine (PCP), MDMA or Ecstasy, and cannabis.

When asked how dangerous different kinds of drugs are, Shelly said that everything has inherent risk that can either be reduced or increased.

In the field of drugs, it is inherently policy that has made the use of drugs particularly dangerous.

— Shaun Shelly, Department of Psychiatry and Mental Health at UCT

He says the problem comes when there is criminalisation of drugs, adding that he believes we've had centuries of non-problematic use of cannabis in Africa until the colonials decided to burn it.

Should drugs be decriminalised?

ECOWAS Ministers of Justice and Interior have on the 5th of September 2016, adopted the ECOWAS Drug Action Plan to Address Illicit Drug Trafficking and Organized Crimes in the West Africa.

The 15-Member State’ Ministers including the Minister of Justice of Mauritania, have by this action at the end of their ministerial meeting, given more Philip to the resolve to chart a holistic course that is consistent with the collective wish of the ECOWAS Heads of State and Government, stakeholders and the people of West Africa to rid the region of the menace of drug trafficking and all forms of organised crimes.

By adopting the Action Plan, ECOWAS Commission, Member States, and all her partners will also now have a common strategic framework to guide their work in countering illicit drug trafficking, organized crimes and drug abuse in the region.

The Ministerial meeting was preceded by the meeting of Drug Demand Reduction, Law Enforcement and Legal/Judicial Cooperation from ECOWAS Member States and Mauritania who reviewed, validated and recommended for approval by the Ministers, of the ECOWAS Drug Action Plan 2016-2020. The recommendation was contained in the 9-page Final Report submitted to Minsters for their consideration.

ECOWAS ministers adopt action plan to address illicit drug trafficking, organised crimes and drug abuse in West Africa

This week, the White House issued its yearly report on the nations on the front lines of the war on drugs. Predictably, it listed Bolivia as one of three countries that “failed demonstrably” to do enough to combat the drug trade. President Evo Morales of Bolivia responded, as he does each year, with defiance.

“The world knows that our counternarcotics model is better without the Americans,” Mr. Morales said during an event on Tuesday, alluding to his expulsion of American drug enforcement agents in 2008.

The yearly condemnation of Bolivia has been futile. So far, that country’s experience with its drug strategy is showing more promise than Washington’s forced-eradication model.

Over the past decade, the Bolivian government has sought to gradually curb the cultivation of coca — the plant processed to make cocaine — by establishing a tightly regulated market for its consumption as a nonnarcotic stimulant. (Bolivians have been chewing coca leaf and using it to make tea for generations.) The government eradicates unauthorized crops after negotiating with, and finding alternatives for, growers.

How Bolivia fights the drug scourge

The Russian government has a notoriously punitive attitude towards drugs. Substitution treatments are banned and the only option for recovering addicts is to go cold turkey. But three drug users who have struggled for years with their addiction and have become life-threateningly ill as a result, claim that this policy is an abuse of their human rights, and are taking the Russian state to court.

Though opioid substitution therapy (OST) – such as methadone or buprenorphine which are commonly used to treat heroin addiction in the UK – is banned in Russia, these replacement therapies are globally recognised as one of the most effective treatments of opioid addiction. Russian activists Alexey Kurmanayevskiy, Irina Abdyusheva Teplinskaya and Ivan Anoshkin have exhausted all available treatments in Russia without success, and over the years of battling with their addictions, have contracted HIV (the UN estimates that half of Russia’s new HIV cases last year were injecting drug users). They believe that being denied this treatment violates international human rights law (pdf) – in particular, the prohibition of inhuman or degrading treatment (article 3) and discrimination (article 14).

In an attempt to gain access to what they see as vital and potentially life-saving healthcare, Kurmanayevskiy, Teplinskaya and Anoshkin have attempted to use Russia’s domestic legal system without success. After four years of litigation and evidence collection, they have submitted their applications to the European court of human rights in Strasbourg, seeking a judgment against the legal prohibition of OST in Russia.

How three drug users took on the might of the Russian state

Prisoners convicted of drug offences in Belarus are being forced to wear identifying badges and endure harsh conditions as part of the government’s increasingly repressive drug policy.

