by Christopher Zoukis

An October 2016 report released by In the Public Interest (ITPI), a research and policy group that opposes the privatization of government services, details the millions of dollars spent by for-profit prison companies to influence public officials.

The report tracks political expenditures by private prison firms, including Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, now known as CoreCivic) and the GEO Group, to expand their role in the U.S. criminal justice system. The report exposes a serious flaw in the conventional belief that such companies will reduce costs, as some of the funds from taxpayer-paid private prison contracts are used for political contributions and lobbying intended to grow the for-profit prison industry and drain even more money from public coffers.

The report is organized around three distinct “avenues of influence” used by private prison firms. The first is the most obvious method by which the companies exert influence: campaign contributions. Between state, federal and local campaigns, the private prison industry spends millions of dollars each year supporting political candidates.

At the state level, the industry contributed over $2.5 million to 360 candidates for public office during the 2013 and 2014 election years. On the federal level, CCA and the ...

by Christopher Zoukis

In an odd twist in this age of prison and jail overcrowding, the Two Rivers Regional Detention Facility (TRRDF) in Hardin, Montana has had an awfully difficult time finding prisoners to fill its beds. Opened in mid-2007 as an intended economic boon for the area, the jail, which is overseen by the Two Rivers Authority (TRA), the economic development arm of the City of Hardin, has not been able to obtain enough contracts to cover interest payments on bonds used to build the $27 million facility, much less break even or generate profit. As PLN has repeatedly reported over the years, this has left city officials scrambling to locate prisoners for almost a decade. [See: PLN, Aug. 2013, p.42; March 2011, p.34; Dec. 2009, p.1].

The situation is dire for Hardin. The facility sat vacant for seven years until TRA entered into a contract with Louisiana-based Emerald Correctional Management to operate the jail in
May 2014.

Under Emerald, TRRDF, which has a capacity of 464 beds, housed just 250 prisoners under a contract with the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Until November 1, 2015, it only housed Native American detainees.

That contract, the facility’s largest since ...

by Nancy A. Heitzeg and Kay Whitlock, Truthout

In the deep fog of the yard at Central California Facility for Women (CCFW), the bright shiny headlines declaring California Proposition 47 (which reclassifies certain property and drug felonies as minor, non-prison time offenses) the beginning of the end of mass incarceration seem so very far away. As women go throughout their daily grind of toxic drudgery at pennies per hour - cooking acrylic over outdated Bunsen Burners in unventilated rooms to make dentures for other state prisoners and MediCal patients, sewing jail jumpsuits and flags for the state of California in 10-hour stints - reform seems impossible.

The lieutenant who guides our university class visit seems to sense this, too. Despite his preliminary promises to us of remaining "politically correct," his contempt for these women is soon revealed - in stories of the closing of "unused" family visiting rooms to make way for a drug-sniffing dog kennel, in his celebration of an American sniper who surveyed all from a gun turret over-looking the solitary unit, in the unchecked assumption that every cry for assistance was thin cover for a scam. A loud speaker alert of an "unresponsive inmate down on the ...

by Mike Mosedale, Minnesota Lawyer

Among the peculiar ironies about the intersection of medicine, public policy and the law in contemporary American life, not many are weirder than the fact that only one segment of the nation’s population –and a largely reviled one, at that — enjoys a constitutionally-protected right to health care: the approximately 2.2 million people incarcerated in the nation’s prisons and jails

True, “enjoys” probably isn’t the best descriptor of how inmates feel about their unusual constitutional status – at least not judging by the volume of correctional health care-related lawsuits against prisons and, increasingly, their medical services contractors. Corizon – the largest of those companies and, until recently, Minnesota’s provider – has been sued over 1,300 times in the past five years.

All that litigation is made possible by the U.S. Supreme Court’s holding that the 8th Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment applies when inmates can establish “deliberate indifference” to a serious medical need, a standard established by the landmark 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision,  Estelle v. Gamble.  In subsequent cases, the high court expanded the standard to cases involving  future medical harms (second hand smoke from his five pack-a-day cellmate) and failure to ...

On May 23, 2016, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed an Idaho federal district court ruling that found Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) -- a private prison company -- in contempt of court for failing to comply with a settlement agreement when the company was caught falsifying reports related to staffing numbers at its Idaho prison. The Ninth Circuit's decision is now final as CCA has declined to seek review of the ruling by the Supreme Court.

CCA runs the state-owned Idaho Corrections Center (ICC) in Kuna, Idaho. In March 2011, a lawsuit was filed against CCA alleging that ICC was inadequately staffed resulting in a dangerous environment that can and did fail to protect the prisoners from assault and other physical violence. In a settlement agreement signed in September 2011, CCA agreed to a specific number of increased custody staff, including a three-person "Warden's Crew," which would be available to enhance security response time. The agreement was for two years and required CCA to issue staffing reports to prove compliance with the settlement.

Just over a year later, however, Idaho Department of Corrections (IDOC) officials began to receive reports that ICC had been falsifying ...

