Jail Sell

By Erin Sullivan, Metroland
Posted on May 15, 2000, Printed on December 15, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/9149/

At 5 feet tall and weighing in at less than 90 pounds, young William P. most likely could not have lasted long defending himself against a cellmate the size of a grown man. A troubled boy diagnosed with attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, William P. was no doubt a handful -- by 1996, he was involuntarily committed to a South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice correctional facility -- but probably no more or less difficult to handle than other teens with similar emotional and disciplinary problems.

In July 1996, William P. was transferred, with 400 other boys, from South Carolina's overcrowded Broad River Road juvenile institution to the Columbia Training Center, a newly renovated psychiatric hospital-turned-"secure training school" in Columbia, S.C.

The new detention center was a little different than the institutions to which boys such as William P. were accustomed. Unlike the other facilities used to detain juvenile offenders in South Carolina, which were operated by the state's Department of Juvenile Justice, the Columbia Training Center was a private, for-profit institution designed, built and financed by the Corrections Corporation of America, one of the fastest-growing multinational, private operators of so-called "prisons for profit." And unlike the facilities that boys such as William P. had been in before, the Center was plagued by problems that CCA would later call "operational challenges."

Within a few months of its opening, the Center came under intense scrutiny from the public. A CCA-employed social worker claimed to have documented abuse and mismanagement at the facility, and later claimed he was fired for airing his complaints to outside sources; the center's staff were accused of using unorthodox and unacceptable disciplinary methods with unruly residents; and by August 1996, CCA was confronted with a shortage of staff members to supervise the 350 to 400 boys who populated the facility at any given time.

William P. quickly found out that Columbia Training Center could be a frightening and dangerous place. According to a federal lawsuit filed on his behalf in 1998 by Columbia, S.C., attorney Gaston Fairey, there was a "lack of control in the CTC facility,"which resulted in the use of abusive techniques to deal with disciplinary problems. The lawsuit claims that CCA permitted the center's staff to routinely terrorize and abuse the boys in their care with "inappropriate use of chemical munitions; excessive force; the inappropriate use of isolation rooms by intentionally placing an excessive number of juveniles into the rooms. ... [and] the use of older, larger juveniles as 'enforcers' or 'strawmen' to abuse younger or smaller juveniles as a means of discipline or control."

The lawsuit claims that in the less than six months that William P. was a resident at the Center, staffers subjected him to "inappropriate use of mace" and repeatedly threatened to lock him up with big, aggressive and violent juvenile offenders who would assault him. The lawsuit also alleges that he was "hog-tied" (a practice in which a juvenile's wrists and ankles are shackled together behind the back) as a disciplinary procedure; and that he was confined to a lock-up cell with a 6-foot-4, 225-pound inmate who, according to the suit, was "known by staff to abuse young, small juveniles such as William P. The other juvenile was placed in the cell by CCA staff with the knowledge and expectation that the other juvenile would assault William P."

By the end of the year, William P. allegedly had been physically brutalized by the larger boy and hog-tied as many as 30 times.

In January 1997, he was committed to the South Carolina Department of Mental Health, covered with bruises and threatening to injure himself. He was hospitalized in an acute care psychiatric unit at a state-run mental-health facility until December 1997 -- almost one full year -- after only six months of detention at the CCA-run center.

"[The] plaintiff's guardian is informed and believes that William P. presently suffers from dissociative reaction disorder (post-traumatic stress disorder) and/or other psychological injuries as a direct and proximate result of the inhuman and torturous abuse inflicted upon the plaintiff by CCA," William P.'s legal complaint charges. "It is expected that he will require care and treatment for the indefinite future as a direct and proximate result of the abuse he suffered while in CCA's custody at CTC. Due to William P.'s present mental condition, he is unable to completely describe the details of the abuse and events that occurred at CTC at this time."

An unfortunate, isolated incident? Not at all -- in fact, according to a representative of the South Carolina Department of Juvenile Justice, 10 similar suits have been filed against CCA by William P.'s lawyer. Five have been settled, the department says, and five more will go to court this fall -- and, as a result of the operating problems at the Columbia Training Center, South Carolina terminated its contract with the company after just one year.

"It was decided by both parties not to renew," explains Monica Newman of the Department of Juvenile Justice. "I think both parties realized that the privatization of a large juvenile facility just, in fact, was not working ... I wouldn't say that one particular juvenile case had any bearing on the ... decision not to renew [CCA's contract]. I think it was just the privatization issue in general."

CCA responded to the bad press that ensued from the Columbia incident -- not to mention myriad other incidents at CCA-operated facilities across the country -- with a 10-point press release stating, among other things, that "inmates at all prisons, private and public, will do anything they can to circumvent both the physical security measures in a facility and the employees responsible for the operations inside the facility ... The history of CCA's South Carolina contract often has been misrepresented ... the operational challenge [the South Carolina contract] presented to CCA and the states also were unprecedented and drew intense public scrutiny. The cloud of negative publicity that resulted undermined the state's faith in CCA."

