THE PERNICIOUS PRIVATE PRISON INDUSTRY
The push to move prisoners from public to private prisons may be the best (or worst) overall example of the dangers of privatization: the failure to live up to promised cost savings, the threat of political corruption, the damage to sound public policy and actual harm to citizens.
According to the nonprofit privatization resource center In the Public Interest:
In states across the country, private prisons have been plagued with a multitude of problems – major riots have exploded, inmates have died, and civil rights have been routinely violated. Private prisons have an economic motive to cut costs in every area of operations, resulting in lower-quality staff, higher employee turnover, and degrading prison conditions. These dismal conditions directly contribute to the decreased security and higher incidence of violence found at privatized prisons. As prison quality greatly suffers, there is little evidence that these private prisons save governments money.
Indeed, in a May 2011 investigative report, the New York Times concluded: “Private Prisons Found to Offer Little in Savings.”
The conviction that private prisons save money helped drive more than 30 states to turn to them for housing inmates. But Arizona shows that popular wisdom might be wrong: Data there suggest that privately operated prisons can cost more to operate than state-run prisons – even though they often steer clear of the sickest, costliest inmates.
A February 2012 report from the American Friends Service Committee on private prisons in Arizona reached a similar conclusion:
The data shows that private prisons under contract with the state cost more than equivalent units operated by the state Department of Corrections. AFSC estimates that in 2009 and 2010, Arizona overpaid for these units by as much as $7 million. If the state adds 2,000 medium-security private beds, as it has proposed, Arizonans could be losing over $10 million every year on private prisons.
Yet in spite of evidence that privatization has frequently failed on all these counts, public officials who are ideologically committed to privatization (or eager to please their prison-industry contributors) continue to push ahead.
According to a 2011 New York Times story, the number of state inmates in private prisons grew by a third over the previous decade, to more than 90,000. And state legislatures keep trying to make that figure grow.
Prison industry contributions are clearly one factor. According to a report by the Institute on Money in State Politics, between 2000 and 2004 private prison companies and companies that provide prison services gave a total of $3.3 million in 44 states. Of that total, $2.1 million was concentrated in 22 states that had “three-strikes” laws on their books.1 The industry has earned a huge return on that investment in political giving and lobbying. In June, the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute noted that the two largest private prison companies reported $2.9 billion in profits in 2010.
Those profits are evidence that private prison companies such as the Corrections Corporation of America and their financial backers have powerful reasons to subvert public policies designed to reduce spending on incarceration and sensibly reduce the number of nonviolent offenders being held in the nation’s prisons. As Adam Sewer of The American Prospect noted in a review of the JPI report,
…every good idea criminal justice experts have come up with over the past twenty years to reduce prison costs and the devastating social impact of mass incarceration on marginalized communities, from non-custodial sentencing to reforming drug laws to innovation in parole and probation, hurts the CCA’s bottom line and it’s in their financial interest to oppose any change that might lead to fewer people being locked up.
SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant law, one now being copied by other states, was pushed by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council, which CCA long served on, and once chaired, and by the Public Safety and Elections Task Force through which the “model legislation” moved. While CCA has denied reports that it authored the law, claiming that it only “observed” the task force’s endorsement of the legislation, there’s no question that CCA and others benefit from policies that encourage more detention of immigrants. According to the Justice Policy Institute, contracts from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement made up 12 percent of CCA’s revenues in 2010 and 20 percent of rival GEO’s.
In September, the New York Times reported on the emergence of an international “detention-industrial complex” profiting from crackdowns on immigration, noting that private companies control half the detention beds in the United States.
Earlier this year, CCA wrote to officials in 48 states offering to buy and run prisons if states would guarantee a 90 percent occupancy rate. A coalition of religious groups urged state officials to turn down the offer, which the groups said would create an incentive for mass incarceration and “be costly to the moral strength of your state” as well as costly financially. “Truth in Sentencing” laws championed by ALEC backers such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker also have the effect of encouraging longer prison stays, and higher profits, by limiting parole and incentives for good behavior.
It’s not only big companies that profit at the expense of the public interest. In Louisiana, according to a May 2012 investigative series by the New Orleans Times-Picayune, sheriffs have become entrepreneurs, overseeing local for-profit local prisons that give them a powerful financial incentive to keep their no-frills prisons full. The paper reports that Louisiana locks up more people per-capita than any other state, and the profit motive is one reason. “Prison operators, who depend on the world’s highest incarceration rate to survive, are a hidden driver behind the harsh sentencing laws that put so many people away for long periods.”
Some localities that have tried to cash in have found themselves in trouble. When private prisons locate in small towns, the towns can become so financially dependent on the prisons that state and local officials defend even nightmarish operations, like the violence-plagued juvenile detention center in Walnut Grove, Tenn., that was the subject of an NPR exposé last May. Because of changes by state lawmakers, prison officials were permitted to raise the age limit and expand beds and profits, so that the “juvenile” facility has 13-year-old offenders locked up with 22-year-olds. And, prison corporations tout their role as the county’s largest employers as a way to gain even more leverage and power over policy decisions.
Sometimes the opposite happens: Communities fall for financial promises made by prison industry brokers and bet the town’s future on income that never shows up.
