Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
We have had a lot of discussions here about the ever growing private prison system in the United States, where our country has become the world leader in imprisoning its citizens. Many blogs have been written discussing our world prison leadership and the fact that it stems from the failed “War on Drugs”, which has tended to focus on people in poverty and/or people of color. The for-profit prison industry has had a growth spurt that can be directly traced to that aspect of the conservative movement that has disparaged government services and at the same time pushed for privatization of government services using the false concept that private industry can do it better and cheaper. It is an ideas that to me seems nonsensical on its face because of the absolute need that private industry turns a profit and in today’s economic scheme that profit has to continually rise as time passes. Business strategy, which by definition, must focus on profit has focused on cutting costs as a means of building profit. Cutting costs then devolves into hiring less skilled workers, cutting down on services provided and in a business like private prisons reducing the quality of care. When ot comes to reduction of services and diminishing of quality of care when it comes to the prison industry, I’m sure that the majority of public opinion would approve of even more draconian measures. After all those convicted of a crime are generally scorned and feared. Muscular fundamentalist philosophy has discarded the Jesus of turn the other cheek into a Jesus of vengeance and so there is even in some circles moral approval of treating prison inmates harshly. There is now a widespread use of solitary confinement as a tool of prison punishment and that confinement has stretched from weeks, too months and too years. We are after all, a society that has a majority of Americans for torture in our post 9/11 era.
In 2008 we saw the opening of a scandal in Pennsylvania where it was discovered that juvenile court judges were sentencing youths to prison for minor offenses because they had received money from sources in the private prison industry. Two judges were convicted in this case and it was seen that many youths were adversely affected and are now suing for unlawful imprisonment. It is this profiting on the imprisonment of youth that I would like to address broadly in this blog. For the most part my reference links will appear at its conclusion. This is a very disturbing problem that I think cuts to the heart of what kind of society we want to live in and I would hope that others find this as disturbing as I do.The impetus for this blog is a Huffington Post story titled: “Prisoners of Profit” by Chris Kirkham http://www.huffingtonpost.com/chris-kirkham/
Chris wrote:
“From a glance at his background, one might assume that James F. Slattery would have a difficult time convincing any state in America to entrust him with the supervision of its lawbreaking youth.
Over the past quarter century, Slattery’s for-profit prison enterprises have run afoul of the Justice Department and authorities in New York, Florida, Maryland, Nevada and Texas for alleged offenses ranging from condoning abuse of inmates to plying politicians with undisclosed gifts while seeking to secure state contracts.”
He goes on to give specifics about incidents that have occurred in Slattery’s prisons such as a teen dying in a Texas Boot Camp that went untreated by authorities although the boy was vomiting; a Maryland facility that encouraged kids to fight on Saturday mornings as a method of dispute resolution; and in Florida charges that the company failed to report incidents of riots, assaults and sexual abuse.
“Despite that history, Slattery’s current company, Youth Services International, has retained and even expanded its contracts to operate juvenile prisons in several states. The company has capitalized on budgetary strains across the country as governments embrace privatization in pursuit of cost savings. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s juvenile delinquents are today committed to private facilities, according to the most recent federal data from 2011, up from about 33 percent twelve years earlier.
Over the past two decades, more than 40,000 boys and girls in 16 states have gone through one of Slattery’s prisons, boot camps or detention centers, according to a Huffington Post analysis of juvenile facility data.”
It all returns to the analysis of whether for-profit prisons for youth provide not only cost savings, but actually are effective in reducing rates of recidivism. Study after study has shown that recidivism rates have actually increased with private prisons and that costs have exceeded prisons maintained by public employees. This large and growing industry though has become an investment opportunity for some and a profit point for others, yet the abuses continue unabated.
“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.” http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/1905:the-corrupt-corporate-incarceration-complex
Now I would be remiss in not saying that there are other studies that laud the use of private prisons, on such is “The Reason Foundation” which is purportedly a libertarian organization. They have a report on private prisons with a conclusion that lauds the private prison industry for providing better services for the prisoners. That report can be found here: http://www.burnetcountytexas.org/docs/6-Segal-Commission-on-PrisonAbuse.pdf Interestingly though the Reason Foundation seems to stretch libertarianism to its breaking point in when it comes to Federal Funding of certain educational tests it supports as shown here: http://www.lewrockwell.com/lrc-blog/the-reason-foundation-a-disgrace/ Finally though comes the fact that the Reason Foundation is one of the front groups funded by the right wing ideologues The Koch Brothers and Sarah Scaife Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_Foundation The family history of both the Koch’s and the Scaifes (Mellon Family) show that much of the wealth garnered came from government and indeed a Mellon was the Treasury Secretary during the Coolidge Administration. Their libertarianism is their philosophy for all but the members of their economic class.
