The Privatization of Punishment

Main Points:

- Corporations make billions of dollars off of prisoners

- They are willing to invest millions of dollars on incarceration policies - The Privatization of prisons does not solve the prison overcrowding crisis - As crime rate goes down, incarceration rates continue to go up - Get tough on crime sanctions target impovershed minorities - Private pison abuse is wide spread - There is a way to make a change - Vote - Get involved with the social movement

The Corporation: A Legal “Person”

The Corporation: The Pathology of Commerce

This week I watched the movie the Corporation.  This movie highly applies to the privatization of public services such as punishment, corrections and reform.  The movie does not go specifically into the privatization of prisons, but it makes substantially relevant points to the issue.  The above clips are from the Canadian Documentary.  The full movie chapter by chapter can be found at youtube.  I recommend that you watch the entire movie.  Since the second clip I have displayed goes relatively quickly, the following is the list of characteristics that the documentary explains corporations to have making them qualify as clinically psychopathic:

• Callous unconcern for the feeling of others
• Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships
• Reckless disregard for the safety of others
• Deceitfulness: repeated lying and conning others for profit
• Incapacity to experience guilt
• Failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors

Corrections Corporation of America has displayed all of these characteristics.  If one would consider CCA a legal human than the human that is responsible for reforming, incarcerating, and incapacitating criminals and psychopaths is criminal and psychopathic.  Furthermore, according to a recent Supreme Court case, CCA is immune from being sued in regards to prisoner abuses (Wiecko 2008: lecture).  Therefore even though our judicial system considers CCA to be a legal human as explained by the first youtube clip, they are treated as superior to other citizens.  The privatization of prison is one of the many ways that the United States government gives profit making machines higher priority and power over moral society.

Work Cited

Wieko, Filip. Strategies and Policies of Punishment in Contemporary America Criminal Justice 385 section 1 Spring 2008 Lecture

As mentioned before, tough on crime policies such as mandatory minimums have fueled the overcrowding in incarceration facilities.  One of those tough on crime policies was campaigned by the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs.  This campaign made it a federal law to strengthen the sentences for possession of serious drugs.  For instance, if someone was caught with 5 grams of crack cocaine they would receive a mandatory sentence of 10 years in prison without the possibility of parole (Pelaez: 2005).  In order to receive the same sentence for possession of powder cocaine one would have to be caught with 500 grams (Pelaez 2005).  After recent Supreme Court review of the case, it was decided that it is unconstitutional to give a stronger penalty to the possession of drugs that are equally dangerous, but are transported differently (Roskey 2008: lecture).  The policy also caused racial disparity in the population of prisons, for the main users of crack cocaine are African Americans and Hispanics while the main users of powder cocaine are whites (Palaez: 2005).  Consequently, 20,000 inmates are having their sentences reviewed, changed, and will be released early. 

This change in population largely affects the private prisons.  Every article I read shows projections expanding growth of private facilities due to overcrowding in public incarceration facilities.  Now a substantial amount of prisoners are returning to society, leaving the private facilities.  Similarly a substantial amount of individual are going to be receiving a lighter sentence for possession of crack cocaine.  For the private prisons administrators and stockholders this means huge loss in financial potential gain.  I project one of two things happening as a result.  Many private facilities will close down because the cost to run and build them will far out weight the profit coming in from taxpayers.  Or massive campaigns will occur from the American Legislative Exchange Council to create more tough on crime policies.  Corporation financed media reports and research studies will provide information the will create a moral panic within taxpayers and fuel the change in policy toward more tough on crime sanctions.

Pelaez, Vickey The Industry in the United States: Big Business or a new form of Slavery?: Digital Gramma Internatioanl, October 14, 2005. http://www.granma.cu/ingles/2005/octubre/juev13/42carceles.html

Roskey, Jeff Juvenile Justice Spring 2008 Lecture

When I was reading Resource Rebels the other day the following situation popped into my head.  It does not have substantial relevance to the book’s content, but it made me think about prison privatization on another level.  In the book, it mentions how military force has been suppressing native protest against US mining efforts.  This led me to the question; could the military or police detain and incarcerate a massive protest if they found it necessary regardless of the number of participants? 

