The Corrupt Corporate Incarceration Complex

The Corrupt Corporate Incarceration Complex

Friday 1 July 2011

by: William Fisher, Truthout | Report

http://www.truth-out.org/public-private-incarceration-complex...

Seventeen-year-old Hillary Transue did what lots of
17-year-olds do: Got into mischief. Hillary's mischief was composing a MySpace
page poking fun at the assistant principal of the high school she attended in
Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Hillary was an honor student who'd never had any
trouble with the law before. And her MySpace page stated clearly that the page
was a joke. But despite all that, Hilary found herself charged with harassment.
She stood before a judge and heard him sentence her to three months in a
juvenile detention facility.

What she expected was perhaps a stern lecture. What she got
was a perp walk - being led away in handcuffs as her stunned parents stood by
helplessly. Hillary told The New York Times, "I felt like I had been
thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare. All I wanted to know was how this could
be fair and why the judge would do such a thing."

It wasn't until two years later that she found out why. In
Scranton, Pennsylvania, two judges pleaded guilty to operating a kickback
scheme involving juvenile offenders. The judges, Mark Ciavarella Jr. and
Michael Conahan, took more than $2.6 million in kickbacks from a private prison
company to send teenagers to two privately run youth detention centers. Since
2003, Ciaverella had sentenced an estimated 5,000 juveniles. Conahan was
accused of setting up the contracts. Many of the youngsters shipped off to the
detention centers were first-time offenders.

PA Child Care is a juvenile detention center in Pittston
Township, Pennsylvania. It was opened in February 2003. It has a sister
company, Western PA Child Care, in Butler County, Pennsylvania. Treatment at
both facilities is provided by Mid Atlantic Youth Services. Gregory Zappala
took sole ownership of the company when he purchased co-owner Robert Powell's
share in June 2008.

In July 2009, Powell pled guilty to failing to report a
felony and being an accessory to tax evasion conspiracy in connection with
$770,000 in kickbacks he paid to Ciavarella and Conahan in exchange for
facilitating the development of his facilities.

The childcare facilities have also been criticized for their
costs, which ranged as high as $315 per child per day. Butler County paid
Western PA Child Care about $800,000 in payments between 2005 and 2008. Butler
County did not renew Western PA Child Care's contract after an extension of the
contract ran out at the end of 2008 [6].

The juvenile detention center Hillary was sent to was a
private, for-profit facility run by one of the more than 50 companies operating
in the five billion dollar private prison industry.

These companies have names you've probably never heard of -
like Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO.

Ironically, it's the federal and state criminal justice
systems that produce the private prisons phenomenon and create the opportunity
for private operators to capitalize. What they are capitalizing on is America's
obsession with handing out long prison sentences out of all proportion to the
crimes committed.

Today, the United States has locked up more prisoners than
any other country in the world - 2.3 million-plus people locked up in state and
federal prisons and county jails. This has predictably resulted in a shortage
of publicly owned prison beds - a shortage increasingly being filled by
companies that charge so many dollars for each convict sent their way.

Detainees include immigrants who have applied for asylum in
the US and others awaiting hearings before being deported. The number of people
detained has soared to more than 400,000 a year. According to Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), part of the sprawling Department of Homeland
Security (DHS), the average detention is about one month, although some
detainees are kept for years. The cost of detention is estimated to be $1.7
billion annually.

In the past five years, the nation's largest private prison
company has partnered with the federal government to detain close to a million
undocumented people waiting to be deported or to appear before an immigration
judge. In the process, CCA has made record profits. Critics suggest that CCA
cuts corners on its detention contracts in order to increase its revenue at the
expense of humane conditions. Thanks to political connections and lobbying, it
dominates the immigrant detention industry. CCA now has close to 10,000 new
beds under development in anticipation of continued demand.

Judith Greene, a policy analyst with Justice Strategies, a
nonprofit sentencing-reform advocacy group in New York, says, "Profits by
no means created the machinery of mass incarceration, no more than defense
contracts invented war, but the huge profits to be made by incarcerating an
ever-growing segment of our population serves the system very well."

