In addition to the corporations that fund it, ALEC members include hundreds of conservative legislators from all fifty states and about eighty members of Congress. It’s a lobbying group that writes a lot of “model” legislation, which often seeps its way into law with few people aware of its origin. Beginning around 2010, however, more journalists began looking into what had been a barely known organization. ALEC tries to keep a low profile so legislator members can take full credit for dropping prefabricated ALEC bills into the hopper. These bills are designed to generate profits for corporate members who share the bounty by legally compensating member politicians through campaign donations or business activities.
ALEC doesn’t believe in coddling convicts. “Additional economic burdens should not be placed on taxpayers,” it says. “To the greatest extent possible, the program’s costs should be borne by criminals.”15 Courts and lawmakers often agree, stacking fees and surcharges upon offenders’ backs like bags of rocks. There are fees for incarceration, probation supervision, drug tests, “reparations,” and other items and services. In many cases the legislatures and local governments that levy the charges aren’t even aware of the others already in place. Typically when inmates’ families deposit money for commissary items such as deodorant or candy bars, the institution deducts as much as 50 percent to pay fees that most folks outside the criminal justice system have never heard of. Uncollected amounts can follow the ex-offender and cause him to be jailed for nonpayment. Ex-convicts already face terrible odds against finding a job. Coming out the gate with debts chains them to additional dead weight. These postprison punishments resemble the old Soviet practice of forcing released prisoners to remain in Siberian exile, further distancing them from the goal of resuming normal life.
If ALEC policymakers spent a little time outside the visitors area of any jail in America, they’d see a lot of beat-up vehicles with mismatched fenders and oil leaks. Young women pour out of Greyhound buses tugging small children. They wear clothing by Walmart or Target. Families of inmates are mostly nonwhite, but the real common denominator is poverty, not race. The New York Bar Association estimated in 2006 that 80 percent of U.S. defendants charged with a felony are indigent.16 The ALEC notion that we can tithe them and their families to subsidize the criminal-industrial complex rests upon the crackpot fantasy that these people are sitting on mountains of dope and hidden cash.
One ALEC idea is to allow convicts to secure early release by posting a bond, which is much like selling pardons. A related money-buys-privilege concept is the trend to add toll lanes rather than carpool lanes to clogged roads. Mississippi enacted a clone of the ALEC early release bill in 2007, and Michigan and South Dakota passed their own versions later. It works very much like the bail system set up for non-convicted defendants, which also allows money to buy extra privileges. Bonding companies charge a fee to the inmate’s family—most often 10 percent of the bail amount—to post bond. The ALEC bill gives the company the right to place early parolees back in custody if they fall out of compliance by, for example, being unemployed.17
Wafting up from beneath the prison privateer’s sales pitch is the same musky promise that pervades so many outsourcing bids: We can do it cheaper because we’ll cut corners you wouldn’t dare cut yourselves. The private employees receive the kind of wages and benefits (or lack of them) that your average public institution wouldn’t want to be a part of, at least not directly. Forbes, noting that wages represent 70 percent of a prison’s budget, reports, “Private prison operators pay security guard wages rather than correctional officer wages, giving a significant advantage.”18
But even when companies pay their guards wages that are a third or less of state employees’ wages, much of the savings goes toward executive salaries and perks and stockholders’ dividends. What the taxpayers get is rent-a-cops like Mongo and Squeaky in charge of their inmates. And if they can avoid it, the firms don’t mention to townsfolk that employees from other locations around the company can bid on the new jobs opening up, leaving locals fewer spots than the Music Man promised.
Certainly marketing brochures issued by private prison companies don’t mention the February 2001 study released by the U.S. Justice Department titled Emerging Issues on Privatized Prisons.19 It concluded that private prisons saved the government at best 1 percent of costs. Worse, the authors found that on a per-inmate basis, there were 40 percent more assaults on inmates in private facilities and 49 percent more assaults on staff, and in two statistics that stand out like skunks at a picnic, there were 11.3 times as many riots and nine times as many AIDS cases. Private institutions also experienced significant problems with staff turnover. According to the last self-reported industry statistics from 2000, the average private prison staff turnover rate was 53 percent, whereas the public prison turnover rate was 16 percent. “Nevertheless,” concluded the federal study, “there were indications that the mere prospect of privatization had a positive effect on prison administration, making it more responsive to reform.”20 In other words, it may be a good idea to threaten to turn your prisons over to corporations, but it’s a bad idea to actually do it.
An exhaustive 2005 study by Professor Thomas J. Bernard of Penn State also found that private lockups might save approximately 1 percent, but that’s only after 70 percent of them obtain tax subsidies. Bernard said that prison corporations routinely claimed they operate for 20 percent less than public institutions, but he found no evidence to back this assertion.21
Undaunted, in early 2012 CCA sent letters to forty-eight states offering to buy up their prisons as a remedy for “challenging corrections budgets.” In exchange, the company sought twenty-year management contracts, plus an assurance that the prison would remain at least 90 percent full. If crime were to decline, the state would still have to go out and find bodies for CCA. The proposed contract therefore kept the concept of justice conveniently out of the equation. “We believe this comes at a timely and helpful juncture and hope you will share our belief in the benefits of the purchase-and-manage model,” read the letter from Harley Lappin, CCA’s chief corrections officer, a former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.22
The ACLU found that the number of inmates in private prisons increased by roughly 1,600 percent between 1990 and 2009 and that in 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone took in nearly $3 billion in revenue while their top executives each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million.23 Ohio officials, accepting CCA’s math, continued this trend in 2011, when they sold off one of the state’s largest prisons to CCA as a way to make some quick cash and slim down its budget.24 Around the same time Louisiana’s Republican governor, Bobby Jindal, proposed accepting private bids for three of his state’s prisons, but he couldn’t convince the legislature to go along.
A 2003 joint study by the Florida Department of Corrections, Florida State University, and the Correctional Privatization Commission found that in “only one of thirty-six comparisons was there evidence that private prisons were more effective than public prisons in terms of reducing recidivism.” The same study also found that two private prisons spent only about half as much on health care per inmate as comparable state prisons did.25 A 2008 study published in Crime and Delinquency, which tracked more than twenty-three thousand released convicts, found that “private prison inmates had a greater hazard of recidivism in all eight models tested, six of which were statistically significant.”26 Increased recidivism significantly negates financial benefits, if they exist at all. Also, because private prison companies are private entities, they’re not covered by the Freedom of Information Act or most public records statutes; this allows them to sweep dirty outcomes under their private rugs. They’re accountable to their shareholders, not the public, and therefore citizens interested in learning about their methods and results have to contend with a layer of secrecy. In 2008 CCA general counsel Gus Puryear admitted that the company did not disclose detailed audit reports to contracting government agencies. In response to a question from U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein, he confirmed that the company “did not make customers aware of these documents.”27