Undaunted, former academic Richard P. Seiter, executive vice president and chief corrections officer of CCA, proclaimed in March 2008 that the “private corrections industry has established itself as a viable and dependable partner to government…. Not only can private operators provide flexibility and cost efficiency to government agencies, they do so without sacrificing quality or safety.”28
The issue of private prisons and their relative effectiveness is similar to the debates over cigarette smoking and climate change. Corporations inconvenienced by the facts pay a bounty to “experts” who find a way to ignore them. It’s not difficult to find polemicists to tell you that the privatization glass is always half-full, that Mongo and Squeaky spell progress, and that governing through actual government institutions is sloppy and unsound. Seiter is a PhD who used to be an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at Saint Louis University. As an expert advocate for CCA, he earned $1,138,550 in 2009. That year his former university employer paid an average of $72,000 to its associate professors, less than a fifteenth of Seiter’s corporate compensation.
The Arizona Department of Corrections, after studying the issue, found private prisons often house only relatively healthy inmates and disguise this shortcut to lower costs. “It’s cherry-picking,” said State Representative Chad Campbell, leader of the Arizona House Democrats. “They leave the most expensive prisoners with taxpayers and take the easy prisoners.”29
Five of eight private prisons serving Arizona didn’t accept inmates with “limited physical capacity and stamina,” severe physical illness, or chronic conditions, according to the state’s analysis, issued in April 2011. None took inmates with “high-need” mental health conditions. Some inmates who became sick were “returned to state prisons due to an increase of their medical scores that exceeds contractual exclusions.”30
Russ Van Vleet, a former codirector of the University of Utah Criminal Justice Center, after reviewing years of research, said, “There’s a perception that the private sector is always going to do it more efficiently and less costly. But there really isn’t much out there that says that’s correct.” Savings from privatizing prisons, he said, “are not guaranteed and appear minimal.” Confronted with the emptiness of the corporate claims, Steve Owen, spokesman for CCA, contended, “There is a mixed bag of research out there. It’s not as black and white and cut and dried as we would like.”31
One referee that sees an eternally bright sun shining on the concept of corporate prisons is the conservative Reason Foundation. David H. Koch, billionaire oligarch and tireless champion of privatization, serves on its board. CCA touts an “independent” joint study by the Reason Foundation and Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Foundation. This study concluded that California’s soaring prison costs ($47,000 per year per inmate, the study said) could be easily curbed by contracting with private prisons. The state’s savings would be $120 million a year for each batch of five thousand inmates transferred from state lockups to private prisons, the evidence-defying study contended. “Public-private partnerships (PPPs) offer a powerful policy option as part of a comprehensive strategy to address California’s corrections crisis,” the report concludes.32 Naturally, this study, released in April 2010 and revised a year later, ignores all the bona fide independent research that reaches the opposite conclusion.
Private prisons are “a big business here in Kentucky,” pointed out Louisville defense attorney Nathan Miller. Two of the state’s fourteen prisons are operated by CCA. “This entails construction contracts,” said Miller, “and after the prison is built, there are providers of phone services, food services, and all that. And they can pretty much charge whatever they want. It’s a big moneymaker for a lot of people. They keep it stocked with drug offenders, mostly.”33
The Federal Bureau of Prisons says that approximately 15 percent of its 210,000 inmates “are confined in secure facilities operated primarily by private corrections companies and to a lesser extent by state and local governments, and in privately operated community corrections centers.”34 This is in spite of the bureau’s own research showing the many serious problems posed by jailing people for cash.
12
Captive Employees
SOFIA COSMA, ONE OF GREATEST PIANISTS OF HER TIME, WAS AN AUSTRIAN Jew who managed to flee into Soviet territory one step ahead of her Nazi pursuers. But after crossing the border, she was arrested and transported to Siberia to dig potatoes for seven years. Her crime? She possessed an Austrian passport. Austria, which had been absorbed into the Third Reich and no longer existed as a separate country, was nevertheless a ghost enemy of the Soviet Union, and so, Cosma was a Soviet enemy too.1 Stalin’s security functionaries made this and other grievous arrests based on bureaucratic bungling, institutional paranoia, and a propensity to punish first and ask questions later. But a fourth cause may have been more powerful than the others—an addiction to free labor. Why let a woman play the piano when you can force her to bring in your potato crop?
The use of forced convict labor provided convenience and savings to the Stalinist regime, whose mission to build an economic foundation for the empire naturally trampled petty anachronisms, such as manifesting equal justice under the law. The Gulag where so many inmates suffered and died wasn’t a new concept. Slavery had been around thousands of years.
There is “not an increase in crime,” contends the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at State University of New York–Binghamton, “rather an increase in people being used to work for free in the factories, fields, telemarketing and lingerie production behind the walls of the existing prison system. The privatization of prisons exposes rehabilitation inside the walls of prisons to be a myth. Such companies as TWA, Victoria’s Secret and many others enjoy the benefits of free labor without the threat of unions, the need for heath care or employee benefits of any kind.”2
Depending on the task and the pay, convicts do in fact compete for jobs behind bars. They have nowhere else to go and generally figure that even poor wages are better than no wage at all. Providing inmates with valuable work habits and skills does have merit, but at what point is the prison-employer partnership an economic model aimed more at exploiting cheap, captive labor than at benefitting society? Further, there is clearly a danger of corruption when businesses approach the government for the purpose of finding cheap labor. Hiring convicts can in fact be a method to replace free workers with people who accept less than minimum wage and don’t ask for benefits. Some of these companies hiring convicts compete with rival businesses that remain tethered to the normal employer-employee relationship.