Empty Promise 4: Private Prisons Don't Cut Corners
Private companies boast of their ability to deliver effective education and treatment programs, while maintaining tight security within their prisons.
REALITY: Private Prisons Cut Corners and the Results are Disastrous
- Public safety officials realize that cutting corners can have expensive — and even deadly — consequences. That's why more and more public safety officials are imposing fines on private companies and even canceling contracts. In recent years, Arkansas, Colorado, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas and Utah have ended contracts with private prison companies.
- George Washington University Professor James Austin, an expert on private prisons and inmate classification, compared the rates of major incidents in private and public prisons of comparable security levels and found that private prisons had 50 percent more inmate-onstaff assaults and two-thirds more inmate-on-inmate assaults. The following incidents illustrate this point: In just a year's time, four inmates and a private prison guard were killed in the GEO Group's two New Mexico prisons. In a little over a year, 20 inmates were stabbed and two were murdered at a CCA facility in Youngstown, Ohio. And the GEO Group closed one of its juvenile facilities after the U.S. Department of Justice said that the facility's conditions were "life-threatening."
- In 2004, Colorado spent an estimated $386,000 quelling a major riot at the CCA-operated Crowley County Correctional Facility. A DOC investigation found that CCA chronically understaffed the facility and the private prison guards were inadequately trained and ill-equipped to prevent the riot or regain order. CCA had a staffing ratio of 34 inmates per officer compared to a ratio of five inmates per officer in state-operated prisons. CCA prison guards made about two-thirds that of state corrections officers — $1,818 per month, compared with $2,774 per month, and CCA's staff turnover was about twice the rate as in state prisons. During the riot, inmates were severely beaten, cells were ransacked and set on fire, and a female librarian was trapped with dozens of convicts.