posted 05-13-2004 08:36 PM            

Mostly Non-Violent Offenders

Flaws in the American way of life
Leader

Monday 17th May 2004

http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSArticle_People&newDisplayURN= 200405170001

What the New Statesman and several of its commentators such as John Pilger and Ziauddin Sardar have said for the past two years is now being accepted across the political spectrum. The Independent's ex-editor Andreas Whittam Smith compares George W Bush and Tony Blair to Stalin - a comparison at which even the most dedicated anti-Americans would have baulked until now. In the London Evening Standard, the political commentator Peter Oborne calls the US "a rogue state". The editor of Newsweek International, Fareed Zakaria, acknowledges that, to much of the world, the US is "an international outlaw". The proposition that America had the slightest interest in the welfare of the Iraqi people, and that a humanitarian mission could piggyback on its invasion, now looks wholly absurd. Attacked by Arabs on 9/11, it wanted to take the battle to Arab territory (that they were different Arabs was neither here nor there); alarmed by China's growing demand for oil, it wanted to strengthen its position in the oil-rich Middle East; dedicated to aggressive capitalism, it wanted to impose its ideology on the only region still largely resisting it.

As always, US leaders try to present America's crimes as an aberration. What happened at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, we are told, does not represent "American values". Yet as Stephen Grey shows in our cover story, the only exceptional thing is that Americans did the torturing themselves. More often, over the past two years, the US has used secret planes to move prisoners to allied regimes that have more skill and experience in torture. Again, the deaths of hundreds in Fallujah must be another aberration - or perhaps they didn't die at all or perhaps they were all armed terrorists.

Why we expect so much of America is a puzzle. During the Korean war, it bombed the north so intensively that it ran out of targets. In the 1960s and 1970s, it killed an estimated three million people in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. At the end of the first Gulf war, it killed retreating Iraqi conscripts in their tens of thousands. In Chile and Nicaragua, it helped armed opponents of democratically elected governments. It has tried to squeeze the life out of Cuba for decades and took new measures to stop Cuban Americans sending cash to their families back home only the other day. It opposes a host of international treaties - on banning nuclear tests and controlling carbon-dioxide emissions, for example - and now abjures the Geneva Conventions as well.

How a country conducts its internal affairs is a good guide to how it will behave abroad. It may treat foreigners worse than it treats its own people, but it will not treat them better. This is why tyrants' professions of peaceful intentions should never be trusted. What misleads us about the US is its commitment to many liberal values: free speech, a free press, a robust legal system and lots of voting, for example. But this is also a country that incarcerates two million (about one in every 140) of its residents - the world's highest rate of imprisonment. One in three black men spends some part of his life behind bars. Prison regimes are sometimes harsh and abuse is frequent, as a correspondent notes on page 35. The US also executes more than 50 people a year, some of them children.

The American way of life has many other shameful features: the subordination of politics to business interests; the uncontrolled possession of guns; huge social and racial inequalities; the pitiful provision of health and welfare for poor people. We tolerate these as an ally's flaw, rather as we might tolerate a few drunken binges in an otherwise amiable friend. We do not see how they add up to a vision of the world that America wishes to export - a way of life that seems comfortable enough for middle-class opinion-formers, but that brings misery to millions of others. We share, we think, "western values" and must unite against a common enemy. But are we sure that we and the Americans share the same understanding of western values? Are we sure that the extreme Christian fundamentalists who lurk behind President Bush, with their hair-raising attitudes to gays and abortionists, are a lesser threat than the extreme Muslim fundamentalists who lurk behind several Middle Eastern regimes?

Scoff if you like, and observe that the US does not behead people in cold blood. But who knows where its unshakeable belief in its own righteousness may lead it? Wiser rulers than Britain's would hedge their bets rather more, lest they find themselves obliged to defend worse things than beatings and sexual humiliation in a Baghdad prison. America, some say, is in a "pre-fascist" era. That now looks just a little less implausible than it did a month ago.

Help ministers to keep abreast

While welcoming the conversion of Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's former press chief, to freedom of information, we must ask if this is still the most urgent priority. Most of us feel saturated with information, but very little of it ever seems to reach ministers. Torture by UK and US troops, eastern Europeans pouring into the country, large donations to the Labour Party, a huge shortfall in funding to schools, even a newspaper headline that the country could be attacked within 45 minutes - the list of things our rulers did not know about is very long. It is no better in Washington, where nobody seems to tell President Bush anything, least of all about an imminent al-Qaeda attack. Where does all this information go? Why does nearly everybody else in the world know everything before leading politicians do? A wish to inform the public is admirable. But shouldn't somebody arrange to keep ministers abreast?
This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.

posted 05-15-2004 10:33 PM            

By Tim Wheeler

Longhorn cows. Oil. They’ve made a few Texans rich and famous. But under Gov. George W. Bush another industry is pumping out cash like an East Texas gusher – private prisons!

