by Matt Clarke

A June 2011 report by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) reveals how for-profit private prison companies use political campaign donations, lobbyists and relationships with government officials to increase their profits by promoting policies that result in more people being incarcerated.

Even in tight budgetary times when many policymakers want to safely reduce prison populations in order to cut costs, private prison companies seek to preserve the status quo in terms of punitive criminal justice policies and high incarceration rates. Since private prison companies receive their revenue almost exclusively from the government, taxpayers are indirectly funding an industry that opposes criminal justice reforms that would benefit the public.

As of December 31, 2010 there were about 128,195 state and federal prisoners being held in private prisons in the U.S., comprising 9.1% of the federal and 3.2% of the state prison populations. This represented an increase in the use of private prisons since 2000 of approximately 120% for the federal government and 33% for the states. During that same time period, the overall U.S. state and federal prison populations increased by less than 16%.

According to the JPI report, corrections spending increased 72% between 1997 and 2007, with total ...

The State of Maryland has agreed to pay more than $60,000 in attorney fees to settle a longstanding lawsuit brought by a prisoner who had requested public records pursuant to the state’s Public Information Act.

While incarcerated at the Western Correctional Institution (WCI) in May 2002, Richard L. Massey, Jr. ...

Academic researchers in Hawaii believe that exiling offenders to private prisons thousands of miles away on the U.S. mainland is misguided. And the Hawaii Attorney General’s office (AG) – the state’s Big Kahuna of law enforcement – actually agrees.
A federally-funded report released last year by the AG recommends that Hawaii lawmakers should think twice about relying on privately-operated mainland prisons, namely Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) facilities, where about 54% of the state’s 3,700 prisoners are incarcerated.

According to researchers at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in collaboration with the AG’s office, rehabilitation is too often viewed “mainly through the prism of cost,” also referred to as “humonetarianism.” And that’s a mistake, they contend.

“[The] focus on short-term financial costs often deflects attention away from deeper problems that plague the correctional system, such as inconsistent sentencing policies, the provision of decent medical care, the protection of inmates from sexual assault ... and the over-representation of racial minorities and the poor at all stages of the criminal justice system,” the researchers wrote. “In Hawaii and elsewhere, problems such as these suggest the short-sightedness” of cost-based corrections, including the use of private prisons.

Sociologists at UH-Manoa began studying Hawaii’s imprisonment ...

As the late business historian Alfred Chandler, Jr. once said, the visible hand of the corporation has been of far greater importance to capitalism than has Adam Smith’s so-called invisible hand of the market.

Although modern forms of capitalism are justified, and often sanitized, by rhetorical appeals to competition, competition contradictorily tends toward monopoly by eliminating “weaker” firms in any given market. Competition is integral to the rationalizing logic of capitalism writ large, but anathema to individual capitalist firms.
The essential inconsistencies of modern capitalism, however, often serve as the fault lines from which social movements can emerge.

And what better place to begin than with the Tennessee-based private prison firm, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). CCA, in its own words, “is the nation’s largest owner and operator of partnership correction and detention facilities and one of the largest prison operators in the United States, behind only the federal government and three states. [The company] currently operate[s] 67 facilities, including 47
company-owned facilities, with a total design capacity of approximately 92,000 beds in 20 states and the District of Columbia.”

Very few corporations are more notoriously devoted to Chandler’s “visible hand” theory than Corrections Corporation of America. With less than ...

Widespread fighting among black and Hispanic California prisoners at the privately-operated North Fork Correctional Facility in Sayre, Oklahoma last year left dozens of prisoners injured.

The disturbance began shortly before noon on October 11, 2011 and was described by some news reports as a riot and by others as a series of random, uncoordinated brawls. Six local police units responded, and order was restored after police and prison employees used chemical irritants and pepperball rounds to quell the fighting. The facility is man-aged by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).

At least 46 prisoners suffered injuries – 57 according to one news report; of those, 8 were removed by helicopter, four were hospitalized for weeks and one lapsed into a coma.
There were no fatalities, and no staff members or law enforcement officers were hurt.

The Associated Press reported that some Hispanic prisoners had barricaded themselves in a dining hall; another news source put the number of prisoners who participated in the riot at 600. Although some of the prisoners involved were affiliated with the Surenos prison gang, it was unknown whether the fighting was gang-related.

