National Media Says: Private Prisons No Panacea

The August escape of two out-of-state inmates from a Texas private prison attracted national media attention and is raising questions across the country about the safety and appropriateness of privatizing corrections.

"Private prisons are booming business in Texas, and the laws haven't exactly caught up with the phenomenon," reported the Los Angeles Times in a Dec. 1 article.

The two escaped sex offenders had been convicted in Oregon, but were serving their term in a prison near Houston run by Corrections Corporation of America. Though the men were later captured 200 miles away, the concerns raised by the escape weren't arrested as easily.

Because of technicalities in the laws of both states, neither man can be prosecuted for escape under Texas or Oregon law. Moreover, Texas officials hadn't even known - nor was there a legal obligation to inform them - that these criminals were behind bars in their state. And now that the men are back in prison, who foots the bill for the state assistance that was required to get them there?

"Texas authorities want to know who will pay for tracking down escapees and quelling riots, something state and local authorities have done over and over," reported a Nov. 6 article in the Chicago Sun-Times.

This recent incident is just one of many for Texas' growing private prison industry. The state's 38 private prisons are home to almost a third of the nation's privately housed inmates.

Private prisons raise philosophical as well as practical concerns, said John Holmes, district attorney of Harris County, which includes the city of Houston.

"I would not suggest to you that we ought to have private armies. ... I don't think private folks ought to print the money. ... I think government ought to be the ones involved in punishing offenders. It's government's rules. Governments ought to be the ones to handle it," Holmes said in a Sept. 1 article in The Houston Chronicle.