"Profits oil the machinery, keep it humming and speed
its growth," she adds.

For-profit prison companies claim to be able to provide
prison and detention services to cities, counties, states and the federal
government for less money - an idea that cash-strapped communities apparently
find irresistible.

Yet, studies throughout the country show that private
prisons are only marginally less expensive than public prisons and are often
substantially more expensive. The second issue is a medical care regimen that,
until recently, allowed the government such wide discretion that it could deny
urgent care, including biopsies for suspected cancers and treatment of heart
conditions.

Moreover, a panoply of hidden subsidies is rarely calculated
into the private prison industry's cost claims. According to a study by Paul
Wright, the founder and editor of "Prison Legal News," a prisoners'
rights advocacy newsletter, at least 44, or 73 percent, of the 60 facilities
(studied) had received a development subsidy from local, state and/or federal
government sources. Subsidies were found in 17 of the 19 states in which the 60
facilities are located.

Facilities operated by the two largest private prison
companies, CCA and GEO, were frequently subsidized. Among the facilities in
this study, 78 percent of CCA's and 69 percent of GEO's prisons were subsidized,
suggesting that these companies had been aggressive in seeking development
subsidies.

According to the not-for-profit Private Corrections
Institute, "the private prison industry relies on a number of allies and
research studies to justify its claims of cost savings and proficiency;
however, most of these sources have industry connections or vested financial
interests."

For example, it claims, the Reason Foundation, a strong
proponent of prison privatization, has received funding from private prison firms.
The American Correctional Association (ACA) receives sponsorship money from
CCA, GEO, and other private prison companies for its biannual conferences.

Former University of Florida Prof. Charles Thomas conducted
supposedly impartial research on the private prison industry until it was
learned that he owned private prison stock, had been paid $3 million for
consulting for a private prison firm and served on the board of Prison Realty
Trust (a CCA spin-off). Thomas was fined $20,000 by the Florida Commission on
Ethics and stepped down from his university position.

Private prisons are paid according to filled beds. So, they
are constantly pushing for more inmates - while officials of publicly owned
prisons are trying to shed prisoners to relieve overcrowding and reduce
expenses.

Private prisons seek to save money by hiring less
experienced staff. The result of that policy can be seen in the
disproportionate numbers of poorly controlled prison riots, by unsanitary
health conditions, by substandard record-keeping, by high employee turnover and
by the number of deaths in detention.

A June 2004 study by academics Curtis R. Blakely and Vic W.
Bumphus found that private prison turnover among correctional officers was 43
percent, while turnover in public sector prisons were only 15 percent. Turnover
in for-profit prisons was linked to lower staff pay and less training.
Moreover, the study found, "Pay, training, and turnover may all contribute
to the higher levels of violence seen in the private sector."

One big area where for-profit prison firms skimp is on labor
costs, according to Wright. "While employees at state-run prisons get
union-scale salaries, private-prison guards typically earn $7 to $10 per
hour," he says, adding, "They have low wages and high turnover and
very little in the way of benefits or training."

Wright, 43, was once a prisoner himself, serving 17 years of
a 25-year term for killing a cocaine dealer he was trying to rob. Today, he is
an advocate for prisoner rights and, over the years, has filed numerous legal
challenges against the industry and won.

"The private-prison industry is marked by
corruption," he says. "Their premise is they can run prisons cheaper
than the government, but taxpayers don't realize any of those savings. Any
savings the private-prison industry obtains is basically profits for their
shareholders."

For-profit prisons are private corporations and, thus, not
subject to external oversight. They are not obligated to produce their internal
records for public scrutiny and are exempt from the Freedom of Information Act
at the federal level because that law applies only to documents in the
government's possession.

Political pressure from interests in US border states has
forced President Obama to exceed the record of former President George W. Bush
in deporting illegal aliens. That surge has resulted in a windfall for the
private prison industry. Today, a substantial slice of its current growth can
be attributed to its activities in the immigration detention field.