“In Florida, where private contractors have in recent years taken control of all of the state’s 3,300 youth prison beds, YSI now manages more than $100 million in contracts, about 10 percent of the system. Its facilities have generated conspicuously large numbers of claims that guards have assaulted youth, according to a HuffPost compilation of state reports. A YSI facility in Palm Beach County had the highest rate of reported sexual assaults out of 36 facilities reviewed in Florida, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report found.
The state’s sweeping privatization of its juvenile incarceration system has produced some of the worst re-offending rates in the nation. More than 40 percent of youth offenders sent to one of Florida’s juvenile prisons wind up arrested and convicted of another crime within a year of their release, according to state data. In New York state, where historically no youth offenders have been held in private institutions, 25 percent are convicted again within that timeframe.”
In my opinion there are three aspects to the private prison industry that one should ponder upon when judging its efficacy:
- 1. Can a for-profit firm do the job cheaper? In my opinion it is impossible for a private entity to deliver the same level of care as a public entity. Profit is the underlying reason. We must consider that running a prison is in no way similar to manufacturing. In manufacturing the issue is efficiency and economy of scale. In dealing with humans one cannot use economy of scale as a comparison factor since one is not producing widgets. As for efficiency the question is how do you equal performance by increasing efficiency in a prison context. I don’t believe it can be done. Perhaps others might show me good reasons why it can be done.
- 2. In our legal system should we surrender control of custodial care of criminals to private industry? My position is that there are certain functions inherent to any government that needs to be performed solely by government. Among these are military, fire fighters, police and the entire criminal justice system. This is not to say that any of these functions can’t be corrupted if run by government, or that any governmental system cannot be corrupt. Yet in my opinion if government makes the criminal law and if under that law people are incarcerated the ultimate responsibility for the caretaker function of that incarceration should fall to government. We see above that with youth facilities in Pennsylvania run as for-profit institutions a corrupt conspiracy developed to maintain levels of incarcerated youth at a profitable number and due to this judges were bribed and youths sent to jail merely to satisfy the need for profit. Do we really support that in our country, or in our States?
- 3. Should a humane society treat its prisoners inhumanely? This shouldn’t be, but is, a subtle question today. I have little doubt that the majority of Americans believe that whatever happens to people convicted of crimes they deserve. To me that kind of thinking is institutionalized savagery. Yet I anticipate the well worn question of what if something was done to someone I love. The analogy amuses me because it assumes that my beliefs make me merely a passive do-gooder, which is far from the case. If someone I loved were hurt by a criminal I would have little compunction in killing them violently if I had the chance and would gladly accept the punishment for same. The problem is that as a society we almost never know for certain if the supposed guilty party really is guilty, whether if accused by the authorities, or convicted. The police may well accuse someone of murdering a loved one, but there have been too many murder convictions overthrown for a conviction ever to be a certainty. Too many people have been convicted by circumstantial evidence, or by eyewitness accounts proven to be untrue. Because of that uncertainty, my “avenging hand” would be stayed unless the crime occurred before my eyes. Since that is such an extremely rare happenstance the certainly of not killing an innocent is at enough of a level for me not to want to take the chance. By the same token the vagaries of our criminal justice system are such that perhaps 5%, to use a conservative estimate, of criminals are wrongly convicted. That 5% would represent more than 100,000 people and that’s assuming that the legal system gets it right 95% of the time. For those 100,000 innocent people to be brutalized by the system that deprives them of liberty is unacceptable to me. Then again, that’s why I am opposed to the death penalty which to me if it results in the death of one innocent person, has caused one death too many.
I believe that the entire concept of a privatized prison system is an abomination and even more so when we are dealing with the incarceration of youths. What is your opinion?
Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/29142654/#.Umq7zhAeNlI
http://abcnews.go.com/US/mark-ciavarella-pa-juvenile-court-judge-convicted-alleged/story?id=12965182
http://sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/inc_Too_Good_to_be_True.pdf
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/1905:the-c,orrupt-corporate-incarceration-complex
http://jonathanturley.org/2011/11/26/the-incarceration-of-black-men-in-america/
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/06/29/obama-and-the-war-on-drugs-hypocrisy-in-action-2/
http://jonathanturley.org/2013/01/19/americas-broken-criminal-justice-system/
Tony,
“I see far less of a role for vengeance in property crimes or robbery or simple assault, where the harm is limited. I think vengeance in such circumstances can be overdone and non-proportional and just sadistic cruelty”
I agree with this and that is why I’m against such things (in general, there are some exceptions) to mandatory minimum sentences (which I think should only be applied when a public trust has been abused) or three strikes laws and draconian sentencing for stuff like marijuana possession which is purely a malum prohibitum matter to begin with (and one that should actually be addressed for what it is – a health issue – instead of a crime). Many columns have been written here about the increasing criminalization of everyday life. Those factor in as well. These kinds of compounding injustices, however, are simply a symptom of the underlying problem: the rise of a fascist police state. Our criminal justice system as a whole has a lot of room for improvement. Not looking to maximize prison populations for private profit by making disproportionate punishments is a place to start. The fact that “the land of the free” leads the world in per capita incarceration rates and that this statistic is being driven by for profit private prisons is a fascist outrage of the worst sort and the kind of thing our Founders would have likely gone to arms over.
I am for capital punishment if, and only if, execution is by hanging at high noon Saturday in the middle of the town square or closest thing thereto in the city where the court entered the judgment of death.
Gene: Two of my siblings have been murdered, in separate incidents, I understand at a pretty visceral level the desire for revenge; that rage burns and I feel it still.
However, in my post I am writing from the view of designing a system. If victims wish to see punishment as vengeance, let them, they may find some small measure of comfort in that (as I do). In terms of design, I am not opposed to a life for a life, that sounds reasonable to me, and in the extremes (death, permanent disability, the rape of a child) I think fair justice and vengeance can become nearly synonymous.
I see far less of a role for vengeance in property crimes or robbery or simple assault, where the harm is limited. I think vengeance in such circumstances can be overdone and non-proportional and just sadistic cruelty, like responding to a bully’s push by permanently blinding him, or putting him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. A month in a cell might make the bully think twice about pushing somebody, we don’t have to ruin his life or turn him into a career criminal.
Mike,
Excellent presentation that all can easily understand and discuss.
Although I was aware of for-profit prisons using slave labor from different discussions Elaine has introduced, I was not nearly as informed on the situation involving for-profit prisons for youth as I should have been.
Needless to say, I will be writing my State representatives to inquire as to the practice here, in Ohio, and then, depending on their answers, moving forward in an appropriate manner. This is a matter that can be strongly influenced by active local participation.
Tony,
That is indeed one of the social aspects of justice, but I think that analysis is rooted in the perspective of third party observer, not that of a first or second party victim. To those parties in a violent crime, I can assure you that the ones who do not factor vengeance into their thinking are the exception and not the rule. You sometimes see it, but it is rare when a victim steps to bar and asks for leniency in violent crime scenarios. It’s simply human nature. That very drive for revenge – which can be grossly disproportionate to the crime – is part and parcel of the necessary basis of criminal law and using a non-party arbiter instead of self-help and the anarchy that invites. The revenge element of justice when present is geared toward creating order.
Great discussions this day, thoughtful.
The purpose of politics doesn’t have to be vengeance either!
****
This is who we are. It makes me angry and sick to my stomach! We’re hateful people. Those who don’t go along are slimed! Remember the awful Sixties when the young people wanted to “make the world a better place?” Those stoned wankers! Then, aha, this was a commodity that could be capitalized on…and has it ever… The accounts are rife with clever entrepreneurs! Then world enterprises!
I live in Florida, and learned more today about the system than I knew. Although I am aware of the “hang ’em high” attitude here. I also know that the justice system is supported by the “people.”
We become aware when someone dies from “punishment.” But, death is a daily occurrence! There is at least one killing a day here in Palm Beach County. So, something’s not working! And people are innured to the condition. Other than the caretakers grooving on the power of authority, not much is being accomplished from this system! They are proponents of Scared Straight, and I guarantee the voters agree!
“They are proponents of Scared Straight, and I guarantee the voters agree!”
Patsylvania,
As a Florida resident myself I agree. Scared Straight is the type of program that sounds good on the surface but is bound for failure. However, the surface is what people buy and seem to vote for.
Follow the money! Whenever any politician wants to privatize anything…from Social Security to prisons, the underlying reason is Money. Great links Elaine.
Excellent piece, Mike.
One knows a country by how it treats those it regards as “criminals.” In America, torture said to all law enforcement that thereafter, anything only slightly less awful than waterboarding is now ready for rapid deployment by jizzed-up men in battle armor 3d-printed from video game specs (they were playing Call of Duty just that afternoon). Those same men get employed at “correctional” facilities when they fail the grunt test to be an actual cop.
You. Will. Feel. Safer. Or. Else.