George and Richard Wackenhut, owners of Wackenhut Corporation, operate 13 prisons in the Lone Star State. They are so enthusiastic about fellow Republican George "Dubya" Bush and his race for the presidency that they have contributed considerable sums to his election campaigns.

Bush’s ties to the prison-industrial complex raise troubling questions about his posturing as a "compassionate conservative." It sheds light on his "lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key" policy on the incarceration of drug users – even though Bush does not deny reports that he snorted cocaine in his youth. It also reveals much about his hard-line support for the death penalty which he has imposed 137 times since taking office, more than any other governor. Another 13 executions are scheduled in Texas between now and election day.

Bush sent Shaka Sankofa (Gary Graham) to his death despite widespread doubt about his guilt. He also executed Karla Faye Tucker, the first women in 100 years executed in Texas, despite worldwide calls for clemency.

The death penalty is a centerpiece of the GOP’s policy of criminalizing youth and people of color. That policy has resulted in the incarceration of 1.8 million people in U.S. prisons, rivaling the number of youth attending college. At least $35 billion is spent each year on prison incarceration and the "privatizers" of the GOP see this industry as a lush pasture for super-profits.

More than 146,000 inmates are incarcerated in the Texas prison system, according to the Sentencing Project. Almost another 58,000 are languishing in local jails, for a grand total of 204,000 prison inmates. Of these, over 63,000 or 45.3 percent, are Black and almost 37,000 or 26.2 percent, are Hispanic.

Texas has the nation’s second highest rate of incarceration after Louisiana. Back in 1994, Texas Comptroller John Sharp released a 384-page report on the Texas prison system that sounded like President Eisenhower’s farewell warning against the "military industrial complex."

In a message to then-Gov. Ann Richards, Sharp warned that the Texas prison system’s two-year budget was $4 billion, more than 6 percent of the state budget.

"Prison operating costs, not including their original construction or debt service cost, have ballooned by some 2,000 percent in the past decade and will rise by another two-thirds by the turn of the century," he wrote.

At the time he was writing, another 76,000 prison beds were to be added to the system, bringing total capacity to 145,000 inmates. But at the rate new inmates were being added, the state would need 206,000 prison beds, he wrote. (His projection was nearly on the mark.)

Sharp further warned of a "prison industrial complex" in Texas that will fight attempts to reduce costs. "Corrections has spawned its own self-perpetuating interest groups with consultants, lobbyists, burgeoning state bureaucracies and a rising private corrections industry. Like any special interest group, the correctional industry is in business to keep its empire growing."

Again, this warning has come true with a vengeance under Gov. Bush. Just listen to Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas), a close crony of Bush. He has proposed turning prisons into industrial parks.

"I want them to make prisoners work 10 hours a day, six days a week. I want to enter into contracts with major manufacturers so that we can produce component parts in prisons ... now being produced in places like Mexico, China, Taiwan and Korea. We can defray about half the cost of keeping people in prison."

The savings, $22,000 annually per prisoner, could be used to build more prisons and train more prison guards, Gramm said. He also proposed doubling the number of graduates of the FBI Academy to oversee this prison boom.

Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, is the sponsor of legislation in the House to speed conversion to private prisons. McCollum spearheaded the impeachment of President Clinton.

"Certainly Sen. Gramm supports that legislation," said Jenny Gainsborough a researcher at the Sentencing Project.

It may sound farfetched, but Bush is actively implementing the plan in Texas. Wackenhut, based in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., where it enjoys close, mutually profitable ties to Gov. Jeb Bush – and McCollum – has generated hefty profits and lots of nasty headlines.

On Dec. 16, 1999 the Texas Department of Corrections was forced to take over the Travis County Community Justice Center, operated by Wackenhut, when several women inmates filed a lawsuit charging that guards had beaten and raped them.

The 11 Wackenhut thugs are now awaiting trial. Wackenhut’s answer was that they would end the practice of male guards overseeing female inmates.

The state of Louisiana was forced to take over the Wackenhut-operated Jena Juvenile Justice facility this spring when inspectors found that guards routinely beat and abused the youthful inmates. A judge denounced conditions as "intolerable" with inmates denied adequate food, clothing and health care. Many of the youths were barefooted.