In the second story of its exposé, NPR reported that in 2000, the Texas farming town of Littlefield borrowed $10 million to build a local prison that made money while Idaho and Wyoming sent prisoners there. But after Idaho stopped doing so, operator GEO pulled out, leaving the town with an empty facility and a $65,000 monthly debt
payment, or $10 for every resident.
According to NPR, “To avoid defaulting on the loan, Littlefield has raised property taxes, increased water and sewer fees, laid off city employees and held off buying a new police car. Still, the city’s bond rating has tanked.” Other towns in Littlefield’s situation are trying to figure out how to undercut their competition by housing prisoners for other cities and states at bargain-basement rates, which doesn’t necessarily translate into sound operations. As the Tucson Citizen wrote in summarizing the NPR series, private prison companies “are in the business of making money first, and they will always prioritize profits over protecting the public or rehabilitating prisoners.”
But prison officials’ political connections seem to make them virtually immune to accountability. In 2010, two prisoners escaped from a for-profit prison facility and killed a couple in Oklahoma. Even though a state investigation found security deficiencies in all private prison facilities, the chair of Arizona’s Senate Judiciary Committee, Ron Gould, responded to proposed legislation to increase oversight and monitoring of private prisons by saying he “did not believe these bills are necessary.” Gould’s district includes a privately run prison; he has received contributions from prison-industry officials.
According to the Tucson Citizen report in February 2011, Gov. Brewer’s chief of staff was a former lobbyist for CCA; her campaign manager runs a public relations firm that lobbies for CCA, and the chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Privatization and Efficiency served as senior director of state and customer relations for CCA from 2005 to 2006 and lobbied for the company in 2007. That may make it less surprising that Arizona officials have pushed to award an additional 5,000 beds to a private bidder, even though the state’s own investigators have said the private prisons are frequently more expensive than the state’s own operations.
In an April 4, 2012, editorial, The Nation highlighted the hypocrisy of lawmakers who claim that privatization is a matter of government efficiency but reject evidence that efficiency is not the result:
One might think that, faced with evidence that the state isn’t getting enough bang for its buck, Arizona legislators would rethink their commitment to putting ever more prisoners into private facilities. Instead, in a move Orwellian even by the gutter standards of Arizona politics, they’ve simply tried to bar the state from collecting the evidence. On February 27 the legislature proposed a budget bill eliminating the requirement for a cost and quality review of private prison contracts. According to the AFSC, “The move would ensure that the public would have no way of knowing whether the state’s private prisons are saving money, rehabilitating prisoners, or ensuring public safety.”
This May, the Arizona Department of Corrections signed a three-year contract to privatize health care in state-run prisons.
In Florida, Gov. Rick Scott pushed a plan to cut nearly 1,700 state corrections jobs and move as many as 1,500 additional inmates to private prisons, according to the Orlando Sentinel. Even some Republican lawmakers resisted: “Private prisons make a profit on the New York Stock Exchange,” said Sen. Mike Fasano. “Government should not be in the business of helping companies make a profit, and that’s what we’re doing here.”
But CCA and two other companies running private prisons are, says the Orlando Sentinel, “prime financiers of the Republican Party.” One, GEO Group, “gave more than $400,000 to the party in the past election cycle and another $25,000 to Scott’s inaugural bash.” In addition, a GEO group lobbyist hosted the governor at his home for a Super Bowl party and helped raise $3 million for the governor’s inaugural.
Last summer it was reported on the blog FireDogLake that the FBI was investigating corruption around private prison contracting; among the reported targets of the investigation was former Florida Budget Chief and Speaker of the House Ray Sansom, who “ introduced a very last-minute provision into the budget bill to provide for $110 million to be appropriated to the GEO Group for the construction of what became the Blackwater Correctional Facility.”
Last fall, a judge rejected the legislature’s move to privatize 29 prison facilities, ruling that doing so in the fine print of the budget violated the state constitution. That ruling is on appeal. Also in the courts is the state’s plan to privatize health care for all 100,000 inmates in the state prison system, which was mandated in the legislature’s 2011 budget. Ohio’s Governor Jon Kasich has also pushed prison privatization; after planning to sell five prisons, the Kasich administration decided in September to sell one to CCA and hire vendors to operate others. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, at least one lawmaker had earlier said there was a clear perception of a conflict of interest given that Kasich’s pick for director of the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, Gary Mohr, used to work for CCA, which was one of three companies that submitted bids to buy and operate the state prisons.
In one case in Pennsylvania, the huge potential profits from privatizing juvenile corrections created enough of an incentive for a detention facility to create a kickback scheme that involved bribing judges to sentence nonviolent juvenile offenders to unconscionably long detentions for minor offenses.
According to CNN, a 24-year-old who stole some change from parked vehicles to buy a soda spent nine months in detention. A teenager was sentenced to three months for creating a MySpace page mocking an assistant principal. Two judges pleaded guilty, were disbarred, and sentenced to jail time. “Once somebody is going to make more money by holding more kids, there is a pretty good predictable profit motive,” criminal justice consultant Judith Greene, who heads a nonprofit group called Justice Strategies, told CNN. “It’s predictable that companies are going to tolerate certain behaviors they shouldn’t.”
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