Privatization Watch
District of Columbia: On Aug. 29, the D.C. City Council approved a contract with Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) to house 1,500 additional inmates in a private prison in Youngstown, Ohio, even though the 900 D.C. inmates already housed there since May have alleged gross abuses at the facility. According to Department of Corrections Director Margaret Moore, the transfers and closing of the medium-security prison at the D.C.-run Lorton (Va.) Complex are part of Mayor Marion Barry’s plan to privatize 75 percent of the city’s corrections system by 2000.
Florida: Plans to privatize Florida’s entire prison system have resurfaced. In the spring, a plan to privatize a region of the prison system met heavy opposition from the state Department of Corrections and the corrections officers’ union. Under current policy, prisons currently run by the state may not be privatized. Now, Wackenhut and CCA are talking about privatizing the state’s five corrections regions all at once. The state system houses nearly 65,000 inmates, employs 26,000 workers and has an annual budget of $1.5 billion.
Illinois: Gov. Jim Edgar’s administration gave Comguard Inc. a five-year contract extension worth $4.8 million to continue electronically monitoring prisoners confined to their homes throughout northern Illinois, including Chicago and the suburbs. This contract extension has been heavily criticized because during the initial contract the company defaulted on a $150,000 loan it received under the state program to create jobs, had its state pay garnished for $22,500 in rent, laid off employees and turned over daily supervision of 875 prisoners to a Texas company, and allowed two Will County prisoners to slip out of the company’s ankle bracelets and leave home undetected.
Iowa: State Sen. Robert Dvorsky recently told a local newspaper that CCA has been talking with Forest City officials about developing a 750-inmate prison project for consideration by the Iowa legislature next year. In addition, the Iowa Board of Corrections recently issued a request for quotations to determine what the operating and leasing costs might be for establishing a private correctional facility in the state.
Mississippi: Correctional Services Corporation recently announced the finalization of a contract to operate a 160-bed jail in Grenada. Through its three divisions — Adult, Juvenile, and Community Corrections — the company currently has 18 contracts to manage facilities in Florida, New York, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico and Washington state with a total of 3,666 beds.
New Mexico: Wackenhut recently began constructing two prisons that it will manage: a 600-bed prison in Santa Rosa and a 1,200-bed prison in Hobbs. The plan calls for Wackenhut to provide interim financing to start work on the prisons. Lea and Guadalupe counties have agreed to issue bonds under a permanent financing arrangement and pay back Wackenhut for its initial spending.
Texas: Federal authorities announced an investigation into conditions at a privately run county jail in northwest Texas, which houses hundreds of inmates from Hawaii and Montana. Prisoners there have complained about strip searches and the COs’ use of warning shots when giving them orders. An audit by Montana’s Corrections Department concluded that there was inadequate food, medical care and counseling services at the prison.
Texas: State lawmakers — frustrated, embarrassed and angered by a series of mishaps that began cropping up in 1996 in for-profit jails — earlier this year approved a new law subjecting private prison operators and their facilities to stringent regulations. The law went into effect on Sept. 1, 1997, and includes placing restrictions on the building of private prisons, making it a crime to escape from a private prison, and calling for the credentialing of private COs.
In an effort to prevent the unfettered construction of the speculative private prisons — what one critic described as "Joe’s Bar and Grill and Prison" — the state now requires private prison operators to contract with a city or county in order to house prisoners.
Other pieces of the law were spurred by last year’s escape of two Oregon sex offenders from a privately run facility in Houston — and the subsequent discovery that there was no law under which the escapees could be prosecuted. Lawmakers closed this loophole by making it a crime to escape from a privately run facility in Texas.
Moreover, private COs are now required to be licensed by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education. The law also mandates that out-of-state inmates be returned to their home states before being set free, authorizes the commission to charge other states for additional costs incurred in quelling riots involving their felons and rounding up escapees, and requires local governments to end their contracts to house other states’ inmates if Texas needs the space to house its own criminals.
