Supporting Private Prisons: How Far will the Feds Go?
The consensus among a group of prison-privatization opponents is that, if it weren't for the Federal Bureau of Prisons (FBP) awarding contracts to for-profit companies, they would go belly up.
In 2000, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) — the largest private-prison vendor in the country — was mired in debt and headed toward insolvency before the federal prison bureau doled out three contracts worth more than $760 million.
One was awarded last May to an empty facility in McRae, Ga. In June 2000, CCA received two contracts — for units in City of California, Calif., and Milan, N.M. — from the agency. Each prison houses inmates who are not U.S. citizens.
According to Judith Greene of the group Justice Strategies, CCA's new CEO (John Ferguson) admitted that without the deals, his company would have gone bankrupt.
Last spring in the nation's capital, the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) sponsored a seminar to share information about difficulties arising from privatization of federal and state prisons.
On hand were correctional-policy experts and representatives of a coalition of labor, religious, criminal justice and public-interest organizations.
Phil Glover, president of AFGE's national council of FBP locals, says that the contracts are unbelievably expensive.
"Most of our low-security prison budgets, with similar amounts of inmates, operate between $15 and $25 million per year in salary, expenses and maintenance." CCA's newest contracts average $30 million to $35 million.
The FBP, Greene says, is expected to "shower" the industry with more than $4.6 billion in contracts over the next two years. Tougher drug sentencing laws have swelled the prison population. And with the influx of immigrants into the United States, the number of non-U.S. citizens — dubbed criminal aliens — in federal prisons has mushroomed.
Between 1995 and 1999, the nationwide incarceration rate in federal facilities increased by 31 percent.
Since 2000, a wide range of private-prison studies have concluded that state governments are shifting course and moving away from for-profit vendors by not soliciting new contracts or are rescinding others. The researchers have determined that the private facilities produce no tangible savings to taxpayers. If anything, those facilities are chock full of hidden costs.
In addition, employees are generally underpaid and receive few benefits, leading to high turnover rates and inexperienced, untrained replacements. Their safety — and the public's — is at higher risk.
"The daily pressures these companies face to satisfy Wall Street causes them to cut corners, pay employees low wages, deliberately understaff facilities, undertrain employees and hire unqualified staff," says Joshua Miller, a labor economist with AFSCME.
But as states have opened their eyes to the issues, the federal government remains in the private-prison camp.
Why is the FBP relying heavily on the private-prison industry to manage its new prisons? Opponents are baffled because there is mounting evidence that privatization isn't working.
"Private-prison operators and their proponents have no incentive to reduce overcrowding, no incentive to consider alternatives to incarceration, and no incentive to deal with the broader questions of criminal justice," says Miller.
"In short, and quite clearly, the private sector is in this for the money," he added.