“My considered opinion is that it looks like they had way too many inmates out ...

by Matt Clarke

The University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB) has challenged the findings of a state audit of the prisoner health care services it provides. The challenged audit reported that UTMB improperly charged the state for about $40 million in prison medical-related costs while reporting a $95.1 million deficit. UTMB also complained that the $900 million allocated by the Texas legislature for prisoner health care for FY 2011-2012 was inadequate, and threatened to cancel its contract. The legislature later approved a supplement to UTMB’s funding. Meanwhile, in a glaringly inappropriate attempt to close the state’s budget gap on the backs of its most disadvantaged citizens, Texas lawmakers passed a bill that imposes a $100 annual medical co-pay on prisoners.

UTMB provides health care services to about three-quarters of the more than 152,000 state prisoners in Texas. The audit found that UTMB charged the state for over $16.2 million in disallowed costs not directly related to prisoner health care, charged $6.6 million that was not allowed under the prison health care contract over a two-year period, and gave its prison health care employees $14.1 million in pay increases over a three-year period, all while reporting a $95.1 million ...

PHS Hit with $312,000 Verdict for Inadequate Care of Pennsylvania Prisoner

On February 17, 2012, a Pennsylvania state jury slapped Prison Health Services (PHS) with a $400,000 verdict for inadequate medical care of a prisoner at State Correctional Institution (SCI) Albion. The award was reduced to $312,000 because the jury ...

There are cuts to health care and there are health care cuts. At least one Arizona prisoner has personal knowledge of the unfortunate difference.

Prisoners and their advocates have accused the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC) of being so obsessed with reducing costs that prison officials routinely deny medical care for serious, even life-threatening conditions.

A diabetic prisoner alleged that he lost sight in one eye and partial sight in the other after waiting months for his insulin injections. Another claimed he was denied medication for epilepsy and suffered repeated seizures for weeks. And one prisoner’s face was permanently disfigured after medical staff failed to treat a cancerous growth on his lip for seven months; consequently, doctors had to remove most of his lip and mouth.

But arguably the worst cut occurred after a prisoner discovered a growth on his penis which then went untreated for two years. The growth was ultimately diagnosed as a cancerous tumor, forcing the amputation of his penis. The cancer then spread to his stomach.

Coupled with Arizona’s prisoner suicide rate, which is more than double the national average (14 suicides were reported in fiscal year 2011), critics such as Arizona Prison Watch point to ...

As previously reported in PLN, Michael Taaffe, 56, retired from his $91,020-per-year position with the Oregon Department of Corrections (ODOC) in March 2011. He had been employed as an assistant administrator with the ODOC’s Health Services Division, and served on a three-member panel in 2009 that recommended Correctional Health Partners (CHP) as a contractor to manage the prison system’s medical care. CHP was awarded the contract, worth approximately $1.2 million annually.

Three days before his retirement Taaffe went to work for CHP, which resulted in an ethics complaint filed against him. Under Oregon state law, public employees are prohibited from having a “direct beneficial financial interest” in a contract awarded by an agency with the employee’s participation. This prohibition “continues for two years after the employee leaves public service.” [See: PLN, Feb. 2012, p.46].

Although Taaffe was not solely responsible for granting the contract to CHP, he worked closely with the company while employed by the ODOC. “Michael Taaffe did work directly with CHP, as did many other staff in Health Services,” state prison officials noted. “His role was to analyze CHP reports and to track DOC costs based on those reports.” Moreover, after Taaffe went to work for CHP, ...

by David M. Reutter

Residents in a South Florida community near a proposed 1,500-bed privately-operated immigration detention center waged a successful yearlong opposition campaign that culminated in the cancellation of the project in June 2012.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) purchased a 24-acre plot in the town of Southwest Ranches 15 years ago, with the intention of eventually building a prison or detention facility on the property. The land was located just outside the city of Pembroke Pines near an existing state women’s prison, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) preliminarily selected the site for a detention center in 2010. ICE contracts with CCA to operate 13 facilities nationwide that hold immigration detainees.

Documents filed in Broward County by Southwest Ranches officials described ICE’s intention. “ICE requires approximately 1,500 to 2,000 new detention beds to meet local demand in the Miami Metropolitan area. Ideally, this demand would be met by one 1,000-1,500 bed facility, with the capacity to expand to 2,000 beds.”

The proposed CCA-run facility, the Southwest Ranches Detention Center, would be almost three times the size of the Krome Detention Center in Miami, making it the largest such facility in South Florida. CCA said the $75 million prison ...