Private prisons have become a major influence in shaping
critical legislation related to illegal immigration. The industry's lobbyists
have played a leading role in drafting a number of recent anti-immigrant laws,
for example, Arizona's SB-1070, and similar laws in Georgia, Alabama, and other
states.

Independent journalism is rare. Click here to get Truthout
stories sent to your email daily.

Under the Alabama measure, police must detain someone they
suspect of being in the country illegally if the person cannot produce proper
documentation when stopped for any reason. It also will be a crime to knowingly
transport or harbor someone who is in the country illegally. The law imposes
penalties on businesses that knowingly employ someone without legal resident
status. A company's business license could be suspended or revoked. And the law
requires Alabama businesses to use a database called E-Verify to confirm the
immigration status of new employees.

Lee Fang reports in ThinkProgress that, in December 2009,
the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) - a powerful front group that
helps corporate representatives craft template legislation for state lawmakers,
funded partially by the private prison industry - hosted Arizona State Sen.
Russell Pearce (R) and began debate on legislation that would provide broad
powers to local police to arrest anyone who might look like an immigrant. The
ALEC then distributed the template legislation to its members. The
January/February 2010 edition of ALEC's magazine highlights the draft version
of SB1070 - the "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act"
- as model legislation.

It was Pearce who introduced ALEC's "template" as
the infamous SB1070 law. Notably, the ALEC task force, which helped Pearce
devise his racial profiling law, included Laurie Shanblum, a CCA lobbyist. CCA
previously played an important role in privatizing many of Texas' prisons.

An investigation by Arizona's KPHO-TV found more ties
between SB1070 and the private prison industry: Paul Senseman, Arizona's Gov.
Janet Brewer's deputy chief of staff, was a former lobbyist for CCA (his wife
is still a lobbyist for CCA), and Chuck Coughlin, Brewer's campaign chairman,
runs the lobbying firm in Arizona that represents CCA.

CCA was set to receive well over $74 million in tax dollars
in fiscal year 2010 for running immigration detention centers. In a recent
presentation, Pershing Square Capital, a hedge fund with a large financial
stake in CCA, suggested that CCA's profitability depends on increasing numbers
of immigrants sent to prison. Many of the legislators helping to earn CCA more
profits with radical anti-immigrant bills mirroring SB1070 have been recipients
of private prison industry cash or have worked closely with the CCA-funded ALEC
organization.

"When detentions increased following the September 11,
2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon," author Mark Dow writes
in "American Gulag: Inside US Immigration Prisons," "private
prison profiteers saw another opportunity. The [then] Chairman of the
Houston-based Cornell Companies spoke candidly in a conference call with other
investors: 'It can only be good ... with the focus on people that are illegal
and also from Middle Eastern descent ... In the US there are over 900,000
undocumented individuals from Middle Eastern descent ... That's half of our
entire [US] prison population ... The Federal business is the best business for
us ... and the events of September 11 [are] increasing that level of business
...'"

Efforts to reach the CEOs of the two leading private prison
companies, CCA and GEO, to invite comment on this article were unsuccessful.
However, their web sites present a comprehensive picture of the companies'
vision of their operations. Both are doing extremely well. GEO's revenues for
2010 rose 11 percent to $1.27.billion. CCA's revenues in 2009 rose to $1.670
billion. The companies' annual reports and 10-K filings present a robust
picture of these operations and strike an optimistic note for the future.

Beau Hodai, considered an authority on the private prison
industry, noted in Prison Legal News last year that private prison leaders had
substantially increased their spending on lobbying.

For example, he writes, "From January 2008 to April
2010, CCA spent $4.4 million lobbying the Department of Homeland Security and
ICE, the Office of the Federal Detention Trustee, the Office of Budget
Management, the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and both houses of Congress. Of the 43
lobbying disclosure reports filed by CCA during this period, only five do not
expressly state intent to monitor or influence immigration reform policy or
gain Homeland Security or ICE appropriations."