Elaine, Thank you for the link, I forgot it- I am preoccupied with computer problems, this is the third time I tried to log on to the internet and second time to log on to the Blawg- WP kept asking me to re-sign in, is it me or is WP acting up too. My computer is possessed.
Re bigfatmike, last I read the charge was $1.00 a minute which is a total rip-off. Also services such as medical care is a contract service and that hasn’t gone very well:
http://www.npr.org/2011/06/08/137055836/the-root-inmate-health-care-another-kind-of-prison
Death penalty opponents stick their heads in the sand when it comes to people in prison without the possibility of parole, and no death penalty. They can be killing machines with solitary being the only consequences.
This stems from the limited govt and the push to privatize public services. I agree with Tony; there are some things that only govt should do.
ET makes an interesting point about the use of for-profit prisons getting around the 14th Amendment and govt liability. Could a police dept or district attorney get a round the 4th Am by hiring a private detective to install a GPS unit on a car or search a home?
A corollary to the privatization of prisons is the privatization of services to inmates.
In the past families and friends could send funds to the account of inmates for little more than the cost of a money order and a stamp. Now many jurisdictions use something called Jpay or similar service. Jpay requires the sender to set up an account and pay a fee for processing. The fee is said to be reasonable – but try finding the fee on their web site.
BTW, Jpay claims outstanding service. But internet messages suggest a bad reputation for late pay and no pay.
Phone services have also been privatized in many institutions. In the past many inmates could make a call to approved friends or relatives at rates that approximated the cost of a collect call. Now many institutions use services that require that an account be set up, and funded with a deposit. The calls are then charged to the deposit, by the minute at rates far beyond typical tariffs for similar calls.
The claim is that these services save money. The fact is that the costs for these services are transferred from the state to inmates – with huge increased that, in effect, make the inmates profit centers for private industry.
“Now many jurisdictions use something called Jpay or similar service.”
BFM,
Thank you for the info, though it is nauseating to contemplate the injustice.
Gene: Well, I wouldn’t argue that much. But even the death penalty doesn’t have to be “vengeance,” to me it could be a probability judgment that keeping some killer alive just poses too much risk to other living people, even if it were only other prisoners or guards. So even that does not have to be vengeance, just a realistic assessment of total harm in two possible futures; e.g. one with a psychopath alive and one with that psychopath dead.
We all die sooner or later, and I think for some, better sooner than later. that is probably an attitude informed by both my atheism and my empathy for the strangers destined to be future victims. What I regard just as precious as “life” is the potential for a life to experience happiness and produce it in others, to love and be loved, to create and contribute. Once it seems clear a person’s future life will produce a net negative on that balance sheet by harming others, we are better off with them dead.
ET,
Interesting way of looking at the problem.
Tony,
There are some instances where vengeance is a component of justice. For example, violent crimes. In those cases, prison (or the death penalty) are socially implemented forms of vengeance meant to substitute for any innate desire for vengeance that would spur self-help remedy from victims or their families. True, vengeance doesn’t have to be a component of justice, but that doesn’t change that it sometimes is.
Yes, Conservative Corporations and Liberal Corporations suck the tit of taxpayers. You need to cut back the taxes if you want this to stop. Koch Brothers, Solyndra, it is all crony capitalism.
Mike Elk on Democracy Now! about “The Hidden History of ALEC & Prison Labor” in The Nation
The Hidden History of ALEC and Prison Labor
Years after ALEC’s Truth In Sentencing bills became the law of the land, its Prison Industries Act has quietly expanded prison labor across the country.
By Mike Elk and Bob Sloan
http://www.thenation.com/article/162478/hidden-history-alec-and-prison-labor#
Excerpt:
The breaded chicken patty your child bites into at school may have been made by a worker earning twenty cents an hour, not in a faraway country, but by a member of an invisible American workforce: prisoners. At the Union Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Florida, inmates from a nearby lower-security prison manufacture tons of processed beef, chicken and pork for Prison Rehabilitative Industries and Diversified Enterprises (PRIDE), a privately held non-profit corporation that operates the state’s forty-one work programs. In addition to processed food, PRIDE’s website reveals an array of products for sale through contracts with private companies, from eyeglasses to office furniture, to be shipped from a distribution center in Florida to businesses across the US. PRIDE boasts that its work programs are “designed to provide vocational training, to improve prison security, to reduce the cost of state government, and to promote the rehabilitation of the state inmates.”