More than 130 African, Latin American, and Asian inmates at a Wackenhut operated Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) detention center in New York City went on a hunger strike last fall to protest their prolonged incarceration and the denial of their appeals for asylum despite clear proof that they faced death if sent back to Uganda, Nigeria, Colombia and other countries. The hunger strikers accused the Wackenhut guards of physical and verbal abuse.

Meanwhile, back in Texas, Wackenhut is prospering. About 25 miles south of Austin, in the town of Lockhart, Wackenhut took over a prison and invited corporations to set up a factory to employ inmates. Leonard Hill, owner of a company in Austin that assembled circuit boards, closed his factory – terminating 150 workers – and moved his plant to the Wackenhut prison.

Texas taxpayers paid for the construction of a new factory built to Hill’s specifications for which he pays $1 per year in rent. Hill’s company, now called Lockhart Technologies Inc., employs 100 inmates who assemble circuit boards for IBM, Dell and Texas Instruments, all non-union. The inmates are paid the minimum wage with 80 percent of their wages deducted to pay "room and board" and "victim restitution." Texas taxpayers cover the inmates health care and workers compensation.

Wackenhut’s prison warden, Scott Comstock, told CAQ magazine’s Reese Erlich, "I think that Texas, in particular, has proven that privatization is a viable alternative." Wackenhut Corp. last year reported a 27 percent increase in revenues, to $530.3 million.

Joe Gunn, president of the Texas AFL-CIO, has accused Wackenhut of profiting from "indentured slave labor" in its private Texas prisons. This system of prison labor exerts a strong downward pressure on the wage standard in "right-to-work" (for less) Texas. U.S. workers are forced to compete not only with non-union sweatshop labor in places like Malaysia, but are also competing with prison labor in Texas. And it isn’t limited to Texas.

Oregon Prison Industries is producing "Prison Blues," stylish denim garments sold for profit around the world. Soledad Prison in California is also exporting garments made by prison inmates. Prisoners in Southern California, Utah and Ohio are doing "data entry" for profit-making corporations.

Wisconsin’s GOP Gov. Tommy Thompson approved a scheme that used $239,000 in taxpayer money to buy cutting and sewing machines that were installed in its prison in Green Bay. Fabry Glove and Mitten Company then closed down plants employing "free workers" and moved into the prison garment shop where it employs 100 inmates. The total cost to taxpayers was $1.6 million and the loss of many jobs.

Wackenhut is surely licking its chops in anticipation of even greater profits in its prison "industrial parks" at home and abroad if George W. Bush is elected president. The rent-a-cop security corporation boasts that it has the nation’s largest private collection of files on alleged "subversives," with dossiers on three million people in the United States. In the 1970s, it diversified into strikebreaking and scab-herding.

Wackenhut works closely with the FBI and CIA, and guards nuclear weapons facilities and embassies. Recently, Wackenhut became the first private prison operator to take over a federal prison, a facility that houses many of the 25,000 undocumented immigrants detained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

Wackenhut operates 42 prisons across the United States. It has private prisons in Puerto Rico, England, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.

More than 5,000 inmates from 14 states are now incarcerated at private "rent-a-cell" facilities in Texas.

No wonder Texas has embraced "assembly line" procedures in its criminal justice system, filling its prisons with profit-generating inmates. Texas is also turning over many subsidiary services to private corporations. A consortium of the Marriott Corporation and Paris-based Sodexho are under contract to provide food services to private and state-owned prisons.

The release of a videotape in 1997 of prison guards at Brazoria County Detention Center in Texas beating and kicking inmates, attacking them with a stun gun and a K-9 dog stirred much outrage. These were prisoners who were lying shackled on the jail floor. They had been convicted in Missouri but shipped to a Texas "rent-a-cell" facility operated by Capital Correctional Resources (CCR). The State of Missouri canceled the contract and brought the inmates back to Missouri.

In August 1998, two Oregon sex offenders escaped from a prison in Houston operated by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), largest of the prison privatizers. This was a minimum security facility used to house undocumented immigrant workers arrested by the INS. But too many of the cells were vacant to give CCA the desired profit margin. Without consulting state authorities, CCA imported 240 sex offenders from Oregon.

The following month, a riot erupted at the Frio Detention Center, a private prison operated by the Dove Development Corporation. Texas had to send in 30 state correctional officers to subdue the 300 inmates from Utah and Missouri.