The private prison industry's operation of immigration
detention centers has been less than stellar - a lot less.

For example:

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Texas and El
Paso co-counsel Mike Torres and Leon Schydlower filed a lawsuit on behalf of
the survivors of Jesus Manuel Galindo. Named as defendants were the federal
government and the GEO Group, the administrator of the West Texas for-profit
prison where Galindo, 32, died on December 12, 2008, after suffering a seizure
in solitary confinement where he had been placed for complaining about the
facility's failure to provide him medication to control his epileptic seizures.

At least nine immigrant prisoners have died in the Reeves
County Detention Center in the last five years. The GEO Group has had at least
six facilities in Texas shuttered or contracts canceled. The state of Idaho
pulled its inmates from the Dickens County Correctional Center in the spring of
2007 in the wake of the suicide of inmate Scot Noble Payne and a subsequent
investigation into "squalid" conditions at the lockup. Idaho also cut
its contract with the Bill Clayton Detention Center in Littlefield, Texas,
after the 2008 suicide of Randy McCullough. In October 2007, the Coke County
Juvenile Justice Center was shuttered by the Texas Youth Commission after a
damning investigation into conditions at the youth detention center.

Despite that record - ironically, on the very day the
lawsuit was filed - the company was awarded a contract by ICE to operate a new
600-bed "civil" detention center in Karnes County, Texas. Texas has
more for-profit prisons than any other state.

In another case, a former immigration detention guard was
convicted of sexually abusing female detainees in the T. Don Hutto Residential
Center, near Austin, Texas, which is managed by CCA. The resident supervisor,
Donald Dunn, 30, was charged with three counts of official oppression and two
counts of unlawful restraint, the Austin American-Statesman reported.

The ACLU said CCA officials were violating policy by
allowing female immigration detainees to be isolated with male staff members.
After an ACLU investigation into sexual abuse at the Hutto facility, Vanita
Gupta, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said the charges show additional need
for reform.

Then there is the issue of death in detention. Nina
Bernstein, writing in The New York Times, alleged that ICE officials, fearful
of media scrutiny, conspired to conceal the details surrounding the deaths of a
number of detained immigrants who died in privately run detention centers.
Bernstein wrote, " ... it is now clear, the deaths had already generated
thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative
reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and
BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside
inquiry."

The documents were obtained by The Times and the ACLU under
the Freedom of Information Act. They relate to most of the 107 deaths in
detention counted by ICE October 2003, when the agency was created within the
DHS. The documents also revealed ten deaths in detention that had never been
disclosed by the government. The ACLU says the number of deaths has increased
since then.

The article details a litany of abuses. For example:

"As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a
New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal
agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from
government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted
those officials to the reporter's inquiry, and they conferred at length about
sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity."

"In another case that year, investigators from the
agency's Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable,
untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old
detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was
so poorly run that other detainees were at risk."

"The investigation found that jail medical personnel
had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named
Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the
drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead."

"Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public
or to Mr. Romero's relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of
abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an
agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were 'finicky' about accepting
detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero's, such people would
continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as 'a last resort.'"

Another case concerns Yusif Osman, who was a US legal
resident from Ghana and had been living in Los Angeles for five years. After a
companion carrying false ID landed him in an immigration detention center run
by CCA, Osman was facing deportation on smuggling charges, an allegation he
denied. While at the immigration detention center outside San Diego, he died
suddenly. His story highlights the poor care some immigrants have received in
the scores of immigration facilities across the United States.

Near midnight on a California spring night, armed guards
escorted Yusif Osman into an immigration prison ringed by concertina wire at
the end of a winding, isolated road. During the intake screening, a part-time
nurse began a computerized medical file on Osman, a routine procedure for any
person entering the vast prison network the government has built for foreign
detainees across the country. But the nurse pushed a button and mistakenly
closed file #077-987-986 and marked it "completed" - even though it
had no medical information in it.

