The private sector pitched capitalism as a solution to mass incarceration, but 20 to 30 years later, they proved they could make money off of the war on drugs and little else
A deep dive into Lauren-Brooke Eisen's book, Inside Private Prisons.
This is a book summary of Inside Private Prisons by Lauren-Brooke Eisen. Quotes and facts are excerpted from it.
There is nothing more true to America than using the private sector to address the problem of mass incarceration by turning imprisoning people into an industry. In the 1990s to early 2000s, an explosion of private prisons appeared to absorb the millions of people thrown away in the war on drugs.
In 1995, one in four states fell under a federal court order or consent agree (a legal truce that avoids a court settlement but legal binds the parties to an agreement) to improve prison conditions or reduce inmate populations. The imprisonment rate quadrupled between 1978 and 2014, leading America to have the highest incarceration rate in the world at 2.1 million in 2019 before the pandemic. The number dropped to 1.8 million in 2020 due to pressure to release people in prison and jail because of their high risk to COVID, according to the Vera Institute of Justice. A portion of those releases were conditional, and some have been sent back behind bars.
Crime rates have dropped in recent decades, but the drop in incarceration rates pale in comparison. Many of the people imprisoned in the 80’s and 90’s are still held due to mandatory minimums.
“The nation has participated in an imprisonment binge it cannot afford, spending $80 billion on corrections annually,” Lauren-Brooke Eisen writes in her book, Inside Private Prisons. The billion dollar industry invested in securing that profit. Lobby expenditures for CoreCivic increased from $410,000 to $3 million between 2000 and 2004. In 2012, CoreCivic sent a letter to 48 states offering to buy their prisons under 20 year contracts.
Between 1995 and 2000, the nation built 150 new private prisons versus 50 public facilities. Many of those were rural prisons due to cheap land, but the 126,000 inmates held in facilities often face time 100s if not thousands of miles away from their family. And when those prisons close, entire communities lose the industry that their town relies on.
Published in 2018, the book deep dives into the creation of the private prison industry in America from the country’s inception to the boom of prison building. There is no definitive answer to the controversy Eisen tries to hash out: whether private prisons are actually better than public facilities. Critics of private prisons say their underlying motive to make money creates even worse conditions than in states. Though state facilities have had their fair share of bad track records as well.
Private prisons have a raggedy record: the infamous Idaho Correctional Center, a prison that was called the “Gladiator School” by the Idaho inmates, was sued by the ACLU for violent conditions between inmates. The state took over control of the prison in 2014. Federal investigations backed the suit but no charges were pressed.
CoreCivic (formerly CCA) and Geo Group lead the nation and world as the largest private prison companies. CoreCivic has 89 correctional facilities with 88,500 beds, and Geo has 104 detention and correctional facilities with 87,000 beds. They usually contract with states under lease back contracts where the company provides the funds to build the prison and the state pays them back annually for sometimes 20 years until the state owns the facility.
These prison contracts have clauses where they require the state or federal government to maintain a 90 percent capacity of the prison. This literally creates an incentive to maintain a certain number of people in prison.
CoreCivic’s 2016 annual report listed a risk to its profit as “the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices.” It included the decriminalization of drugs.
One of the difficulties to answering the true nature of private prisons is the fact that they are not subject to the same open record laws that public government is. So Eisen and anyone for that matter cannot do a true comparison of private v. public until these companies cease to be black boxes.
The Department of Justice’s inspector general found that private prisons were more dangerous than those managed by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and that they need more oversight. On site monitors are sometimes past staff of the prison and are often too close to the facility to be effective.
The facilities often point to their accreditation status, a certification from the American Corrections Association, an inspection prisons pay for. But doubt has been cast over the ACA’s credibility. A former corrections officer is quoted in the book saying that a facility can lose accreditation over food temperature violations but 25 murders between inmates will not impact it at all.
Fines for breaking contracts with the government partners are often cheaper to pay than avoid all together. Contracts rarely incentivize private companies for positive outcomes like drops in incarceration or recidivism.
One study found that long term relationships with CCA or other private companies cut state costs 12 to 58 percent, but Arizona found that the costs remained the same in 2011 after adjusting for inmates with worse health in public facilities. (Private prisons can control the kind of inmate they accept, weeding out those with more expensive health complications.)
CoreCivic claims that the average client spends $31 a day to incarcerate an inmate where CoreCivic spends $6. The companies save the states money on the front end and make their own profit. Geo Group and CoreCivic, both publicly traded on the stock exchange, earned a combined $4.3 billion with $328 million in profit in 2016.
Most recently, both Geo Group and CoreCivic, moved into the immigrant detention sector. Nine of 19 immigration courts are housed in detention centers run by CoreCivic and Geo. Both have also already ventured into the re-entry sector as the pressure rises tostop incarcerating people as much. They’ve bought treatment and rehabilitation facilities where people are diverted from prison to. ACLU wrote that CoreCivic is becoming “the Walmart of reentry.”
As incarceration begins to drop, private facilities are being closed in states like Colorado, but the companies are pivoting their beds to fit different labels. And in states like Alabama with deteriorating prisons and high incarceration rates, they are still jumping on opportunities to build new prisons.
It’s unclear if private or public prisons are a better option, but it is clear that private facilities are pressured to make more money not provide better prison or detention conditions.
“It is thus easy to think of prisoners as members of a separate netherworld, driven by its own demands ordered by its own customs, ruled by those who claim to power rests on raw necessity. Nothing can change the fact, however, that the society these prisoners inhabit is our own. Prisons may exist on the margin of society , but no act of will can sever them from the body politic.” [O’Lone v Estate of Shabazz, 1987]
COVID-19 resources: State policy changes. News. Bureau of Prisons updates. State court changes. Prison holistic self care and protection. Jailhouse Lawyers Handbook.
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