Hiring mercenaries to keep prisoners locked up, obedient, and dependent on profit-making companies is a giant step away from morality and good sense. Bear in mind that private prison firms can boost profits by cutting corners or even filing new charges against inmates. It’s one thing to hire rent-a-cops to protect property, but quite another to substitute them for sworn officers and place them in charge of captive humans. The American Friends Service Committee isn’t alone in its view that private prisons are “inherently unethical.” These prisons are part of the same outsourcing mania that seized Chicago when it leased all its parking meters to a private firm. The firm made many promises and then proceeded to raise meter prices exponentially and screw everybody.3
GEO/Wackenhut all by itself has enough penal atrocities on its rap sheet to rival the Hell’s Angels. The offenses include racial bigotry, cheating, lying, fraud, gratuitous strip searches, sexual assault, and inmate death. Yet the company’s contracts keep coming. It’s the American Gulag’s own Halliburton, whose KBR subsidiary built showers on U.S. bases in Iraq that electrocuted military personnel and then won new Pentagon contracts anyway. The following are a few examples of GEO/Wackenhut’s known transgressions:
• June 2010: GEO Group signs a consent decree with U.S. Department of Labor for discriminating against African-American job seekers at a Colorado detention facility; it distributes $290,000 to 446 applicants.
• May 2010: GEO Group pays out $3 million in a class-action suit for strip searches of as many as ten thousand arrestees without cause at six jails in Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Mexico, and Texas.
• February 2010: GEO Group settles for $7.5 million with a whistle-blower and Miami/Dade County, Florida, for fraudulent billing practices.
• March 2007: GEO Group settles with the family of a female inmate for an unknown amount after the inmate was assaulted and raped in a Texas county lockup and died in the jail.
• August 1999: Wackenhut loses a $12 million contract with a jail in Travis County, Texas, after several guards are charged with sexually assaulting female inmates; it pays $625,000 in fines for related mismanagement.4
Clearly Gergen and I got off lucky. But we’d left Allen behind, and we worried he’d have to answer to Mongo and Squeaky for our transgressions. I decided the best way to protect him was to put the incident on the record. I did not trust Wackenhut, so I contacted the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which had awarded the contract, to see if anyone there would care. Eventually, I was passed along to a public affairs officer who, learning that I wrote a column for a boxing magazine, actually did show concern of a sort. He asked me not to make the bureau look bad in my column.
Later I described our brush with Mongo and Squeaky to Allen. He wasn’t surprised in the least. “I live with that every day,” he said simply.
11
Prison Privateers and Jailing for Cash
PRISON CORPORATIONS ARE ENTREPRENEURIAL KIN TO THE THÉNARDIERS IN Hugo’s Les Misérables. Paid to care for Cosette by her struggling, tragically deceived mother, they saw her as a commodity to exploit for labor and income. Modern Thénadiers hire hordes of lobbyists and propagandists to induce us to ignore the conflict of interest that’s built into the very concept of a private prison, to disregard the plain truth that the mission of incarcerating humans is incongruent with the profit motive.
These privateers most obviously cross the line when they subtly advocate jailing people even though they either know or at least strongly suspect that it serves no social purpose. Those who lack the gene for rapacious greed might have a hard time believing that corporate chieftains, politicians, and other members of the Gulag industry would actually seek to unjustly imprison their fellow citizens merely to make extra dollars. Jailing the wrong people for cash sounds like an exaggerated cliché, the kind of evil that might be conceived by villainous buffoons in a Batman comic. But it’s a multibillion-dollar industry that, unlike the Joker and the Penguin, has no caped heroes to oppose it.
Alan Greenspan, no leftist crank, famously observed that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was “largely about oil”1—that is, it was a war fought for booty. Conducted under the cloak of government, it was the modern equivalent of releasing privateers on the high seas to scare up loot. In the scheme of things, locking up loads of people to make a fast buck is at least less lethal than bombarding them with the shock and awe of a modern death storm in order to harvest their resources. And those who can convince themselves that gratuitous incarceration somehow benefits society might fail to view it as the atrocity that it is.
Only a small segment of the global corporate structure makes a direct profit from expanding the Gulag. The rest of it probably doesn’t much care one way or the other, although theorists, such as Frances Fox Piven at the City University of New York, make the case that the establishment sees wholesale incarceration as a useful method to preventively marginalize the oppressed masses before they can take their grievances into the street.2 In any case, while a trip to the cooler may constitute a black hole of grief, danger, boredom, and towering unpleasantness to inmates, to a small army of beneficiaries it is an opportunity to extract some of the $70 billion a year generated from the care and feeding of the American prison-industrial complex. Maintaining these institutions is one of those chores, like processing sewage, that most folks prefer to leave to someone else. The distastefulness of the job makes it more lucrative for private companies willing to handle it. County jails, for instance, are generally run by deputies within the sheriff’s departments. Working in the jail is often considered either a punishment or a form of hazing, so deputies assigned there tend to be rookies and rejects.
“The guards are in prison too,” observed Patrick Russell, a retired investigator for the San Diego District Attorney’s Office whose penitentiary trips generally left him vaguely disquieted. His is a common reaction to the impenetrable grimness. He continued, “Can you imagine what kind of person would work in one of those places day after day? Now imagine doing two shifts back to back so you can pull in overtime.”3 Custodial duty sits at the bottom of the police pecking order, even beneath the vice squad chore of hanging around men’s rooms to monitor them for gay sex.
Another element that makes the confinement business profitable is that no one with any political or financial clout is terribly finicky about what kind of job you do. An Alabama-based outfit by the name of Global Tel Link, for example, buys exclusive rights to connect calls made from the temperamental phones they install for inmates in jails and prisons around the country. The phones process only outgoing calls, which must be made collect, and calling charges are exorbitantly priced. When a firm serves customers who are a captive audience, it doesn’t need to run spring sales to attract their business. A poll of users would find that malfunctions are common. Sometimes the other party seems to be speaking from deep inside a mine. Other times the call goes dead altogether. Although the average American knows little or nothing about these irksome connections and the steep bills that accompany them, a multitude of poor and powerless folks struggle with them every day.4
Prisoners and their families endure shoddy service and high prices in one jail transaction after another, whether they’re making a call, arranging for a package, or purchasing toothpaste. Service can range from lousy to impossible. It’s a natural consequence when the people awarding the monopoly contracts do not consult actual customers about what they experience.