The Bobby Ross Group, based in Austin, operates seven prisons in Texas, signing contracts to house inmates from Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Oklahoma, Virginia and Hawaii. Ross was a Texas sheriff who went into the private prison business in 1993. At the Bobby Ross Prison in Dickens County, inmates organized a protest against the inedible food and lack of proper medical care. Montana sent an investigator who found that the inmates "were going hungry and waiting days to see a doctor." But the Texas Commission on Jails gave the jail "the highest possible ratings." Their inspector later admitted that, in addition to his official duties, he also worked as a "consultant" for the Bobby Ross Group, which paid him a $42,000 annual retainer.

In December 1998, 11 inmates escaped from the Bobby Ross prison in Newton, Texas. They released nearly 300 other inmates and set fire to one of the buildings. Ross’ answer to the chorus of outrage was to hire William Sessions, who served as FBI director under Presidents Reagan and Bush, as a "special adviser ... He goes with us on sales calls to potential clients."

We should not be surprised that Texas is currently operating private prisons that reek of the chain gangs and forced convict labor of a century ago.

But a hard look at Texas tells us much about what may be in store if Bush is elected president and his fellow Texas lawmakers, Dick Armey, Tom DeLay, and Bill Archer, continue their gangster-like control of the House.

As for the Senate, it is under the leadership of a Bush soul mate, Trent Lott of Mississippi, a devotee of the White Citizens Council whose state has its own history of convict labor and lynch law.

"There is no question that Texas has given the private prison industry its biggest boost," said Gainsborough. "They built all these prisons to house their huge prison population and now they are importing inmates from all across the country."

posted 05-15-2004 10:34 PM            

By 1966, Wackenhut could confidently state that it had secret files on 4 million Americans

SID -- a unit, known as founder and chairman George Wackenhut's "private FBI," that provided executive protection and conducted undercover investigations and sting operations. Once they arrived, they rented two gray Ford Taurus's and drove four hours to a desolate town on the Mexican border called Eagle Pass. There, just after dark, they met two truck drivers who had been flown in from Houston. Inside a nearby warehouse was an 18-wheel tractor-trailer, which the two truck drivers and the four Wackenhut agents in their rented cars were supposed to transport to Chicago. "My instructions were very clear," Ramirez recalls. "Do not look into the trailer, secure it, and make sure it safely gets to Chicago." It went without saying that no one else was supposed to look in the trailer, either, which is why the Wackenhut men were armed with fully loaded Remington 870 pump-action shotguns.

