Prison Payola

Decades ago, the economy of Florence, Arizona, was in shambles. The small town, located 45 minutes southeast of Phoenix, could barely provide basic civic services; the fire department had to park their truck on a ramp in case the aging engine wouldn’t start. Today, however, the municipal coffers are overflowing, thanks to three private prisons that employ the town’s residents, fuel the economy, and draw state funds. As former police chief Tom Rankin says in the award-winning 2005 radio documentary Crime Pays: A Look at Who’s Getting Rich from the Prison Boom, “There’s a lot of towns bigger than us that would love to have [what we have]. But they don’t have it because they don’t have that private prison money coming in.”

Private prisons are changing the face of American incarceration. According to supporters, they provide a higher level of service at a lower cost to the state—all while boosting development. 

In reality, private prisons are hardly a panacea. In Crime Pays, researcher JoAnn Mar describes how private prisons struggle to match the level of service at the state-run public prisons they were meant to replace. The prison industry has shown little private sector innovation and efficiency, those commonly cited reasons to privatize. As Mar explains, “To maximize profits, many prisons cut corners.”

Private prisons generally reduce salaries, healthcare, and training. The common practice of hiring non-union workers at lower wages has led to turnover rates roughly three times higher than public prisons. Staff at private prisons is often inexperienced and less rigorously trained—sometimes disastrously so. In 1998, for instance, four murderers and two other violent offenders escaped from a private prison in Youngstown, Ohio, sending the town into a panic. The subsequent investigation found inadequate guard training was a primary factor in the incident.

Despite their rampant cost-cutting, it’s unclear whether private prisons even cost less. A 1996 report by the United States General Accounting Office found that studies on private prisons in five states “[did] not offer substantial evidence that savings have occurred.” Several independent studies have since echoed that conclusion, but never definitively. As Mar states in Crime Pays, “Studies comparing [private prisons to public prisons] reach different conclusions, depending on who’s funding the research.”

In theory, successful privatization depends upon economic competition, but in the private prison business, two companies—the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, Inc.—control over 70 percent of the market. If a private prison operator fails to meet contractual obligations to the state, cash-strapped authorities have to resume public operations of the prison–or else permit substandard operation. Louisiana’s Tallulah Correctional Center for Youth notoriously chose the latter: The New York Times reported in 1998 that inmates suffered “black eyes, broken noses or jaws, or perforated eardrums from beatings by the poorly paid, poorly trained guards, or from fights with other boys.” Yet Tallulah continued operating as a for-profit prison until 2004, when excessive negative publicity finally forced the state to close it.

Of course, measuring private prisons against public prisons is like comparing rotten apples to rotten oranges: neither is particularly desirable. Analyzing cost-efficiency misses the more pressing issue of how privatization affects criminal justice. As UCLA law professor Sharon Dolovich asks in “State Punishment and Private Prisons,” published in the December 2005 Duke Law Journal, “What if the private prison industry were exerting political pressure on state legislators not only to encourage a shift to privatization, but also to generate harsher sentencing regimes? The state’s sentencing policies, and thus the sentences imposed pursuant to them, [would be] inconsistent with the priority of the most urgent interests and instead serve the financial interests of the private prison industry.” In short, when imprisonment becomes business, society pays.

Dolovich’s question isn’t hypothetical: Private prisons do manipulate the criminal justice system for profit. One of the principal mechanisms used to advance their cause is the American Legislative Council (ALEC), a conservative public policy think tank whose members include private corporations, trade organizations, and 2,400 (about one-third of the country’s total) state and federal legislators. According to their website, “ALEC’s National Task Forces serve as public policy laboratories where members develop model policies to use across the country…Legislators welcome their private sector counterparts to the table as equals, working in unison to solve the challenges facing the nation.” ALEC’s primary function is to draft model legislation for officials to introduce in their districts; it’s essentially a forum for corporations and government to coauthor laws.

Among the most productive of ALEC’s various divisions is the Criminal Justice and Homeland Security Task Force, which has passed its model legislation into real laws for minimum mandatory sentencing, “three-strikes” regulations, and “truth in sentencing” statutes that dramatically reduce the potential for parole. Due in large part to these laws, the population of incarcerated Americans has risen dramatically from 740,000 prisoners in 1985 to more than 2.1 million in 2003. With that statistic, a windfall for the private prison business, it should come as no surprise that both CCA and Wackenhut are major benefactors of ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force which, for many years, CCA executives cochaired.

Today, the federal government’s efforts to keep track of thousands of illegal immigrants and foreign detainees are the industry’s biggest growth area. The new business since 9/11 has helped CCA and Wackenhut recover from low stock prices after a series of escapes and riots in the late 1990s. Independent prison analyst Judith A. Greene found that by 2000, “most state correctional managers were taking a hard look at the private prison industry, [but] the federal government began to fill the breach with an unprecedented level of new contact solicitations for private prison beds.” President Bush has expressed unwillingness to raise taxes to build new federal prisons: Foreign detainees will be kept in private prisons.

Private prisons’ influence over the American criminal justice system threatens the wellbeing of cities in particular. While a few rural towns like Florence, Arizona, profit from excessive incarceration, the cities from which prisons are drawn suffer diminished workforces, torn-apart families, and growing distrust of the government. As Greene states, “Putting the profit motive ahead of the public interest undercuts sound correctional practice. A corporation’s fundamental obligation is to increase its stockholders’ profits, not to increase public safety, to improve prison conditions, or to rehabilitate prisoners… skimping on food, medical services, and prison programs is not only likely to increase prison management problems in the short run, but it also undermines the longterm goal of preparing prisoners for release back to the community.”

Even if private prisons provided a level of service equivalent to existing public facilities at a lower price, a for-profit incarceration system costs too much. The American prison system needs to be fixed, and private prisons aren’t the solution.