Although a wide variety of goods have long been produced by state and federal prisoners for the US government—license plates are the classic example, with more recent contracts including everything from guided missile parts to the solar panels powering government buildings—prison labor for the private sector was legally barred for years, to avoid unfair competition with private companies. But this has changed thanks to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), its Prison Industries Act, and a little-known federal program known as PIE (the Prison Industries Enhancement Certification Program). While much has been written about prison labor in the past several years, these forces, which have driven its expansion, remain largely unknown.
Somewhat more familiar is ALEC’s instrumental role in the explosion of the US prison population in the past few decades. ALEC helped pioneer some of the toughest sentencing laws on the books today, like mandatory minimums for non-violent drug offenders, “three strikes” laws, and “truth in sentencing” laws. In 1995 alone, ALEC’s Truth in Sentencing Act was signed into law in twenty-five states. (Then State Rep. Scott Walker was an ALEC member when he sponsored Wisconsin’s truth-in-sentencing laws and, according to PR Watch, used its statistics to make the case for the law.) More recently, ALEC has proposed innovative “solutions” to the overcrowding it helped create, such as privatizing the parole process through “the proven success of the private bail bond industry,” as it recommended in 2007. (The American Bail Coalition is an executive member of ALEC’s Public Safety and Elections Task Force.) ALEC has also worked to pass state laws to create private for-profit prisons, a boon to two of its major corporate sponsors: Corrections Corporation of America and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections), the largest private prison firms in the country. An In These Times investigation last summer revealed that ALEC arranged secret meetings between Arizona’s state legislators and CCA to draft what became SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, to keep CCA prisons flush with immigrant detainees. ALEC has proven expertly capable of devising endless ways to help private corporations benefit from the country’s massive prison population.
That mass incarceration would create a huge captive workforce was anticipated long before the US prison population reached its peak—and at a time when the concept of “rehabilitation” was still considered part of the mission of prisons. First created by Congress in 1979, the PIE program was designed “to encourage states and units of local government to establish employment opportunities for prisoners that approximate private sector work opportunities,” according to PRIDE’s website. The benefits to big corporations were clear—a “readily available workforce” for the private sector and “a cost-effective way to occupy a portion of the ever-growing offender/inmate population” for prison officials—yet from its founding until the mid-1990s, few states participated in the program.
This started to change in 1993, when Texas State Representative and ALEC member Ray Allen crafted the Texas Prison Industries Act, which aimed to expand the PIE program. After it passed in Texas, Allen advocated that it be duplicated across the country. In 1995, ALEC’s Prison Industries Act was born.
HumpinDog, ALEC is involved from start to finish, passing laws for harsher sentences, for-profit prisons, for-profit parole/halfway houses and the prison labor industry. ALEC’s dream IMO is the corporatists and the small slice of free workers to service them and their interests on the outside and the rest of humanity in its prison/worker complex.
I agree that all prisons should be run by government.
There is also the problem of proportionality. If being sent to prison risks your life, being raped and used as a sex slave, or destroys your life potential by making it impossible to get anything but a menial labor job, or get a loan: That increases crime, it doesn’t decrease crime.
Once you send a shoplifter or pot smoker to jail, or even a joy-riding teenage car thief, you have probably created a career criminal that will go on to do a hundred or thousand times as much harm to society as their initial offense.
The purpose of prison does not have to be “vengeance.”
The logical purpose of prison (in my view) is two-fold. One is to sequester those people from society that have proven they do not have the self-control to keep themselves from harming society. Thus they need imposed control. Although at some point psychological evaluation might mean some have developed self-control and warrant release, for many incarceration has to be permanent. And if they are still so out of control in prison that they harm other prisoners or prison personnel, they may need to be caged in isolation and prevented from those physical interactions as well (although verbalized social contact seems fine to me.)
The other purpose of prison is to enforce consequences as proof that punishment WILL be enforced, otherwise laws will be disregarded and broken at will.
Neither type of imprisonment is “vengeance.” Punishment is not always vengeance, if you impose a timeout on your child you aren’t taking angry vengeance. Both imprisonment and time-out for a kid deprive a person of freedom, but the authority in both cases (society or a parent) does not have to be sadistic or cause pain or terror. Deprivation of freedom is the punishment.
I have no problem with escalating punishment based on previous offenses, I think that should always be taken into account (including for fines against corporations).
I don’t think it is as simplistic as the no-context “three strikes” legislation, but previous offenses ARE evidence that punishment and (for people) psychological counseling and therapy have been ineffective, and punishment needs to be escalated, eventually to life imprisonment to keep the person from causing any further harm to society. But again, that is not vengeance; punishment does not have to be vengeance.
In 1995 he ran for judge in Luzerne County on the Democratic ticket