Interested in a little “light reading” this Monday morning?  Susie Cagle's has some particularly lurid—and disheartening—news about the fate of arrested female Occupy protesters in Oakland:

In November, after I was arrested while reporting on the General Strike in Oakland, Alameda County sheriffs and a nurse who didn’t identify herself made me pee into a cup. This was in an open cell, as other sheriffs, nurses and inmates walked by. I tried to do it quickly. I wanted to get it over with. I wanted to cooperate.

But I also wanted to know why I was being forced to take a pregnancy test upon my booking for a cite and release misdemeanor which technically only need involve the police giving me a ticket. I never would’ve guessed at the time that a Tennessee-based for-profit privately held national corporation was asking for my urine.

Neither the sheriffs nor the nurse would tell me why they needed to know the contents of my uterus. In the following months, others subjected to this test said they were told they needed to take the test because the county jail in Oakland, Glen Dyer, is “not equipped” with the health services to hold pregnant women over night. I was booked into Dyer between 4 and 5 a.m. on November 3, transferred to Santa Rita, the only county jail allowed to hold women, around 10 a.m. I was finally released around 6 p.m. I guess it depends on your definition of “overnight.”

[…]

“That’s Corizon policy, that’s not our policy,” they said. Their legal counsel agreed, and expressed his disappointment that they had not asked a Corizon official to attend the meeting as well.

Corizon is the third-party health care provider for both of Alameda County’s jails, and more than 400 other jails across the country. They have their own item in the budget, a four year contract worth more than $120 million and rising every year. […]

In this country, in this county, we are now beyond private companies providing public services — the county jails have outsourced their health services for years, to the tune of more than $30 million each year. But now we also allow them to dictate the policies of those services. Corizon does those pregnancy tests in order to protect Corizon from potential litigation from inmates. I can understand that — if I were Corizon, I’d want to downgrade my liability too, especially since if I were Corizon I’d be facing more than 20 other lawsuits right now.

Read on at Susie's tumblr, and be sure to watch the ominous 'promotional' video for Corizon at the top of her post.

[Photo by Alex Washburn]