Prison Riots and Privatization
Take 1200 prisoners from Arizona, hire Indiana at $64 per day to house them, then ship them 1500 miles from home and loved ones to a private prison in New Castle, Indiana run by the GEO Group, a private prison company that has been repeatedly cited for substandard conditions. When a riot among 500 prisoners broke out last week, with prisoners taking over the facility for two hours, it was hardly surprising to observers.
As the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette noted in an editorial:
The director of the Arizona Department of Corrections had visited New Castle a week before the riot and – based on what she found there – halted the planned transfer of 630 more inmates. A spokeswoman for the Arizona department said there were not enough guards on duty and they did not have enough experience...Some former prison employees have charged that GEO Group has cut staffing, and there are reports that privatization of the food services prompted complaints from inmates.
Profits for private prisons comes, as the Journal-Gazette emphasizes, from "cost savings and low-wage jobs that come at the expense of public safety."
Adding to these concerns is the fact that prison privatization in Indiana, as in too many states, followed a massive infusion of $226,000 in campaign contributions by prison interests to state-level candidates between 2001 and 2004, including $52,900 to incumbent governor Mitch Daniels.
This is all part of a broader trend, as Business Week details this week, of cash-strapped states increasingly turning to privatization of public assets like highways, airports and bridges -- a dangerous recipe for undermining public safety and ripping off the taxpayer, as Progressive States Network explained earlier this year.
Slightly below the radar at times, this privatization of public assets and public services, from Iraq to local toll roads, is a political issue spreading corruption and taxpayer ripoffs across the country. Riots in an Indiana prison are just a nasty manifestation of the broader rot in out civic life.
Comments (23)
It's a trend that didn't work the first time: I wonder why anyone thinks it will work now? I gather the first time the idea of state authorization for infrastructure construction by private investors was tried was creation of the Turnpike Trust (1703) in England. This was the model adopted in Colonial New England as well. In the UK it became mired in corruption. I don't believe this was quite the problem in the United States, but certainly the resulting system of improved roadways was very much a hit or miss affair.
Both England and the United States realized that National investment in projects for the civic good were necessary about the same time--the early 19th century. The first 19th century result in the United States was the National Road.
There is something incredibly perverse in selling of public assets to private interests. The idea of running prisons for profit grates my teeth...not only perverse, but ethically inexcusable and economically nonsensical, as we're beginning to see.
aMike
May 3, 2007 10:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
The GEO Group was formerly the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation.
May 3, 2007 10:26 AM | Reply | Permalink
The only reason there is a problem is our attitude about crime and punishment. We are in the position where we punish those who break laws, see that law breaking doesn't go down, so we add still more punishment for still more lawbreaking. Thus, the percentage of our citizenry that we insist on housing in prisons keeps rising rapidly. Until we accept the fact that ever harsher punishment is not a deterrent to law breaking, we can't solve this problem.
Hoppy in Sacramento
May 3, 2007 10:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
And apparently GEO/Wackenhut is a great fan of Bill Richardson:
The biggest beneficiary is Gov. Bill Richardson, who has collected $42,750 from the company since 2005. His running mate, Lt. Gov. Diane Denish, has received $8,000 from the prison company. According to The Institute of Money in State Politics, Richardson, as of May, had received more money from GEO than any other politician nationwide running for state office in this election cycle.
(From the link provided above on GEO's track record.)
May 3, 2007 10:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
I'm wondering when they're going to privatize prosecution.
May 3, 2007 11:24 AM | Reply | Permalink
They're working on that right now at the DOJ.
May 3, 2007 12:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Snicker...
May 3, 2007 1:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Outsourcing the prisons to India rather than Indiana would make more sense to me.
If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
I guess that makes me conservative on this issue. I'm not all lefty, more balanced on left and right issues I guess.
May 3, 2007 1:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Tax collection and security background investigations are only two of the other law enforcement functions being privatized. For all the complaints about "the bureaucracy", there are often appeal mechanisms that simply don't exist with privatization.
Quite seriously, think about what the direct privatized contractor can do with his own service delivery. What if a prison outsourced its call center, to people measured by calls per hour rather than any metric of satisfaction? What if the function is offshored, so now you may have competing accents?
How does one measure private prisons? Lack of riots? Rehabilitation?
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
May 3, 2007 1:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
Profitable prisons are, indeed, questionable. The drive to minimize costs to maximize margins has to be audited carefully.