Three months later, at 2:00 in the morning on June 27, 2006,
the native of Ghana collapsed in Cell 206 at the Otay Mesa immigrant detention
center outside San Diego. His cellmate hit the intercom button, yelling to
guards that Osman was on the floor suffering from chest pains. A guard peered
through the window into the dim cell and saw the detainee on the ground, but
did not go in. Instead, he called a clinic nurse to find out whether Osman had
any medical problems.

When the nurse opened the file and found it blank, she
decided there was no emergency and said Osman needed to fill out a sick call
request. The guard went on a lunch break.

The cellmate yelled again. Another guard came by, looked in
and called the nurse. This time she wanted Osman brought to the clinic. Forty
minutes passed before guards brought a wheelchair to his cell. By then, it was
too late: Osman was barely alive when paramedics reached him. He soon died.

His body, clothed only in dark pants and socks, was left on
a breezeway for two hours, an airway tube sticking out of his mouth. Osman was
34.

The next day, an autopsy determined that he had died because
his heart had suddenly stopped, confidential medical records show. Two physicians
who reviewed his case for The Washington Post said he might have lived had he
received timely treatment, perhaps as basic as an aspirin.

Privately, Otay Mesa's medical staff also knew his care was
deficient. On page 3 of an internal review of his death is this question:

Did patient receive appropriate and adequate health care
consistent with community standards during his/her detention ...?

Otay Mesa's medical director, Esther Hui, checked
"No."

The ACLU records: "One man was brought in with such high
blood pressure that if he was not in custody, he would have been sent to an
emergency room immediately. He was denied treatment and shortly thereafter he
suffered a massive heart attack and died."

The ACLU said he was denied treatment because the treatment
he needed - a coronary artery bypass - was not considered an 'emergency'
procedure, the only condition under which care could be provided.

Another detainee had for over a year been denied a biopsy to
detect a possible cancer. He died soon afterward.

The medical neglect they endure is part of the hidden human
cost of increasingly strict policies adopted following the 9/11 attacks. A
Washington Post investigation found that detainees have less access to lawyers
than convicted murderers in maximum-security prisons and some have fewer
comforts than al-Qaeda terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Post investigation, carried out by Dana Priest and Amy
Goldstein, found that the most vulnerable detainees, the physically sick and
the mentally ill, are sometimes denied the proper treatment to which they are
entitled by law and regulation. They are locked in a world of slow care, poor
care and no care, with panic and cover-ups among employees watching it happen.

The investigation found a hidden world of flawed medical
judgments, faulty administrative practices, neglectful guards, ill-trained
technicians, sloppy record-keeping, lost medical files and dangerous staff
shortages. It is also a world increasingly run by high-priced private
contractors. There is evidence that infectious diseases, including tuberculosis
and chicken pox, are spreading inside the centers.

Nurses who work on the front lines see the problems up
close. "Dogs get better care in the dog pound," said Catherine Rouse,
a contract nurse at an Arizona detention center who quit after two months last
year because she saw what she regarded as "scary medicine" in the
prison: patients taken off medications they needed and nurses doing tasks they
were not qualified to do. "You don't treat people like that. There has to
be some kind of moral fiber," Rouse said.

Bob Libal, senior organizer for Grassroots Leadership in
Austin, Texas - considered by many to be the "guru" of private prison
opposition - summed up the situation as he sees it. He told Truthout, "A
litany of human rights abuses, scandals, and lawsuits have plagued private
prisons corporations, particularly in Texas, where there are more private
prisons, detention centers, and jails than in any other state," he said,
adding:

"Unfortunately, the private prison industry has fought
even the most limited oversight and transparency measures. Furthermore, the
largest private prison corporations - CCA and GEO - spend millions of dollars
each year on lobbying [21] and campaign contributions that ensure that their
interests - an ever increasing flow of prisoners and detainees into private
beds - are met."

ACLU attorney David Shapiro told Truthout that two issues
play a major role in creating an environment in which death and deprivation in
detention become inevitable. The first issue is the absence of any enforceable
standards for the maze of 400 federal, municipal, county and private jails used
by ICE to house immigrants.