 Many restraints exist against  complete government supremacy and dominance in the Constitution.   These restraints are usually seen as the separation of powers doctrine in the US Constitution, human rights groups, and non-governmental organizations.  They are also represented in practical restraints.  If prison privatization is permitted to expand, and function under little to no expectation of accountability, and profit from the exponential growth of inmate, than the US government will have much less practical restraints keeping them from complete control of its citizens.  In other words, in the 1980s the US government could not imprison massive amounts of individuals such as protesters.  Now private prisons have made that option possible providing the space to lock up anyone who poses a threat to the public, themselves and most importantly the State.  Therefore, to answer my question, while civil rights afforded to us by the United States Constitution still prevent the pracitce, there are very few if any practical restraints currently compared to 20 years ago preventing the US government from incarcerating massive amounts of individuals.

Many different private institutions exist.  As I mentioned in the last blog, the media constantly uses the terms jails and prisons as synonyms.  This is a mistake.  Jails are much different from prisons.  On the other hand, apart from the main difference that jails are meant for short term confinement (no more than a year) and prisons are designed for long term confinement (no less than a year and a day), many similarities exist between private prisons and public jails.  For instance, both facilities are used to hold prisoners during times of overcrowding in public prisons.  The only difference in these two practices of prisoner outsourcing is that it is the decision of the judge to send a offender to jail instead of prison due to outsourcing instead of a prison administrator to send current inmates to a private prison. 

Furthermore, in some cases private prisons administrators and public jail wards or sheriffs get paid.  When the public jail receive prisoners, the receive funds through what is known as a fee system.  This is where ”jail operations are funded by a set amount per day for each prisoner held” (Clear et. al. 2006: 165).  Private prisons receive funding through the same exact system.   Once again in our system we can see a quick response/solution to a never-ending problem.  Privatizing prisons is no worse than sending prisoners to jails.  Similar to private prisons, the conditions of jails are much worse than public prison due to personnel problems.  For instance,  much like private prisons, jail corrections officers are understaffed, less trained, less educated, paid less, and have a higher turnover than public prisons (Wiecko 2008: lecture). 

Once these elements are put into perspective, contracting with private prisons are a better alternative than outsourcing prisoners to jails.  Furthermore, Jails are less likely to have rehabilitative programs because there is less time to implement such programs than in prisons whether they be public or private.  Therefore, private prisons are not the worst alternative or solution to prison overcrowding.  It is important to note that better alternatives do exist to contracting with private prisons, such as increasing funding for rehabilitative programs, community corrections, probation, parole, indeterminate sentencing and intermediate sanctions. 

Clear, Todd R., George F. Cole, and Michael D D. Resig. American Corrections. Seventh ed. Canada: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006. 165

Wiecko, Filip. Strategies and Polices of Punishment in Contemporary America, Spring 2008. Lecture

The following video is a 17 minute documentary covering the T. Don Hutto Family Residential Facility in Texas run by Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).  It is basically a privately run medium-security prison.  According to the video, CCA receives $2,801,643 each month in federal tax dollars to run Hutto alone.  In addition, CCA is paid $200 per person incarcerated in Hutto (including children) per day.  The felons incarcerated in Hutto are refugees whose only crime is insufficient documentation of residency.  The movie brings up a strong critique against private prisons.  They are not well supervised, therefore they are not always held responsible for their actions.  For instance the movie shows a New York times article which states that the UN Inspector was denied access to Immigrant jails May 15 of 2007.  Which brings me to another point that I will elaborate in a separate post.  Jails and prisons are two very different facilities.  I was meaning to focus this blog solely on the privatization of prisons, but I will need to dive further on the differences between the two types of incarceration facilities next week. 