The convoy drove for 30 hours straight, stopping only for gas and food. Even then, one of the Wackenhut agents had to stay with the truck, standing by one of the cars, its trunk open, shotgun within easy reach. "Whenever we stopped, I bought a shot glass with the name of the town on it," Ramirez recalls. "I have glasses from Oklahoma City, Kansas City, St. Louis."
A little before 5:00 on the morning of the third day, they delivered the trailer to a practically empty warehouse outside Chicago. A burly man who had been waiting for them on the loading dock told them to take off the locks and go home, and that was that. They were on a plane back to Miami that afternoon. Later Ramirez's superiors told him—as they told other SID agents about similar midnight runs—that the trucks contained $$40 million worth of food stamps. After considering the secrecy, the way the team was assembled and the orders not to stop or open the truck, Ramirez decided he didn't believe that explanation.
Neither do we. One reason is simple: A Department of Agriculture official simply denies that food stamps are shipped that way. "Someone is blowing smoke," he says. Another reason is that after a six-month investigation, in the course of which we spoke to more than 300 people, we believe we know what the truck did contain—equipment necessary for the manufacture of chemical weapons—and where it was headed: to Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And the Wackenhut Corporation—a publicly traded company with strong ties to the CIA and federal contracts worth $$200 million a year—was making sure Saddam would be getting his equipment intact. The question is why.
IN 1954, GEORGE WACKENHUT, THEN A 34-YEAR-old former FBI agent, joined up with three other former FBI agents to open a company in Miami called Special Agent Investigators Inc. The partnership was neither successful nor harmonious—George once knocked partner Ed Dubois unconscious to end a disagreement over the direction the company would take—and in 1958, George bought out his partners.
However capable Wackenhut's detectives may have been at their work, George Wackenhut had two personal attributes that were instrumental in the company's growth. First, he got along exceptionally well with important politicians. He was a close ally of Florida governor Claude Kirk, who hired him to combat organized crime in the state, and was also friends with Senator George Smathers, an intimate of John F. Kennedy's. It was Smathers who provided Wackenhut with his big break when the senator's law firm helped the company find a loophole in the Pinkerton law, the 1893 federal statute that had made it a crime for an employee of a private detective agency to do work for the government. Smathers's firm set up a wholly owned subsidiary of Wackenhut that provided only guards, not detectives. Shortly thereafter, Wackenhut received multimillion-dollar contracts from the government to guard Cape Canaveral and the Nevada nuclear-bomb test site, the first of many extremely lucrative federal contracts that have sustained the company to this day.
The second thing that helped make George Wackenhut successful was that he was, and is, a hard-line right-winger. He was able to profit from his beliefs by building up dossiers on Americans suspected of being Communists or merely left-leaning—"subversives and sympathizers," as he put it—and selling the information to interested parties. According to Frank Donner, the author of Age of Surveillance, the Wackenhut Corporation maintained and updated its files even after the McCarthyite hysteria had ebbed, adding the names of antiwar protesters and civil-rights demonstrators to its list of "derogatory types." By 1965, Wackenhut was boasting to potential investors that the company maintained files on 2.5 million suspected dissidents—one in 46 American adults then living. In 1966, after acquiring the private files of Karl Barslaag, a former staff member of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Wackenhut could confidently maintain that with more than 4 million names, it had the largest privately held file on suspected dissidents in America. In 1975, after Congress investigated companies that had private files, Wackenhut gave its files to the now-defunct anti-Communist Church League of America of Wheaton, Illinois. That organization had worked closely with the red squads of big-city police departments, particularly in New York and L.A., spying on suspected sympathizers; George Wackenhut was personal friends with the League's leaders, and was a major contributor to the group. To be sure, after giving the League its files, Wackenhut reserved the right to use them for its clients and friends.
Wackenhut had gone public in 1965; George Wackenhut retained 54 percent of the company. Between his salary and dividends, his annual compensation approaches $2 million a year, sufficient for him to live in a $$20 million castle in Coral Gables, Florida, complete with a moat and 18 full-time servants. Today the company is the third-largest investigative security firm in the country, with offices throughout the United States and in 39 foreign countries.
It is not possible to overstate the special relationship Wackenhut enjoys with the federal government. It is close. When it comes to security matters, Wackenhut many respects is the government. 1991, a third of the company's $600 million in revenues came from the federal government, and another large chunk from companies that themselves work for the government, such as Westinghouse. Wackenhut is the largest single company supplying security to U.S. embassies overseas; several of the 13 embassies it guards have been in important hotbeds of espionage, such as Chile, Greece and El Salvador. It also guards nearly all the most strategic government facilities in the U.S., including the Alaskan oil pipeline, the Hanford nuclear-waste facility, the Savannah River plutonium plant and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Wackenhut maintains an especially close relationship with the federal government in other ways as well. While early boards of directors included such prominent personalities of the political right as Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, General Mark Clark and Ralph E. Davis, a John Birch Society leader, current and recent members of the board have included much of the country's recent national-security directorate: former FBI director Clarence Kelley; former Defense secretary and former CIA deputy director Frank Carlucci; former Defense Intelligence Agency director General Joseph Carroll; former U.S. Secret Service director James J. Rowley; former Marine commandant P. X. Kelley; and acting chairman of President Bush's foreign-intelligence advisory board and former CIA deputy director Admiral Bobby Ray Inman. Before his appointment as Reagan's CIA director, the late William Casey was Wackenhut's outside legal counsel. The company has 30,000 armed employees on its payroll.
We wanted to know more about this special relationship, but the government was not forthcoming. Repeated requests to the Department of Energy for an explanation of how one company got he security contracts for nearly all of America's most strategic installations have gone unanswered. Similarly, efforts to get the State Department to explain whether embassy contracts were awarded arbitrarily or through competitive bidding were fruitless; essentially, the State Department said, "Some of both." Wackenhut's competitors—who, understandably, asked not to be quoted by name—have their own version. "All those contracts," said one security-firm executive, "are just another way to pay Wackenhut for their clandestine help." And what is the nature of that help? "It is known throughout the industry," says retired FBI special agent William Hinshaw, "that if you want a dirty job done, call Wackenhut."

Wackenhut has been involved with the CIA,
ex-analyst says, on a quid pro quo

posted 05-15-2004 10:42 PM            

Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars -- the majority of them nonviolent offenders -- mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers

by Eric Schlosser

In the hills east of Sacramento, California, Folsom State Prison stands beside a man-made lake, surrounded by granite walls built by inmate laborers. The gun towers have peaked roofs and Gothic stonework that give the prison the appearance of a medieval fortress, ominous and forbidding. For more than a century Folsom and San Quentin were the end of the line in California's penal system; they were the state's only maximum-security penitentiaries. During the early 1980s, as California's inmate population began to climb, Folsom became dangerously overcrowded. Fights between inmates ended in stabbings six or seven times a week. The poor sight lines within the old cellblocks put correctional officers at enormous risk. From 1984 to 1994 California built eight new maximum-security (Level 4) facilities. The bullet holes in the ceilings of Folsom's cellblocks, left by warning shots, are the last traces of the prison's violent years. Today Folsom is a medium-security (Level 2) facility, filled with the kind of inmates that correctional officers consider "soft." No one has been stabbed to death at Folsom in almost four years. Among its roughly 3,800 inmates are some 500 murderers, 250 child molesters, and an assortment of rapists, armed robbers, drug dealers, burglars, and petty thieves. The cells in Housing Unit 1 are stacked five stories high, like boxes in a vast warehouse; glimpses of hands and arms and faces, of flickering TV screens, are visible between the steel bars. Folsom now houses almost twice as many inmates as it was designed to hold. The machine shop at the prison, run by inmates, manufactures steel frames for double bunks -- and triple bunks -- in addition to license plates.

Less than a quarter mile from the old prison is the California State Prison at Sacramento, known as "New Folsom," which houses about 3,000 Level 4 inmates. They are the real hard cases: violent predators, gang members, prisoners unable to "program" well at other facilities, unable to obey the rules. New Folsom does not have granite walls. It has a "death-wire electrified fence,"
Documenting the Prison-Industrial Complex
A series of photographs by Andrew Lichtenstein.
set between two ordinary chain-link fences, that administers a lethal dose of 5,100 volts at the slightest touch. The architecture of New Folsom is stark and futuristic. The buildings have smooth gray concrete façades, unadorned except for narrow slits for cell windows. Approximately a third of the inmates are serving life sentences; more than a thousand have committed at least one murder, nearly 500 have committed armed robbery, and nearly 200 have committed assault with a deadly weapon.

Inmates were placed in New Folsom while it was still under construction. The prison was badly overcrowded even before it was finished, in 1987. It has at times housed more than 300 inmates in its gymnasiums. New Folsom -- like old Folsom, and like the rest of the California prison system -- now operates at roughly double its intended capacity. Over the past twenty years the State of California has built twenty-one new prisons, added thousands of cells to existing facilities, and increased its inmate population eightfold. Nonviolent offenders have been responsible for most of that increase. The number of drug offenders imprisoned in the state today is more than twice the number of inmates who were imprisoned for all crimes in 1978. California now has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined. The California Department of Corrections predicts that at the current rate of expansion, barring a court order that forces a release of prisoners, it will run out of room eighteen months from now. Simply to remain at double capacity the state will need to open at least one new prison a year, every year, for the foreseeable future.

Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local jails. Prisons hold inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world -- perhaps half a million more than Communist China. The American inmate population has grown so large that it is difficult to comprehend: imagine the combined populations of Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Miami behind bars. "We have embarked on a great social experiment," says Marc Mauer, the author of the upcoming book The Race to Incarcerate. "No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control." The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon. Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation's incarceration rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States. Nevertheless, America's prisons are more overcrowded now than when the building spree began, and the inmate population continues to increase by 50,000 to 80,000 people a year.

The economist and legal scholar Michael K. Block, who believes that American sentencing policies are still not harsh enough, offers a straightforward explanation for why the United States has lately incarcerated so many people: "There are too many prisoners because there are too many criminals committing too many crimes." Indeed, the nation's prisons now hold about 150,000 armed robbers, 125,000 murderers, and 100,000 sex offenders -- enough violent criminals to populate a medium-sized city such as Cincinnati. Few would dispute the need to remove these people from society. The level of violent crime in the United States, despite recent declines, still dwarfs that in Western Europe. But the proportion of offenders being sent to prison each year for violent crimes has actually fallen during the prison boom. In 1980 about half the people entering state prison were violent offenders; in 1995 less than a third had been convicted of a violent crime. The enormous increase in America's inmate population can be explained in large part by the sentences given to people who have committed nonviolent offenses. Crimes that in other countries would usually lead to community service, fines, or drug treatment -- or would not be considered crimes at all -- in the United States now lead to a prison term, by far the most expensive form of punishment. "No matter what the question has been in American criminal justice over the last generation," says Franklin E. Zimring, the director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute, "prison has been the answer."

N January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used his farewell address to issue a warning, as the United States continued its cold war with the Soviet Union. "In the councils of government," Eisenhower said, "we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." Eisenhower had grown concerned about this new threat to democracy during the 1960 campaign, when fears of a "missile gap" with the Soviet Union were whipped up by politicians, the press, and defense contractors hoping for increased military spending. Eisenhower knew that no missile gap existed and that fear of one might lead to a costly, unnecessary response. "The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist," Eisenhower warned. "We should take nothing for granted."

Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a prison-industrial complex -- a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation's criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population. Since 1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20 percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent. The prison boom has its own inexorable logic. Steven R. Donziger, a young attorney who headed the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains the thinking: "If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons; and if crime is going down, it's because we built more prisons -- and building even more prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower."

The raw material of the prison-industrial complex is its inmates: the poor, the homeless, and the mentally ill; drug dealers, drug addicts, alcoholics, and a wide assortment of violent sociopaths. About 70 percent of the prison inmates in the United States are illiterate. Perhaps 200,000 of the country's inmates suffer from a serious mental illness. A generation ago such people were handled primarily by the mental-health, not the criminal-justice, system. Sixty to 80 percent of the American inmate population has a history of substance abuse. Meanwhile, the number of drug-treatment slots in American prisons has declined by more than half since 1993. Drug treatment is now available to just one in ten of the inmates who need it. Among those arrested for violent crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has changed little over the past twenty years. Among those arrested for drug crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has tripled. Although the prevalence of illegal drug use among white men is approximately the same as that among black men, black men are five times as likely to be arrested for a drug offense. As a result, about half the inmates in the United States are African-American. One out of every fourteen black men is now in prison or jail. One out of every four black men is likely to be imprisoned at some point during his lifetime. The number of women sentenced to a year or more of prison has grown twelvefold since 1970. Of the 80,000 women now imprisoned, about 70 percent are nonviolent offenders. About 75 percent have children.

The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass "tough-on-crime" legislation -- combined with their unwillingness to disclose the true costs of these laws -- has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties. The inner workings of the prison-industrial complex can be observed in the state of New York, where the prison boom started, transforming the economy of an entire region; in Texas and Tennessee, where private prison companies have thrived; and in California, where the correctional trends of the past two decades have converged and reached extremes. In the realm of psychology a complex is an overreaction to some perceived threat. Eisenhower no doubt had that meaning in mind when, during his farewell address, he urged the nation to resist "a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties."

Liberal Legacy

HE origins of the prison-industrial complex can be dated to January of 1973. Senator Barry Goldwater had used the fear of crime to attract white middle-class voters a decade earlier, and Richard Nixon had revived the theme during the 1968 presidential campaign, but little that was concrete emerged from their demands for law and order. On the contrary, Congress voted decisively in 1970 to eliminate almost all federal mandatory-minimum sentences for drug offenders. Leading members of both political parties applauded the move. Mainstream opinion considered drug addiction to be largely a public-health problem, not an issue for the criminal courts. The Federal Bureau of Prisons was preparing to close large penitentiaries in Georgia, Kansas, and Washington. From 1963 to 1972 the number of inmates in California had declined by more than a fourth, despite the state's growing population. The number of inmates in New York had fallen to its lowest level since at least 1950. Prisons were widely viewed as a barbaric and ineffective means of controlling deviant behavior. Then, on January 3, 1973, Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, gave a State of the State address demanding that every illegal-drug dealer be punished with a mandatory prison sentence of life without parole.

Rockefeller was a liberal Republican who for a dozen years had governed New York with policies more closely resembling those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt than those of Ronald Reagan. He had been booed at the 1964 Republican Convention by conservative delegates; he still harbored grand political ambitions; and President Nixon would be ineligible for a third term in 1976. Rockefeller demonstrated his newfound commitment to law and order in 1971, when he crushed the Attica prison uprising. By proposing the harshest drug laws in the United States, he took the lead on an issue that would soon dominate the nation's political agenda. In his State of the State address Rockefeller argued not only that all drug dealers should be imprisoned for life but also that plea-bargaining should be forbidden in such cases and that even juvenile offenders should receive life sentences.

The Rockefeller drug laws, enacted a few months later by the state legislature, were somewhat less draconian: the penalty for possessing four ounces of an illegal drug, or for selling two ounces, was a mandatory prison term of fifteen years to life. The legislation also included a provision that established a mandatory prison sentence for many second felony convictions, regardless of the crime or its circumstances. Rockefeller proudly declared that his state had enacted "the toughest anti-drug program in the country." Other states eventually followed New York's example, enacting strict mandatory-minimum sentences for drug offenses. A liberal Democrat, Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, led the campaign to revive federal mandatory minimums, which were incorporated in the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. Nelson Rockefeller had set in motion a profound shift in American sentencing policy, but he never had to deal with the consequences. Nineteen months after the passage of his drug laws Rockefeller became Vice President of the United States.