The second issue is a medical care regimen that, until
recently, allowed the government such wide discretion that it could deny urgent
care, including biopsies for suspected cancers, and treatment of heart
conditions. As a result of an ACLU lawsuit, there is now a new document that
defines the medical care to which detainees are entitled. But lack of
independent oversight casts doubt on the extent to which the new regimen is
being followed.

The Obama administration has declined to produce system-wide
enforceable standards for the prisons it uses to house immigrants. Shapiro
declined to speculate on the administration's rationale, but others have said that
it is based on the wide differences among the various types of facilities used
by the government. It has also failed to produce a medical care program that is
binding on ICE personnel and its contractors. A number of the reported deaths
in detention have been caused by ICE's failure to provide timely medical
interventions in emergency situations. Some observers believe that the
rationale for deciding against providing "long term" medical care -
for example, biopsies - is that ICE detention is largely short term.

Yet, ICE and its DHS parent department have acknowledged
that many immigrants are held in custody for years. ICE has also admitted many
of the deficiencies in its detention system and has vowed to initiate reforms.
But Shapiro contends that the most recent documents obtained by the ACLU show
that ICE's culture of secrecy has not changed.

Bernstein's New York Times article says that the documents
show how officials - some still in key positions - used their role as overseers
to "cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media
or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to
substandard care or abuse."

As of today, there are no legally enforceable rules
governing immigration detention, despite an order by a federal judge to create
such rules. The Obama administration refused the judge's order, which followed
a petition filed in court by former detainees. Instead, ICE chose to follow an
inspection system instituted during the administration of George W. Bush. That
system relies in part on private contractors. Judge Denny Chin ruled that the
agency's failure to respond to the plaintiffs' petition for two and a half
years was unreasonable.

DHS contended that rule making would be "laborious,
time-consuming and less flexible" than the review process now in place. It
said its current inspection system would "provide adequately for both
quality control and accountability."

According to Paromita Shah of the National Immigration
Project of the National Lawyers Guild, one of the plaintiffs, the government's
decision "disregards the plight of the hundreds of thousands of
immigration detainees." She claims that the absence of enforceable rules
is the major cause of problems of mistreatment and medical neglect. "The
department has demonstrated a disturbing commitment to policies that have cost
dozens of lives," she says.

In the view of numerous observers, ICE is itself a highly
dysfunctional unit. Thus far, the promises of significant operational changes
have not come to fruition. The agency remains opaque.

But it is precisely this condition that presents private
prison contractors with growing opportunities to pitch their services.
Increasing numbers of alleged illegals are being detained by ICE and its various
programs, such as 287(g), which enlists local police forces to suss out people
in this country who they say shouldn't be.

As to the future of the private prison industry, its reach
is vast - from the teenager in Pennsylvania to the undocumented worker in
Arizona. The ACLU's Shapiro told Truthout, "The main thing the government
should do is stop using private prisons. They are a failed experiment and have
contributed to mass incarceration, horrid conditions, and escalating costs. At
minimum, greater oversight and transparency are critical."

But President Obama continues to use detention and
deportation as a political tool to curry favor with the hard right. In the
process, myriad injustices are being committed. And with the 2012 election
looming, it seems unlikely that Washington has the appetite to actually fix any
of the headaches caused by ICE and its for-profit prisons [24].

In a chapter from a forthcoming book, Alex Friedmann,
associate editor of Prison Legal News, writes, "The most harmful effect of
private prison companies is that they have made imprisonment-for-profit
politically and socially acceptable, thereby creating an insidious industry
that benefits from incarceration while instilling the notion that justice
literally is for sale and crime does in fact pay."

He adds, "Hopefully, at some point in the future we
will look back on the time when private prisons were considered sensible and
wonder how such a destructive concept was allowed to exist. For now, though, we
must deal with the harsh reality of the private prison industry, including its
many flaws and harmful effects on prisoners, our justice system and society as
a whole."