Otherwise, private incarceration facilities are not transparent and therefore, are not as accountable as public incarceration facilities.  This is further expressed in the practice of building prisons on speculation.  This practice has recently been banned in many states, but is still in practice nonetheless.  Building a prison on speculation is the concept of a private corporation deciding to build a prison facility before entering into a contract with the public.  According to the book Merchandising Prisoners by Byron Price, “states are forced to use the existing facility [prison built on speculation] because they can not justify buliding a new prison with public funds when one built by private funds is already available” (Price 2006: 94).  Therefore taxpayers have no say in whether a new prison is built in their community.  Price also mentions that prisons built on speculation “may not house any prisoners from housing state, and their only obligation is to pay corporate taxes (Price 2006: 96).  Therefore, if a prisoner escapes, which has happened many times in private prison facilities, it is the states responsibility to capture the fleeing felon even though the prisoner is from another state.

In the book Merchandising Prisoners, Byron Price explains that many public services are subsidized to private industry and public prisons such as food, health care, sanitation, treatment and phone service.  Prisons will only have an agreement with one phone service, so that service whether it be MCI, AT&T or Bell South owns a monopoly on all calls that come in and out of each facility whether it be private or public.  Therefore it is easy to see how these Corporations benefit from the increase growth and overpopulation crisis in prisons.  Not surprisingly, MCI, AT&T and Bell South are also members of the American Legislative Exchange Council for Criminal Justice (Price 2006: 137).  Private Prison firms such as Corrections Corporation of America, and Wackenhut are also on this Council.  This Council serves to fund campaigns targeted toward more punitive sentences for more individuals.  It is important to note that in private prisons the majority of prisoners in that prison could be from other states.  Since private prisons provides more customers for telephone companies that will be making more longer calls there is even more of a profit seen for them coming from private prisons than public prisons.  For example, “in 1995 prisoners generated $1 billion in long distance calls.  [In Addition,] communication companies charge prisoners 6 times the normal charge when they use prison pay phones” (Price: 2006 137).  It is easy to see that a prison payphone makes about $15,000 per day especially since that is the only means that many prisoners in  have in private facilities to stay connected with family and friends (Price 2006: 104).  It is also easy to see how private prisons stay in business even though they may not be the most publicly popular option.  When a industry has Multinational Corporations supporting its operation, not much is going to slow down its expansion.  This also helps explain how even though the actual crime trend is going down, prison expansion is still increasing.

Price, Byron E. Merchandising Prisons. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006

The above new brief mentions the critique that there are many foreign nationals the California Prison system that taxpayers would be wasting their money transporting to a private prison in another state instead of deporting to their home country.  It also mentions that California alone would save “about about almost 1 billion dollars a year” by allowing the foreign inmates to serve time in their home countries.  As shown in the book Prison Nation, aliens are not only public burden to tax payers and the criminal justice system they are also victims of the Private Prisons.  First of all, the system is a little more complicated than just allowing the undocumented immigrants to serve time in their own country.  There are instances where the country that the individual is from refuses to take their citizen back.  According to Prison Nation, lifers, people awaiting deportation who have completed their criminal sentences in state or federal prison, but who remain incarcerated because no country will take them back” exist in the system (Herivel 2003: 143).  Furthermore, we are more likely to place these individuals into private prisons where they are known to receive poor treatment and abuse.  For instance, Mike Janus the privatization administrator of the Federal Bureau of Prisons explains that illegal aliens face deportation at the end for their sentences and therefore do not require the kinds of education and counseling programs available in regular federal prisons” (Herivel 2003: 144).  As one can see, housing illegal immigrants is a complex issue that hurts not only the tax payers, but the immigrants in a disproportionate manner.