It works like this: A financially strapped community, searching for ways to pump money into its economy, is approached by a company such as Corrections Corporation of America or Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (the world's largest for-profit prison operator), willing to put underutilized properties back on the tax rolls, create hundreds of long-term jobs that pay moderately well, and (usually) ask for little in return. Further, the companies promise, they will provide a public service -- housing, feeding and rehabilitating prisoners or juvenile offenders -- at significantly lower cost to the taxpayer than a government-run facility.

According to Susan Hart, vice president of communications for CCA, some of her company's business comes from state and municipal government bidding processes -- that is, a government decides that it will contract with a private firm for corrections management -- and a good portion comes from pure speculation. The company singles out facilities that are close to capacity, builds its own facility nearby and steps in to take some of the overflow prisoners at a set cost per head.

"One part of our company growth is from anticipating the needs of government and investing in a particular project because you know that a state or federal system has a severe overcrowding problem," Hart explains. "We are anticipating their needs without costing government or taxpayers any capital."

The company makes its money by billing government agencies for its services; Hart says that her company works hand-in-hand with government officials to "erase the line between public and private" and streamline the bureaucracy-heavy, state-administered system.

"We are a publicly held company -- we have investors and we borrow money, just like everyone else," Hart says. "If you sort of compared us to homebuilding, we basically establish a line of credit, which we must pay back ... There's no magic to that part. What is quote-unquote magical is it doesn't cost taxpayers, in many instances, up-front tax dollars."

But, according to private-prison critics, including Eric Lotke of the D.C. Prisoners' Legal Services Project, the way the private-prison industry makes its money is much less benign than company spokespeople make it sound.

"Right at the time when the state is out of space in the prison -- and right at the time when the voters would have to approve a bond issue for prison expansion, the time when people might suddenly say, 'Hey why are we locking up all these nickel-bag drug offenders at $32,000 a head?' -- right at that time, CCA or Wackenhut walks up and says, 'Hey, guess what -- we already have a prison. All you have to do is ship us your guys."

Once the prison is built, every dollar not spent on a prisoner's care is a dollar that goes back to the company's stockholders -- and for companies such as CCA, which is actually traded on the New York Stock Exchange, the interests of stockholders legally must come first -- so quality care becomes secondary to profit.

"The biggest problem, probably, is in the fact that private corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to maximize their profits," explains Judith Greene, a senior Soros justice fellow for the Open Society Institute's Center on Crime, Communities and Culture. "In the last two years, both of the two largest companies -- CCA and Wackenhut, who really dominate the industry -- between the two of them, they own or operate 75 percent of the private bids. Both of those companies have had really serious problems in their facilities ... Take [Wackenhut's] Jena [juvenile prison] in Louisiana, for example. The chief government expert, Nancy Ray, is writing about how so many of those kids didn't have any shoes and were walking around the prison with no shoes or with just dirty socks ... The sneakers they issue cost $9.90 at Wal-Mart. But they sell sneakers at the prison's canteen for $30 a pair. You see that kind of thing all the time. CCA in Florida charges a 30 percent mark-up for batteries for headphones. ... Prisoners I interviewed in Minnesota said that they were issued just one towel."

Just as troubling as the corner-cutting, private-prison critics say, is that the industry makes its money by trading human beings -- hence the private prison industry's nickname, the "New Slavery."

According to Lotke, whose organization was involved in a class-action lawsuit against the notorious CCA-operated Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown, Ohio, America's experiment with private prisons has proven that most companies do not do a good job.

"I used to not be troubled too much by the problems with private prisons," Lotke says. "I said, 'Look, it's a new industry -- cut them a little slack, they've got to get the wrinkles out still.' I sort of felt that way in the first generation of private prisons and prison companies. Now, I've come to feel differently about that."

After CCA established itself in Youngstown -- once the nation's leader in steel production, now an economically struggling town where abandoned factories and vacant warehouses dot the landscape -- the company made a $182 million deal with the District of Columbia. CCA agreed to take some of the most difficult inmates from D.C.'s troubled prison complex in Lorton, Va., and house them at the Northeast Ohio facility.

Shortly after the experiment began, Lotke claims, he and his staff began to hear horror stories. "These were our folks, 1,400 of them, and they went down there, and they started to die," he recalls, his voice breaking with anger. "There was the Bryson Chisley death, the Derrick Davis death -- in the opening month, there were all these murders. And then the medical deaths started trickling in -- I think there were nine medical deaths in the first year. We yelled and screamed and yelled and screamed, for example, to get this one guy with a lump on his neck, to have it investigated. They said, 'Oh, we looked at it,' and they said, 'Oh it's just a node.' Six months later, maybe more than that, we finally got the thing biopsied, and it was lymphatic cancer. And now we think he's gonna die. And we will hold CCA accountable for that."

