Prison Privatization: An Insider’s Perspective

By Alex Friedmann

A former Tennessee inmate relates his experiences in a Corrections Corporation of America lockup and identifies the root reasons why turning prisons private is bad public policy.

Editor’s Note: The general public may discount AFSCME’s opposition to private prisons because our members staff the public counterparts. In fact, there are plenty of other people who deplore and resist the incursions privateers have made in this highly sensitive area. Here’s one — from an unexpected source.

Experts have probed and analyzed America’s private prisons, questioning their cost-effectiveness and citing the higher levels of violence and other shortcomings commonly found there. Although such information is valuable, it does not adequately address the deficiencies of private prison operators. For that, you need someone who was incarcerated in one of their facilities; someone who has experienced firsthand the day-to-day operations of a private prison and who also understands the broader issues concerning privatization.

Someone like me.

I spent six years at the South Central Correctional Center, a medium-security prison in Clifton, Tenn., operated under contract by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). At first, I favored privatization. My opinion quickly changed.

The differences between publicly and privately operated lockups can be expressed in simple terms. Think blankets, toilet paper, food. Because the Tennessee winters are cold, prisons run by the state Department of Correction (DOC) issue two blankets to each inmate. South Central issued one, which cost CCA half as much — and made for cold nights. Toilet paper was rationed. The food was of inferior quality and served in smaller portions than the DOC provides.

To some, blankets and lousy food might not seem very important — especially to people who think inmates deserve few, if any, privileges. But corrections professionals know that issues like bad food and not enough blankets touch off riots and other violent confrontations in which staff and inmates get hurt. (One of the many grievances in the infamous Attica, N.Y., riot was a demand for more toilet paper.)

SECURITY LAPSES. Such cost-cutting by CCA also extended to security-related practices at South Central. The former chief of security complained that, when the facility opened, the warden refused to let him buy a $15 metal rod that he could use to probe garbage trucks leaving the compound. Within a month, a prisoner escaped in one of the trucks.

When South Central needed fire-evacuation diagrams designed, its officials could have had a staff member prepare them. Instead, they assigned the job to me and gave me the floor layout for the facility — including the administration building. And when the officials wanted a program to track the failures of perimeter-fence motion detectors, they gave the project to inmates in the computer programming lab.

Why entrust such security-sensitive tasks to prisoners? Because it’s cheaper. The main corrections-related expense, however, is neither inmate amenities nor security expenditures. It’s staffing costs. Salaries and benefits account for about 70 percent of a prison’s operating budget. CCA and other private operators like Wackenhut cut those costs by paying lower salaries and offering fewer benefits than the public sector.

The result is high turnover at privately operated prisons. And security personnel who are paid low wages with few benefits, no civil service protections and no pension plan simply aren’t — for instance — going to risk their lives to break up a knife fight.

ASK THE INMATE? Another area where CCA cuts employee expenses is staff training: The company rarely meets the standards required of state and federal corrections officers. In interviews, former CCA employees have admitted that their training was inadequate. (New security personnel at South Central would ask inmates for advice on how to perform their job duties.) And in a correctional setting, substandard training can be dangerous and sometimes deadly. Shoddy training has resulted in the following incidents at CCA-operated facilities:

• An inmate walked out the front door wearing a guard’s uniform.
• Guards "counted" a dummy placed in a bunk while an inmate escaped.
• A CCA perimeter officer entered the facility’s main compound wearing his sidearm. (The officer who relieved him forgot to take it from him.)
• An inmate in a maximum-security segregation unit, released from his cell, managed to unlock his handcuffs and then killed another prisoner.
• Guards "hog tied" juvenile offenders and used other inappropriate restraints on them.
• Officers tortured inmates with stun guns, leaving visible marks.

Private prison guards are also more susceptible to corruption. They do not have the authority of the state — and the threat of state prosecution — to deter them from breaking prison rules. And private prison companies prefer to quietly fire employees found guilty of malfeasance rather than turn them over to the police. Low salaries make private prison officers more likely to take bribes, while poor training makes them more vulnerable to manipulation.

An example: I had packages mailed to a teacher in South Central’s education department, so that a clerk could give them to me. I wanted only to receive food from home, which was forbidden but would harm no one. Several years later, however, a supervisor passed on to an inmate a package that contained bolt cutters. Four prisoners cut their way out.

CCA, like most large corporations, is image conscious. The company is concerned about negative publicity that could cause shareholders to dump their investments. For example, CCA’s stock dropped almost 20 percent following the 1998 escape of six inmates from the company’s Youngstown, Ohio, facility. Private prisons therefore have an incentive to conceal adverse incidents.

SILENCING DISSENT. While at South Central, I worked on a computer-refurbishing project. When I learned that some of the better computers were being taken and used by CCA employees rather than being donated to public schools, I contacted both the media and CCA’s corporate office. The warden personally ordered a special reclassification to transfer me to another prison. I appealed and won.

Legislation to privatize Tennessee’s prison system was introduced in 1997. I was active in the fight against the bill, along with state prison workers represented by the Tennessee State Employees Association, prisoners’ rights groups, churches and prisoners’ families. I compiled a list of negative incidents involving CCA, aptly titled "What CCA Doesn’t Want You to Know," to mail to all of our state senators. Hours after I submitted the list to the librarian for photocopying, the warden ordered my immediate transfer to a distant prison. The legislature subsequently rejected the privatization bill despite intense lobbying by CCA.

To what extent are CCA officials willing to go to quash dissent and "get rid of" troublemakers? In my case, at least, to the extent of inciting violence. In 1998, I obtained a $6,000 federal judgment against a former CCA unit manager who tried to get other inmates to assault me because I refused to withdraw an administrative grievance I had filed.

* * *

The private prison industry is not solely responsible for its many shortcomings. Public officials, including state and federal corrections officials, deserve blame for failing to effectively monitor the industry and hold it accountable. I mean, for example, legislatures and regulatory agencies that fail to enact effective regulations, state monitors who ignore operators’ abuses, corrections departments that fail to enforce safeguard provisions of private prison contracts.

To be sure, publicly run facilities have problems, too, including corruption, incompetence or malfeasance at the local, state and federal levels. Nor are the publics exempt from violence, abuse of prisoners and civil rights violations.

The difference lies in the nature of the two types of facility. Privatization, with its emphasis on cutting corners to reduce costs, produces systemic deficiencies that make problems — ranging from riots and stabbings to escapes and murders — more likely to occur. High employee turnover and inadequate staff training lead to situations like the deadly violence at CCA’s Youngstown, Ohio, prison and the shameless abuse of juvenile offenders at a Wackenhut facility in Jena, La.

BOOSTING PROFITS. There is no incentive in public facilities to encourage or condone conditions that result in such shocking incidents. In the private sector, however, there is a built-in incentive: to save money and boost profit margins by hiring fewer staff, paying them less, failing to train them properly and cutting corners on security.

CCA and other private prison companies claim they can do the job cheaper. Perhaps they can. But that does not mean they can do it better, and better — or at least as well — is what’s required in an area as sensitive as prison operations.

When it comes to contracting out our corrections system to the lowest bidder, we should not be surprised when we get what we pay for.

Alex Friedmann is a prisoners’ rights activist and former editor of the Private Corrections Industry News Bulletin; he is presently employed as the statewide advocacy coordinator for Reconciliation, a Nashville-based non-profit that works on behalf of prisoners’ families.