Should all prisons in the USA be privatized?

I wrote a futuristic novel titled, "Birth of an Angel", that is about my arrest many years ago for sale of hashish (two ounces). Before making bail, my girlfriend was killed in an auto accident.
I began writing it as a way of dealing with my pain and sorrow at never seeing her again. However, after a year long series of court hearings and trial, I ended up spending $10,000 and got a hung jury. Rather than spending any more money, I fled to South America. Several years later I was captured by US drug agents and extradited back to the USA. I ran into a friend in a holding cell and told him what had happened. His opinion was that certain "conservative" elements wanted to privatize the US prison system. That way, they could not only make lots of money, but eventually they could make it so that certain prisoners could be used as sex slaves. That was in 1975.

This is the reality today:
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Dungeons for dollars

The Bureau of Justice Statistics reports
that there are more than 98,900 inmates in private prisons in America
today. About 5.6 percent of state inmates and 13.7 percent of federal
inmates are now making the ‘Dungeons for Dollars’ crowd rich.

Forget
about public safety – according to one study, inmates escape ‘secure’
private prisons at a rate that is 41 times higher than public
facilities. (one escape per every 310 inmates in private prisons
compared to one per every 12,500 inmates in the public sector.) Forget
about staff and inmate safety - inmate-on-inmate assaults are 66 percent
higher, and assaults on staff are 49 percent higher in private prisons.
Forget about the importance of experience and excellence in law
enforcement – private ‘guards’ receive 35 percent fewer pre-service
training hours and have an astonishing 53 percent annual turnover rate
of security staff.

They are also not Peace Officers. They are
private ‘guards’ who never swear an oath to protect the public, as their
allegiance is to the corporation.

Forget about saving the
taxpayers money – nearly every study conducted that was not paid for in
part or in whole by the private prison industry itself shows no or
little cost savings. Also, every academic study done on economic
development shows that rather than private prisons in your community
providing an economic boon, the hidden costs and designation as a
“prison town” is an economic boondoggle. Private prisons are about one
thing and one thing only – making money for the corporation.

Public
correction professionals are judged by the safety of their prisons and
the impact they have on the community. Private CEOs are judged by one
thing - profit. Private prison operators don’t want fewer inmates; they
want more.

They do not want alternative sentencing, probation or
parole; they want warm bodies in their cells for as long as possible.
(Some of them have been caught holding inmates past their release dates
to make more per diems.) They do not want recidivism rates to go down;
they want them to go up. They don’t care if there is increased violence
in their prisons; they don’t live or work there.

More violence
can also mean more profit. Violence brings with it new charges against
the inmates, additional sentences, and loss of good time, which all
result in more time behind the walls and, of course, for the
corporations - more profit. Private prisons are notorious for
understaffing and under training their employees. That allows them to
keep costs down, while at the same time the violence increases.

When
a new public facility opens, the majority of officers are seasoned
professionals who transfer in. Conversely, private prisons often boast
to elected local officials that 95 percent of the employees they hire
will be right from their community. That means that 95 percent of the
men and women working in those facilities will have NO correctional
experience.

The wages they pay generally range from $8.25 to
$10.00 an hour. Many times the biggest job responsibility that private
prison guards had prior to working in a correctional facility was to be
sure to ask, “Do you want fries with that?” The only pros in a private
prison are the cons.

The privateers don’t like to offer programs
to promote rehabilitation, although they will when pressed. Programs
cost money and may increase the likelihood that inmates might actually
make it on the outside and not come back, and that’s not good for the
bottom line.

They do not want to hire and retain good help. If
they did, they wouldn’t pay $8.25 - $10.00 an hour, offer few, if any,
benefits, and they wouldn’t have a 53 percent annual turnover rate of
security personnel either.

They do not want to be involved with
local law enforcement. It costs money in the form of manpower to
interact with the police. Indeed when there is an escape or riot, the
privateers routinely call the home office and not local law enforcement
when it happens. Their first concern is the bad PR they will get, and
not the safety of the community.

The three biggest private prison
companies, Corrections Corporation of America, Wackenhut/GEO and
Cornell operate 207 facilities and have more than 141,500 available beds
between them. All three are publicly held corporations. They must
answer to their shareholders and not to the citizens of this country, as
we in the public sector must do.

Fortunately, the number of
state inmates housed in private prisons over the last five years has
decreased by 1.3 percent. Unfortunately, however, under President Bush’s
administration the number of federal inmates in private prisons has
increased by an astonishing 60 percent during that same period.

Much of their growth can be linked to campaign contributions. Once again it’s all about the money.

Should
we privatize the police or the military? How about DEA, Immigration
officers, the Boarder patrol, the CIA, FBI or the ATF? Of course not,
and we shouldn’t privatize corrections either.

Street police may
catch the criminals, but it is professional correctional officers who
must keep them away from the public. The safety of our communities
should never be for sale.
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Brian Dawe is co-founder of the
American Correctional Officer Intelligence Network. He also is a
founding member of Corrections USA and served as their Executive
Director until August, 2006. He has been in corrections for more than 24
years, and served as a Massachusetts CO from 1982 to 1998. Dawe
co-founded the Massachusetts Correctional Officers Federated Union where
he served on the statewide Executive Board for nine years, and served
as Grievance Coordinator, Executive Secretary and Vice President. He can
be reached at ACOIN1@aol.com