Too simplistic a metric leads to absurdities in critical functions. I have a friend, an emergency physician, who was a contractor to a company contracted to run the urgent care centers for a hospital. After several months, he found two memos in his box.
The first commended him for having the highest patient satisfaction rating of any physician in the organization. That memo made a point that patient satisfaction increased business, and indeed lowered costs from having to redo tests, procedures, etc. that tended to be needed with the physicians whose patients were dissatisfied.
The second was notification of his termination as a contractor, because he had not met the norms of patients seen per hour. By their own metrics, he calculated, his satisfaction rating actually had his productivity as one of the highest in the group.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
May 3, 2007 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
What we need to do is outsource prison riots. I mean it took 500 people to take over the facility for 2 days? My company could have taken over the prison for a week with 100 well-motivated, highly trained people!
thosethingswesay.blogspot.com
May 3, 2007 2:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
As a very serious question, what do you see as the purpose of prisons? It's relatively straightforward for those prisoners sentenced to life without parole: keeping society safe from them.
I recognize rehabilitation is truly difficult. Prisons, however, often only equip inmates for more crime. I'd like to see some decent statistical analysis of the tradeoffs among cost of imprisonment, cost of recidivism, cost of rehabilitative services that have measurable benefit, and what are sometimes called "indirect costs" of imprisonment. The latter are such things as child and spouse support, assuming the prisoner did provide for a family.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
May 3, 2007 2:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
isn't that what arbitration is for? a lot of times, when you sign agreements, you agree to privatized arbitration.
May 3, 2007 4:35 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hate using the word immoral but this sounds immoral to me. It's sad to see that parents are being moved so far away from their kids and families.
May 3, 2007 4:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Stake a million dollars on it and Republicans will not only state publicly that 2-1=3, they will sincerely believe it. This is exactly the logic of privatiztion. It doesn,t matter how many times you lay out 2 oranges, take one away and count one left. Such is the power of markets.
May 3, 2007 7:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
If the so called Globalism scam which is actually thinly disguised Nienteenth Century imperialism continues to export factories/plants and outsource jobs to the third world we are going to become a three class society, the first a ruling elite getting stinking rich from exploiting third world labor, illegal immigrants here and exploiting citizens fallen into poverty plus two more rather broad classes. Those two classes will be prisoners and those hired by the prison privatizers from among the elite, for a little as possible, to guard them. Is that strains of Brazil I hear floating in the smoggy air?
Whenever two people meet, there are really six people present. There is each man as he sees himself, each man as the other person sees him, and each man as he really is.
William James
May 3, 2007 9:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
In our Democracy, by Constitution the People hold authority, granting some powers to the Government via Laws which are ratified by the People's Congress.
Those Powers are nontransferable.
Outsourcing any of its functions to third parties, whether they be private companies, shadow governments, secret police, foreign parties, etc. is innately forbidden by the vary nature of our Constitution whereby the People grant powers explicitly.
Unfortunately, things have gotten rather sloppy and we're moving towards oligarchy and blurring the authority of the People and the Constitution in many regards.
May 3, 2007 11:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
If the People have the authority (or sovereignty, as it used to be called), then the People can grant power where they will. The powers are transferrable. The flaw, however, is that the People have not agreed to this newest transfer of power -- in any way, shape, or form.
May 4, 2007 9:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
Kinda, but not exactly.
Any contract, whether it be a verbal agreement or the Constitution, is explicit, minimal, and exclusionary by nature, and thusly nontransferable unless explicitly stated otherwise.
The sovereign power held by the People and then granted to Government is absolutely not transferable by Government to the private sector, because the powers granted to Government do not explicitly include the power to transfer those powers.
For example, if you hire someone to do a job, say take care of your children, that person specifically is your employee, not anyone else. That person can't then delegate the job to a stranger without your prior explicit approval. The contract between you doesn't need to stipulate that the job is nontransferable (though lawyers might add it extraneously) because a contract between parties is nontransferable by default.
May 4, 2007 1:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm late responding Howard. But here goes in case you come back to this thread.
Here goes my "balanced" left and right. While I believe in sentencing repeat offenders for enough "time" to not make it worth the risk for them to do the "crime," I am all in favor of educating the criminals within the prison, rather than just caging them away like zoo animals.
So while they may have to do 10 years, why not let them get a college degree during that time?
