Lack of Correctional Services: the Adverse Effect on Human Rights

Lack of Correctional Services: The Adverse Effect on Human Rights By Judith A. Greene Published in Capitalist Punishment: Prison Privatization and Human Rights. Edited by Andrew Coyle, Rodney Neufield and Allison Campbell. Clarity Press. 2003 Introduction The private prison industry emerged in the US amid a rising tide of neo-liberal free-market economic ideas and neo-conservative zeal for moralistic discipline that propelled the country’s criminal justice system through a series of campaigns to “get tough on crime.” Reagan Administration officials’ ardor for mandatory prison sentences and zero-tolerance approaches to crime control and drug enforcement launched a national crusade to “take back” criminal justice policies and practices from the hands of a supposedly liberal elite of criminologists and a defense-oriented legal establishment. The rapid embrace of their ideas by the public sent prison population levels shooting through the roof. The Reagan Administration introduced a broad program of privatization to make good on their President’s promise to “get government off our backs and out of our pockets.”1 But the US government had few state-owned enterprises such as were being sold off to private corporations by the Thatcher government in Great Britain. Privatization in the US was to be accomplished largely by contracting out public services. Federal policymakers urged both the US Marshals Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service to contract for detention beds for pretrial prisoners and undocumented immigrants. Both the Corrections Corporation of America and the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation – the two firms which together hold three-quarters of the current US market for private prison beds – were launched into business with contracts from the INS. Prison privatization was touted by policy analysts at conservative think tanks as a prison reform panacea. They championed the notion that privatization could and would solve seemingly intractable problems of deteriorating prison facilities, crowded conditions, and rising correctional costs, blindly believing that private-sector competition and profit incentives inevitably yield efficiencies that lie beyond the reach of government bureaucrats. While the industry was still in its infancy, with just a handful of facilities in operation, the national business press published glowing accounts of how private firms were using innovative building techniques, and media pundits predicted that private prisons would soon meet higher performance measures than could be met in the public sector.2 Corporate prison pioneers pledged that their industry would revolutionize the “business” of corrections. Tom Beasley, one of the founders of CCA, promised that private management of prisons would improve correctional practices across the board. Private prison guards would receive higher wages. Prisoners would get better living conditions, improved programs, and full-time assignments to work or educational activities. All this, while saving taxpayers millions of dollars.3 Academic experts rode to prominence on these issues, providing testimonials for policymakers and the media that privatization would indeed lead to better prisons and substantial savings. As the industry matured, however, the promise of higher quality services at a lower cost was not demonstrated by solid evidence. Research findings about cost savings were mixed, inconclusive, and sometimes contradictory.4 Comparative evaluations of prison performance were few and far between, and those that existed were plagued with a variety of methodological shortcomings.5 During rapid expansion of the industry over the 1990s, it became abundantly clear that private prison management is far more challenging than private collection of solid waste, private repair of potholes, or even private provision of security in public buildings. As private prison executives began to press government officials for contracts to take on more challenging types of prisoners, the operational flaws and deficiencies that critics had cautioned against from the very beginning became all too evident. When, in July 1998, six prisoners fled to freedom through the security fences surrounding a CCA prison in Youngstown, the largest private prison company in the world found itself at the center of a media maelstrom. A series of operational disasters over the next three years kept the industry in the bright light of public scrutiny. By the end of 2000, the private prison industry experienced a “market slump.” With prison populations beginning to level off in many states, and public officials terminating contracts where scandals erupted or poor performance was chronic, opportunities for new business contracts at the state level evaporated. Because advocates for privatization of prisons placed so much emphasis on the putative cost-benefits, the relatively scant body of research and evaluation of private prisons has focused primarily on the issue of correctional costs. A fast-growing stack of newspaper accounts of operational difficulties, routine monitoring reports, security audits, and special inquiry documents offer increasing evidence that the industry’s performance record does not engender much confidence. Nevertheless, questions about whether cost savings and profit-taking entail a significant sacrifice of performance quality – in terms of programs, facility security, and public safety – have not received much rigorous examination by researchers. In 1998, this author designed and directed a performance evaluation of a CCA prison located in Minnesota with the goal of determining whether, as the company claimed, privatization was providing higher quality correctional services. The research project was sponsored through the University of Minnesota Law School Institute on Criminal Justice. Correctional services and programs offered at CCA’s medium-security Prairie Correctional Facility (PCF) in Appleton were compared with those offered at three medium-security prisons run by the Minnesota Department of Corrections (DOC). All four prisons had been operating for many years, and their administration and programs were well established. The research plan entailed both review of facility records and site visits, but the primary component of the study was survey research. A detailed questionnaire was used to conduct structured interviews with Minnesota prisoners housed at PCF, and with a carefully matched set of prisoners at the public prison who fully met the screening criteria used by DOC case managers to select prisoners for transfer to PCF whenever a bed became available at the private prison. The survey was designed to explore prisoners’ perceptions about all aspects of prison operations: health care, counseling services, educational and treatment programs, work assignments, recreation, routine daily activities, and prison safety and security. Information was collected about the extent of their participation in these activities and services. Through the use of questions requiring a graded response (e.g., from one to five) or an answer of true or false, the questionnaire made it possible to compare the responses of prisoners at PCF with those in the public prison facilities, and to use standard statistical methods to test the significance of their responses.6 The Prison in Appleton The Prairie Correctional Facility, now owned and operated by the Correctional Corporation of America, was originally established as a city-owned non-profit private prison facility. This municipal venture was initiated in 1990 with the formation of the Appleton Prison Corporation as a not-for-profit corporation by the City of Appleton, Minnesota. The corporation was used to finance prison construction through lease- revenue bonds. The prison was built purely “on speculation,” which is to say that the facility was planned, financed, and fully constructed without a contractual agreement having been secured from any government agency to house prisoners there. Appleton is a small farming community located in southwestern Minnesota, about 20 miles east of the South Dakota border. The town was established in 1872 when the settlers built a flour mill and a schoolhouse on the banks of the Pomme de Terre River. By the 1880s the town had become the area’s major distribution point for farm machinery. Sustained by a booming farm economy founded on the production of wheat and the sale of farm machinery, Appleton thrived for a century until low grain prices and the economics of corporate agriculture brought that era to a close. With foreclosures of family farms and a population exodus to other communities to find jobs, farm equipment stores were shuttered and the town appeared to be relegated to an inexorable decline. The Appleton City Coordinator, Bob Thompson, chased after a variety of economic development schemes to restore the town’s employment base. Thompson pursued plans for a gambling casino and a furniture manufacturing plant, before hitting on the prison development idea in 1989. By the spring of 1990, Thompson had recruited a corporate board of directors to finance construction of the $28 million private prison through sale of $5,000 revenue bonds. The prison development board would operate under the aegis of the city council, with profits, if any, accruing to the city treasury. The board was headed up by Mark Stromswold, the local “Culligan Man.” Major investors included IDS Financial Services in Minneapolis, as well as the banks with local branch offices in Appleton. The project developer

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