It’s a well-known fact that the United States has around five percent of the world’s population but incarcerates approximately 25% of the world’s prisoners. Within that disturbing statistic is Louisiana, which has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the nation – with the U.S. Department of Justice reporting that, based on 2015 data, 776 out of every 100,000 residents in the state were in prison. That is substantially higher than Russia’s rate of incarceration (492 per hundred thousand) and China’s (119 per hundred thousand). As such, Louisiana is the global leader in imprisonment.

The average incarceration rate in the U.S., for both state and federal prison populations, was 458 per 100,000 in 2015. In the view of most public officials, jails and prisons are a necessary evil.

“I wish we didn’t have to have jails, but as long as there are human beings, we’re going to have them,” said Bossier Parish Sheriff Julian Whittington. “Not everybody’s going to follow the law, we’re adequately prepared, we have plenty of room and we’re set for the future.... And I don’t have apologies for what we do.”

Whittington runs a profitable three-jail system that has a minimum, medium and maximum-security facility. In ...

In 2015, the Pennsylvania Department of Human Services (PDHS) issued a statement saying it “believes that the current use of the Berks County Residential Center (BCRC) as a family residential center is inconsistent with its current license as a child residential facility.”

The statement was hailed as a message to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which has been using BCRC and two privately-operated detention facilities in Texas to house undocumented immigrant families as they await disposition of their status by federal officials. [See: PLN, Sept. 2016, p.40]

The Coalition to Shut Down Berks County Family Detention (the Coalition), a grassroots effort supported by numerous organizations, had been pushing for the revocation of BCRC’s child care license and publicizing abuses that have occurred at the detention facility.

One incident that took place in the summer of 2014, stated a Coalition release, involved an “institutional sexual assault ... of a 19 year old in front of other detainees.” According to the Coalition, other abuses have included “the rampant medical neglect of children which led to a child vomiting blood for four days before receiving proper medical attention.”

Labor abuses involved paying women detainees $1 a day to clean the facility. In June ...

History will remember the United States as the first country in the world to privatize its prisons and jails; the modern era of prison privatization began when Corrections Corporation of America (now known as CoreCivic) was founded in the U.S. in 1983. Many other countries looked toward the United States when privatizing their own prison systems. As of January 13, 2017, data indicates that the UK, Australia and New Zealand have a higher proportion of prisoners held in for-profit facilities than the comparable proportion of U.S. prisoners.

Australia, England and Wales house one of every five prisoners in a private correctional facility, whereas in the U.S. the ratio is around 1 in 12 (or 8.3% of the state and federal prison population). The UK opened its first private prison in 1992 and currently has 14 privatized facilities. Numerous problems have been cited at such prisons, and in February 2017 a BBC documentary found that the Sodexo-operated HMP Northumberland, “one of Britain’s biggest jails, has descended into chaos, with failing alarms, prisoners calling the shots and a troubling drug problem sweeping its corridors,” according to The Telegraph.

In Australia, nine for-profit prisons have cropped up since 1995. All of Australia’s ...

On February 8, 2017, the Private Corrections Institute (PCI), a non-profit citizen watchdog organization, announced its 2016 awardees for individual activism, organizational advocacy and excellence in news reporting related to the private prison industry. PCI opposes the privatization of correctional services, including the operation of prisons, jails and other detention facilities by for-profit companies such as industry leaders Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, which recently rebranded as CoreCivic) and The GEO Group, which both trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

PCI’s 2016 award for excellence in news reporting on the private prison industry went to Shane Bauer, a senior reporter with Mother Jones magazine, for his extensive first-hand account titled, “My four months as a private prison guard.” His article described his experiences working undercover as a guard at a CCA-operated prison in Louisiana – the Winn Correctional Center, which is now managed by a different contractor. Shane’s reporting was accompanied by a number of related articles and video clips, as well as a follow-up piece about the tragic suicide of a prisoner he had met while employed at Winn. [See: PLN, Aug. 2016, p.54].

“It’s a great honor to receive this award from the Private Corrections Institute,” ...

In October 2015, Phillip Henry Freeman disappeared from the Liberty County Jail near Houston, Texas. He was recaptured living in a wooded area in Arkansas in late January 2016. His escape was the latest in a slew of problems at the 281-bed facility, which is operated by New Jersey-based Community Education Centers (CEC). In recent years the Liberty County Jail has experienced three prisoner deaths, including two suicides; two top jail administrators were fired amid allegations of sexual misconduct; one administrator was found to lack a state jailer’s license and the facility has failed a number of state inspections. [See: PLN, July 2014, p.47].

Freeman, 38, was last seen working in the jail’s kitchen prior to his disappearance. Jailers searched for four hours before declaring him an escapee; they remain uncertain how he absconded.

The escape “seems to encapsulate all of the problems of turning a jail over to a for-profit prison corporation,” stated Bob Libal, executive director of Grassroots Leadership, a civil rights group that is outspoken in its opposition to prison privatization. “Including incentivizing high rates of incarceration, staffing at a very low level to maximize profits, which lead to operational outcomes like you’ve seen – failed inspections ...