So far, D.C. Prisoner's Legal Services Project has managed to hold CCA accountable for some of its more egregious actions. Citing the deaths, stabbings, insufficient medical attention, abusive treatment and undertrained staff, the nonprofit organization filed a class-action lawsuit against CCA and was awarded nearly $2 million in 1999 on behalf of Northeast's inmates.

According to Alphonse Gerhardstein, an attorney who joined D.C. Prisoner's Legal Services Project in the suit, the company failed to address complaints and was reluctant to take responsibility for its shortcomings: "We had a combination of very high levels of violence and very low levels of medical care, but CCA said everything was fine and [that] we were just crying wolf.

"I do a lot of prison litigation," he continues. "Most of my work has been against public prisons, so I'm not an apologist for the public system -- I have plenty of gripes against them, too -- but when my name came up [for the Northeast Ohio case], and when they wrote to me about it, I knew this smelled bad. I had never been in a private prison before, never even seen one. When I walked in that first time, I just knew the place was out of control. No one checked my bag -- they just opened the gates and let me in because I said I was an attorney there for an attorney interview."

Garhardstein says that during the visit, he saw inmates wandering through the prison "pods" unsupervised; when he asked guards where certain prisoners were going, or why they were wandering freely, he was met with a markedly cavalier attitude.

"I saw an inmate going into Pod B unsupervised, and I said, 'What's going on here? Do you know where that person is going?'" Gerhardstein recalls. "The hall guard said no. He wasn't concerned. I said, 'Isn't it your job as the hall-monitor officer to check why they are going places?' He said, 'No, I figure if someone let him out, he must know where he's going."

Currently, there are only two states that outlaw the practice of prisons for profit: One is Illinois, the other New York. The private-prison question in New York was settled -- at least for now -- in 1997, when CCA bought a tract of land in the town of Fallsburg, then announced its intention to build a 1,000-bed, minimum-security drug-treatment center at the site of a former resort hotel.

Council 82, the labor union that represents prison guards in the state, banded together with members of the Civil Service Employees' Association and successfully lobbied for a law that would prohibit anyone other than local or state corrections officers to supervise inmates at county and state correctional facilities. A bill passed in the Assembly and Senate declared New York's borders closed to prison privateers -- but that doesn't mean that private correctional facilities can't find a backdoor into the market.

The New York law, for example, declares it illegal for private companies to house state inmates, but there is no law on the books precluding them from housing federal prisoners. In 1997, Wackenhut opened, for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, New York's one and (so far) only private prison, the Queens Private Correctional Facility in New York City.

And just because a state may declare private prisons illegal today, a document linked to CCA's Web site points out, doesn't mean they'll be illegal forever.

"Statutes are inherently subject to change," the document, prepared by retired University of Florida criminology professor Charles Thomas, states. "The effect of this reality is that research results that are valid at one point in time are swiftly invalidated by subsequent legislative actions."

Which is why U.S. Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio), a former guard at a maximum-security prison, has proposed legislation at the federal level that, if passed, would significantly restrict the private-prison industry by tying federal grant programs to the prohibition of outsourcing corrections contracts.

"My purpose is twofold," Strickland explains, "to prevent the privatization of any federal prison facility, and [to] significantly discourage the state leaders choosing to further privatize prisons in their states."

The bill, dubbed the Public Safety Act, would require all federal prisoners to be held in government-owned and -operated prison facilities; further, it would prohibit all states receiving grants under the federal Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 (most states receive these grants) from contracting out prison services. So far, Strickland says, his bill has the bipartisan support of more than 110 members of Congress.

"The bottom line for me is that incarceration should remain the responsibility of the public," Strickland says. "The public should not only to be responsible for the various parts of our criminal-justice apparatus -- that consists of the courts and juries and judges -- but also incarceration. Incarceration, in my view, is part of our criminal-justice apparatus. It's part of how we, as a nation, administer justice, and to take a part of that and turn it over to a private, for-profit concern is just wrong, and can lead to all kinds of abuses."

And abuses seem to be happening all the time: the murders and stabbings and escapes that happened at the Northeast Ohio facility; the problems at Jena, where juvenile prisoners were not provided with basic necessities, such as shoes; and even the unorthodox disciplinary procedures at the Columbia Training Center, which may have scarred the young William P. for life.

But instead of taking these incidents as early warning signs that the private prisons don't work, Lotke says, municipalities and state governments, looking for a quick cash fix, continue to embrace private prisons. In fact, he says, the District of Columbia recently passed a local law that mandates that at least half of its prisoners be locked up in privately run facilities -- an ordinance that, Lotke says, flies in the face of good sense, considering the problems that clearly plague the prisons-for-profit industry.

"This was their audition -- this was their coming-out party," Lotke says, unable to hide the venom in his voice. "If they couldn't perform during their test run, when all eyes are on them, why would they be able to perform better later on, when nobody cares? Ten years from now, when these guys are just part of the landscape, nobody's gonna care if these guys screw up. If they're doing this in year one, what are they going to do in year five, when they're not being watched anymore? You promised us a better product at a better price -- that's what you promised. We're now a couple of years into this, and you still haven't shown us that."

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