"Prisons, however, often only equip inmates for more crime."
I agree - and this is also why I think the "time" needs to be sufficient enough to prevent them from committing the crime in the first place - which will keep them out of prison.
I befriended an ex con once, and I learned from listening to him that repeat offenders do indeed know what they are doing and they do measure the amount of time as a risk - they all follow the "don't do the crime" moniker. Or you could say - if you *can* do the time...... (I'll let you fill in the blank.)
I am not in favor of for-profit organizations running prisons off hand unless I saw evidence of such prisons doing better than governmental ones. But I do sometimes think we should outsource expensive operations such as surgery and prisons overseas to be able to shift tax revenues to positive programs such as education (and if it were the case that this shift to education meant paying for education for the criminals I'd be OK with that. Cheaper overhead trading off for being able to educate the criminals.)
May 4, 2007 11:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
One of the challenges here is we just don't have enough understanding of people that do crimes. I'm not making excuses here that someone's upbringing made him do it, but more to evaluate if the individual can be rehabilitated. Some can't. I tend to doubt that traditional psychological testing will tell us a lot, although it's probably something to be part of analysis. Functional (i.e., actually seeing metabolism and what parts activate when) brain imaging is in its infancy, but is starting to give some ideas about impulse control -- but it will be a long time before we can depend on it.
A friend of mine is a criminal defense attorney who does, among other things, death penalty defense. I was surprised when she told me that she was not flatly opposed to the death penalty. Essentially, she felt it was appropriate for dangerous people who showed no sign of change, and, by any rational standard, had a high risk of recidivism. She used the example that she would throw the switch on Bundy or McVeigh, but she would fight hard for someone in a crime of passion or in a robbery that went terribly wrong -- long prison terms yes, but not death. I pay her the compliment of making me think.
In an ideal world, we could separate those who might be rehabilitated, and those that really need to be caged. I have a friend, who I jokingly call my token Christian fundamentalist, and he calls me his token humanist neopagan, who has done a good deal of missionary work in prisons. He has no illusions about criminals, but he, as well as the Black Muslims, do manage to touch some people. He says that as much as being cared about, a tough-love form is the only thing that works; there has to be a way of developing self-discipline.
Religion is one such thing, and here I get into the area of questioning my own devotion to separation of church and state. Another area that seems quite successful are the various service dog, pet grooming, etc., training programs, even horse training in some Western states. I can see the need for discipline, the affection of the animals, and the feeling of contribution (with loss) as the animals graduate and leave.
As far as outsourcing, I have great difficulty giving private organizations any form of law enforcement authority, without a better understanding of how they can be made accountable in a country not under US law.
This is a discussion where no answers are simple, but that makes it good to talk about.
--
Howard
*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]
May 5, 2007 6:11 AM | Reply | Permalink
I saw a television segement on inmates who were getting their college degree while in prison. Professors from a University traveled to the prison to teach in a classroom within the prison. I doubt all the prisoners wanted to apply for the college, and the enrollment might have been limited / it might have been a test program, but - it seemed to be *working.* The inmates had positive outlooks on their lives. Not to mention if you understand more about society you might naturally have less against it - less of the "system got me" belief and more of the personal responsibility for your life belief.
Now opponents felt the government money should instead have been channelled to people who havn't committed crimes and need a scholarship to go to college. And that is where I would trade off lower overhead - damn the torpedoes - then putting the savings into paying for the college scholarships for the prisoners that have applied for the program. Admission to the program could also be an incentive for good behavior.
On the subject of negative peer influence, if you re-arrange the peer influence to another sort of influence be it religion or education or a prison job or what not then you are on the right track.
The peer thing and the mentor thing are what are needed to push aside the negative peers and negative mentors inner city children grow up around through no fault of their own in the poor areas.
Let's also consider the possibility of (some) inmates with a positive outlook on life due to being provided a colleege degree or vocational training or work experience, or becoming involved in a religion, hopefully with some generic personal growth education as well, can be positive advisors to the youth they encounter when they get out of jail. Rather than getting out of jail and teaching kids how to be criminals.
May 5, 2007 7:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
Just thought you might be interested in this.
Schools Behind Bars
Two interesting points behind the link. The programs are cost effective, and, in many instances, volunteer teachers actually do the teaching. Some other readers may know of other programs.
aMike
May 5, 2007 7:33 PM | Reply | Permalink