With a market capitalization of $3.8 billion,5 Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is the nation’s largest private prison operator, running more than sixty correctional and detention facilities, owning most of them and leasing the rest. As of March 2013, it employed nearly seventeen thousand full-timers to watch over its inmates, who are spread out over institutions with a total capacity of ninety thousand.6 Of course that’s only a tiny sliver of the U.S. inmate population, which is why stock analysts figure the company has awesome growth potential. Citing “the long-term trend toward harsher incarceration in the United States,” Forbes concluded that “the future looks bright” for CCA. The magazine pointed out that from 1980 to 2008, the prison population gained 375 percent and added, “That figure exceeds the growth in the general population—+32.4%—by more than a factor of 10.”7
Forbes predicted that California, the biggest state with the biggest prison population, will at some point have to turn to private prisons to staunch some of its red ink (Forbes wrongly assumed private jailers would deliver on their promises to lower costs), and gushed without a trace of irony, “Fully 9.5% of the California state budget is allocated toward prisons. Only 5.7%, by comparison, goes to universities. Twenty-five years ago, prisons were 4% of the budget. Higher education represented 11% of the state budget.” Actually, current state prison expenditures are higher than that—more like 11.5 percent. Still, it makes you wonder about the mind set of financial reporters who seem to think these malevolent priorities are something to celebrate: “The bottom line is that Corrections Corp. can’t build prisons fast enough, and it will never run out of demand for its product…. Low costs, strong margins and an endless supply of ‘customers’ make this business model as good as they get.”8 In 1985 CCA gained attention when it boldly and publicly offered to take over the entire state prison system of Tennessee for $200 million. The bid was ultimately defeated by strong opposition from public employees and many skeptics within the legislature.
When Brenda Valencia finally finished her sentence for drug charges, she hoped to help stem the mandatory-sentencing currents that had put her away for so many birthdays and Christmases. “It’s very difficult, getting the system to change,” she said. “It’s actually a money-making industry, and it’s really strong.” Trying to alert the public to tragic stories about imprisoning hapless souls for no good reason wasn’t working, she said. So instead of trying to change the system she settled for counseling young girls. She tries to change lives one at a time.
Like the fast-talking Harold Hill in The Music Man, CCA is particularly adept at selling its spiel to rural communities. In some cases it’s actually convinced town fathers to issue bonds to build a private prison on speculation, with no guarantee that a governmental entity will make use of the facility. Without owning horses, they bought horse carts, the theory being “build it and they will come.” Once such a project is launched, local citizens and their political appendages become a lobbying branch of the company, working to get somebody’s prisoners inside the spanking new, purposely sterile, sorrowful structures, which, of course, are then operated by CCA. One might think that these little towns would try juicing the local economy by establishing something with a little more pizzazz, perhaps a music camp or a solar power institute, but they’re particularly vulnerable to the siren song of watchtowers and razor wire. A big selling point is that no special knowledge is demanded of guard recruits. CCA gives them four weeks of training, and bam—they’re surrounded by bars, inmates, and tedium.
Once the place begins employing people and operating as an actual prison, it becomes a special interest in the same league with all the bridges to nowhere, superfluous military installations, and other budget boondoggles. The Gulag industry can always justify putting more people in prison and imposing longer sentences, no matter what’s going on outside the walls: if crime rises, we must need more people behind bars. If crime goes down, wholesale imprisonment must be succeeding.
CCA unabashedly concedes that anything softer than a hard line is the enemy of its profits. In a 2010 annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company stated, “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by… leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices.”9
Frank Keating, who during his campaign promised to “get tough” on crime, was elected Oklahoma governor in 1994. Not long after he assumed office, he directed a CCA executive to evaluate the state’s prison system, which was like asking a life insurance company whether you should buy life insurance. Not surprisingly, the CCA man concluded that the parole system was too lenient, that Oklahoma needed to hold convicts longer, and that private prisons should be employed to lock up the expected overflow. Keating, a Republican, began contracting with prison companies, CCA among them. “It is high time Democratic legislators demonstrate the leadership and concern for our citizenry in providing the necessary funding to contract with private prisons for high security bed space,” he declared, calling the situation an “emergency.”10
The state allocated millions of dollars to private prison corporations that promised they could do the job cheaper, and the state’s prisoner population climbed as toughened statutes stiffened sentences and the courts relied less and less on probationary programs. From 1995 to 2010 the state’s prison population grew 48 percent from 17,983 inmates to 26,720. State appropriations increased 145 percent to more than $461 million.11 As tax income shrank with the 2008 global economic spiral, the state drastically cut prison treatment and training programs and per diem rates paid to the prison privateers. By the end of 2010 it was appropriating only $2.22 a day to feed each inmate, down about 25 percent from previous budgets. (By comparison, the Salvation Army figures its Golden Meals for seniors cost it $5.50 apiece. That’s per meal, not per day.)
When conditions inside deteriorate this much, it’s past time to ask how many of these prisoners actually need to be there. The state legislature commissioned a study of the female inmate population and concluded 68 percent of them posed no threat to public safety.12
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is a secretive, right-wing lobbying group of corporations and legislators that works to privatize most of the known universe, including the penal system. ALEC, one of those vital junctions where hard-right politics meets corporate revenues, is particularly keen on mandatory sentencing, a practice that basically transfers social welfare dollars from communities to prison corporations and private servicing companies.13
One of the most powerful lobbying arms in the country, ALEC seeks to expand the role of private enterprise in the criminal justice system by taking on additional duties, such as monitoring parolees.14 This expansion would give significant power to people who aren’t sworn officers and presents a particularly sticky situation when employees monitoring released inmates work for a firm that also runs prisons. The firms would clearly have a powerful incentive to cast released prisoners back inside their prisons-for-profit, where every empty bed is a slap in the face to net income. But because ALEC treats all forms of government regulation like infectious diseases, nothing in its model legislation prevents this clear conflict of interest.