(NEW YORK) MintPress — Once again, the nation’s private prison industry claims to be trying to alleviate the huge burden that many states are carrying due to overcrowded prisons and underfunded budgets when it is in fact trying to create the market conditions necessary to expand its own business.
In its latest and perhaps brashest move, the Nashville-based Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the country’s largest private prison company, has sent a $250 million proposal to prison officials in 48 states offering to buy facilities in exchange for certain guarantees, including one that the governments maintain an occupancy rate of 90 percent for at least 20 years.
Illinois and New York have both enacted laws banning the privatization of prisons, correctional facilities and any services related to their operation.
Some state officials have lashed out at the latest offer, expressing anger over the obvious: A contractually required occupancy rate puts undue pressure on criminal justice officials to seek harsher sentences.
“My concern would be that our state would be obligated to maintain these (occupancy) rates and subtle pressure would be applied to make sentencing laws more severe with a clear intent to drive up the population,” said Roger Werholtz, former Kansas secretary of corrections.
CCA spokesman Steve Owen described what he called the company’s “investment initiative” as “an additional option” for cash-strapped states.
Last September, CCA reached a similar deal with the state of Ohio to pay it $72.2 million for the 1,798-bed Lake Erie Correctional Institution, although that agreement requires the state to maintain a 90 percent occupancy rate for 18 months.
Linda Janes, chief of staff for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, told govtslaves.info that the state was trying to fill a $188 million deficit in the corrections agency. She said private management of the facility would result in an annual savings of about $3 million.
As part of the contract, Ohio pays CCA a monthly fee totaling $3.8 million a year.
“You don’t want a prison system operating with the goal of maximizing profits,” said Texas state Sen. John Whitmire (D-Houston), an advocate for reducing prison populations through less costly diversion programs. “The only thing worse is that this seeks to take advantage of some states’ troubled financial position.”
Booming business
This is hardly the first time that CCA finds itself at the center of a controversy. In fact, CCA created the modern private prison industry in 1984, a year after it was established, when it was awarded a contract to take over a facility in Hamilton County, Tenn., the first time any government in the U.S. had contracted out the complete operation of a jail.
The next year, the company graciously offered to take over the entire state prison system of Tennessee for $200 million; the bid was defeated by the state legislature amid strong opposition from public employees.
But CAA continued to expand and now houses more than 80,000 inmates in more than 60 facilities, 44 of which are company-owned. It currently partners with all three federal corrections agencies (the Federal Bureau of Prisons; the U.S. Marshals Service; and Immigration and Customs Enforcement), 16 states, more than a dozen local municipalities and Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Eager to jump on the inmates for profit bandwagon, other prison companies followed suit, among them the Boca-Raton, Fla.-based GEO Group, which has 109 facilities, approximately 75,000 beds and 20,000 employees around the globe.
Most privately run facilities in the U.S. are located in the South and West and include both state and federal offenders.
CCA and the GEO Group, both publicly traded companies, posted revenues of more than $1.5 billion each last year.
Buying beds
Not surprisingly, these huge profits come after an equally huge lobbying campaign. “The relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” said the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) in a June 2011 report.
The report found that the private prison industry has spent millions trying to increase sentences and incarcerate more people in order to boost profits. CCA spent more than $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO forked out between $120,000 and $199,999 in Florida alone during a three-month span in 2011.
Of that, $450,000 went to the Republican national and congressional committees, while Democrats received less than half of that. Among the private prison lobby’s main benefactors: House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
The co-founder of CCA, Tom Beasley, used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.
And until 2010, CCA senior director Laurie Shanblum sat on the executive task for public safety and elections of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group of conservative legislators and business representatives.
Funded by 23 corporations, including Exxon Mobil, AT&T, Coca Cola and Koch Industries, which comprise its “private enterprise board,” ALEC writes and supplies fully drafted bills to state legislators. On its website, it claims that it has more than 1,000 of these bills introduced by legislative members every year, with 1 in every 5 of them enacted into law.
Also on the ALEC executive task force for public safety and elections: Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce, who introduced Arizona’s draconian immigration law, S.B. 1070.
Indeed, parts of the law, including the “show me your papers” provision, are exactly the same as the ALEC public safety task force’s model legislation, according to the Center for Media and Democracy.
Thirty of the 36 legislators who co-sponsored S.B. 1070, received campaign contributions from CCA and GEO.
Rampant corruption
Private prisons have also been found guilty of myriad abuses, from understaffing facilities to bribing judges to impose disproportionately long sentences.
Thinkprogress recently found that a Georgia prison run by CCA charges detainees $5 a minute for phone calls to lawyers and loved ones while paying them just a dollar a day for menial labor. One woman reported that her diabetic husband does not receive enough food, so she has to deposit money for him to buy more.
Last fall, Occupy Nashville protested outside of the company headquarters by holding a “human auction” to demonstrate how CCA profits from human suffering.
According to the Justice Policy Institute, privatizing more prisons to control costs is the wrong way to go.
“Policies introduced in the 1980s and 1990s are responsible for the rapid growth in prison populations and costs,” it said in a recent report. “Reforming these policies will result in the significant savings lawmakers seek, while maintaining public safety, improving outcomes for people and communities, and avoiding the problems known to accompany private prisons.”