Herivel, Tara, and Paul Wright, eds. Prison Nation. Ney York, NY: Routedge, 2003. 142-144

In 1971 Professor Philip Zimbardo conducted an experiment where the roles of inmates and prison authorities were played out by college students.  These students had no previous training as prison guards.  As seen on the videos below, they were only instructed to refrain from using physical violence.  There are many flaws in the experiment, for example it was a small study sample and can not represent larger population well.  Zimbardo was also too influential in the study by playing the prison ward and the conductor of the study.  Nonetheless, this experiment helps explain how the little experience and inadequate training correctional officers can result in an atmosphere of abuse and extreme mistreatment.

This directly applies to the conditions of private prisons because private prison officers have less experience and training than public prison officers.  As shown in the book Capitialist Punishment,  “private prisons have significantly lower staffing level, lower salaries and higher rate of assaults on staff and inmates than public facilities” (Coyle et al 2003; 141).  Furthermore, when high turnover exists in a staff, there is little time for experiance to be gained, for the system is constantly training new employees.  Private prisons are also  known for having huge turn over rates.  For instance, Wakenhut Corrections facility in Jena, Louisiana had a 300% turnover rate in a one year period (Coyle et al 2003; 144).  It is also important to note that overall private prisons maintain a higher rate of turnover rate and pay a lower salary to front line officers than public facilites (Coyle et al 2003; 144). This trend helps explain the root cause of turnover rates and more importantly the root cause of higher instances of violence, abuse and extreme mistreatment that exists in private prisons.

Coyle, Andrew, Allison Campbell, and Rodney Neufeld, eds. Capitalist Punishment. London: Zed Books, 2003. 140-144.

First item of business, posting blogs is a new concept for me.  Please have patients while I figure out what I am doing.  In the meanwhile, here is one that I might get credit for. As for the tile, one can see a vicious cycle fueled by corporate funding when they look at prison privatization.  I named this blog “The Truth in Prison Privatization” after the group of “laws that require offenders to serve a substantial portion (usually 85% for violent crimes) of their prison sentence before being released on parole” (Clear et. Al 2006: 74).  These laws are grouped under the category of Truth-in-Sentencing Laws.  Laws and policies that fall under a similar category are Determinate sentences (“a fixed period of incarceration imposed by a court”), Mandatory Sentences (“a sentence stipulating that some minimum period of incarceration must be served by people convicted of selected crimes, regardless of background or circumstance”) (Clear et. Al 2006: 73).  Basically, all of these polices guarantee that more individuals spend more time in prison.  In effect prisons become massively overcrowded.   

Unfortunately, prisons are very ineffective in reducing crime in the long run.  According to professor Jeff Bouffard of Crime Control Polices, once released back into society from incapacitation within 5 years 80% of offenders are rearrested (Bouffard 2007).  That statistic is very significant, because it does not account for the individuals that recidivate (continue to commit crime after being incarcerated) without being detected by the system.  Furthermore, a 1969 study performed by the National Commission on Cause and Prevention of Violence found that 54% of prisoners became mentally ill after having been imprisoned” (Clear et. Al 2006: 73).  Therefore a substancial population of indivduals are leaving the system prone, if not more prone to commit crime than they were before coming in. 

So the question is why do private prisons place substantial funding in these “tough-on-crime” polices such as Truth-in-Sentencing?  If their intention is to decrease the amount of crime, then they are making the wrong investment.  Being that they are paid per prisoner, it is more likely that the actual rate of crime is not a concern to private prison administrators or shareholders.  As long as incarceration is a mandatory sentence, prisons will continue to be overcrowded, and private prisons will continue to get paid, but crime will not decrease or slow down. Many factors fuel the massive growth of prison privatization.  If one is to look superficially they would see that overcrowding of prison facilities and inadequate funding left oublic prison administrators with no choice but to send prisoners to private facilities.  This is true, but the problem started with the massive corporate funding of tough on crime statutes. 

Work Cited

Clear, Todd R., George F. Cole, and Michael D D. Reisig. American Corrections. Seventh ed. Canada: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006. 255-258.

Bouffard, Jeff Crime Control Polices Fall 2007 Section 1 Lecture