Over the past two years, the Belarusian government has ramped up its punitive approach towards people who commit drug offences. The intensification has been spearheaded by the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, a self-described authoritarian who has ruled the country since 1994, and is commonly referred to as “Europe’s last dictator”.

Lukashenko specifically advocates the systemic marginalisation of people who commit drug offences. In 2014, he demanded that people incarcerated for drug offences be segregated from other prisoners, and kept in “intolerable imprisonment conditions”. Indeed, later that year, the state began allocating specific prisons for “drug addicts” to be sent to, according to 

In April 2016, Siarhei Daroshka, the country’s interior minister, declared that people imprisoned for drug offences must face harsher “moral and living conditions” than people incarcerated for any other crimes.

Belarus Drug Offenders Singled Out in “Intolerable Prison Conditions”

This short film, narrated by Jay Z (Shawn Carter) and featuring the artwork of Molly Crabapple, is part history lesson about the war on drugs and part vision statement. As Ms. Crabapple’s haunting images flash by, the film takes us from the Nixon administration and the Rockefeller drug laws — the draconian 1973 statutes enacted in New York that exploded the state’s prison population and ushered in a period of similar sentencing schemes for other states — through the extraordinary growth in our nation’s prison population to the emerging aboveground marijuana market of today. We learn how African-Americans can make up around 13 percent of the United States population — yet 

 of those arrested for drug law violations, even though they use and sell drugs at the same rate as whites.

The project came about when, last year, Dream Hampton, the filmmaker and a co-author of Jay Z’s book “Decoded,” approached the Drug Policy Alliance about collaborating with Revolve Impact, the social impact agency she works with. Revolve Impact connects artists and influencers to community organizers, and with marijuana legalization taking hold across the nation — and about to be considered in her own state, California — Ms. Hampton wanted to tackle the contradiction raised by Michelle Alexander, the author of “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” in 2014: Why were white men poised to get rich doing the very same thing that African-American boys and men had long been going to prison for? Ms. Hampton proposed creating an animated video that the D.P.A. would produce about the impact of the drug war in African-American communities.

Jay Z: ‘The War on Drugs Is an Epic Fail’

The NGO Delegation to the Programme Coordinating Board of the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV and AIDS Programme Coordinating Board (UNAIDS PCB) has 

The NGO Delegation is now recruiting for:

One Latin America and the Caribbean Delegate 

Applications from people living with HIV, key populations, women and young people are particularly encouraged.

The NGO Delegation's terms of reference and mission/vision/principles, as well as the call for nominations of NGO delegates are attached to this email.

 The UNAIDS PCB is the governing body on all programming issues concerning policy, strategy, finance, monitoring and evaluation of UNAIDS. It is composed of 22 Member States, 11 Cosponsors, and an 

 of 10 civil society representatives, 2 per UN region. For more information about the UNAIDS PCB, please visit this 

The NGO Delegation is integral to the effective inclusion of community voices, representing the perspectives of civil society, including people living with HIV, within UNAIDS programs and policies. It is a unique opportunity for committed activists and advocates to make a difference in HIV and AIDS policy implementation globally and in their regions. UNAIDS was the first UN program to have formal civil society representation on its governing body through the NGO Delegation. For more information about the NGO Delegation, please visit this 

NGO Delegation to the UNAIDS PCB recruits three delegates

While we have seen a surge in new psychoactive substances in recent years, there has also been a rediscovery in the West of old herbal narcotics that have traditionally been used in different parts of the world. One example is khat, the leaves of which are chewed for a mild stimulant effect in some societies in the Horn of Africa – it was banned in the UK in 2014. Another plant to come to the attention of the authorities is kratom, a tropical tree from Southeast Asia that has just been banned by the US Drug Enforcement Agency.

) is a tropical tree that grows between four and 16 metres high and is indigenous to Southeast Asia, the Philippines and New Guinea. Like coca leaves in the central Andes, the chopped fresh or dried leaves of the kratom tree have been chewed for centuries or made into tea to combat fatigue.

The DEA’s ban places kratom as a schedule 1 controlled substance, alongside drugs like cannabis, heroin, MDMA (ecstasy) and LSD. It joins an ever-expanding list of psychoactive drugs deemed to have “no currently accepted medical use” and a “high potential for abuse”. There has been quite an uproar about this among kratom users, although both the arguments for and against lack consistent evidence.

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