When Mario Cuomo was first elected governor of New York, in 1982, he confronted some difficult choices. The state government was in a precarious fiscal condition, the inmate population had more than doubled since the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws, and the prison system had grown dangerously overcrowded. A week after Cuomo took office, inmates rioted at Sing Sing, an aging prison in Ossining. Cuomo was an old-fashioned liberal who opposed mandatory-minimum drug sentences. But the national mood seemed to be calling for harsher drug laws, not sympathy for drug addicts. President Reagan had just launched the War on Drugs; it was an inauspicious moment to buck the tide.

Unable to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws, Cuomo decided to build more prisons. The rhetoric of the drug war, however, was proving more popular than the financial reality. In 1981 New York's voters had defeated a $500 million bond issue for new prison construction. Cuomo searched for an alternate source of financing, and decided to use the state's Urban Development Corporation to build prisons. The corporation was a public agency that had been created in 1968 to build housing for the poor. Despite strong opposition from upstate Republicans, among others, it had been legislated into existence on the day of Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, to honor his legacy. The corporation was an attractive means of financing prison construction for one simple reason: it had the authority to issue state bonds without gaining approval from the voters.

New Prison construction, Franklin County, N.Y.
(Click on the photo above to see a larger version.)

Over the next twelve years Mario Cuomo added more prison beds in New York than all the previous governors in the state's history combined. Their total cost, including interest, would eventually reach about $7 billion. Cuomo's use of the Urban Development Corporation drew criticism from both liberals and conservatives. Robert Gangi, the head of the Correctional Association of New York, argued that Cuomo was building altogether the wrong sort of housing for the poor. The state comptroller, Edward V. Regan, a Republican, said that Cuomo was defying the wishes of the electorate, which had voted not to spend money on prisons, and that his financing scheme was costly and improper. Bonds issued by the Urban Development Corporation carried a higher rate of interest than the state's general-issue bonds.

Legally the state's new prisons were owned by the Urban Development Corporation and leased to the Department of Corrections. In 1991, as New York struggled to emerge from a recession, Governor Cuomo "sold" Attica prison to the corporation for $200 million and used the money to fill gaps in the state budget. In order to buy the prison, the corporation had to issue more bonds. The entire transaction could eventually cost New York State about $700 million.

The New York prison boom was a source of embarrassment for Mario Cuomo. At times he publicly called it "stupid," an immoral waste of scarce state monies, an obligation forced on him by the dictates of the law. But it was also a source of political capital. Cuomo strongly opposed the death penalty, and building new prisons shielded him from Republican charges of being soft on crime. In his 1987 State of the State address, having just been re-elected by a landslide, Cuomo boasted of having put nearly 10,000 "dangerous felons" behind bars. The inmate population of New York's prisons had indeed grown by roughly that number during his first term in office. But the proportion of offenders being incarcerated for violent crimes had fallen from 63 percent to 52 percent during those four years. In 1987 New York State sent almost a thousand fewer violent offenders to prison than it had in 1983. Despite having the "toughest anti-drug program" and one of the fastest-growing inmate populations in the nation, New York was hit hard by the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the violent crime that accompanied it. From 1983 to 1990 the state's inmate population almost doubled -- and yet during that same period the violent-crime rate rose 24 percent. Between the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws and the time Cuomo left office, in January of 1995, New York's inmate population increased almost fivefold. And the state's prison system was more overcrowded than it had been when the prison boom began.

Y using an unorthodox means of financing prison construction, Mario Cuomo turned the Urban Development Corporation into a rural development corporation that invested billions of dollars in upstate New York. Although roughly 80 percent of the state's inmates came from New York City and its suburbs, high real-estate prices and opposition from community groups made it difficult to build correctional facilities there. Cuomo needed somewhere to put his new prisons; he formed a close working relationship with the state senator Ronald B. Stafford, a conservative Republican whose rural, Adirondack district included six counties extending from Lake George to the Canadian border. "Any time there's an extra prison," a Cuomo appointee told Newsdayin 1990, "Ron Stafford will take it."

Stafford had represented this district, known as the North Country, for more than two decades. Orphaned as a child, he had been adopted by a family in the upstate town of Dannemora. The main street of the town was dominated by the massive stone wall around Clinton, a notorious maximum-security prison. His adoptive father was a correctional officer at Clinton, and Stafford spent much of his childhood within the prison's walls. He developed great respect for correctional officers, and viewed their profession as an honorable one; he believed that prisons could give his district a real economic boost. Towns in the North Country soon competed with one another to attract new prisons. The Republican Party controlled the state senate, and prison construction became part of the political give and take with the Cuomo administration. Of the twenty-nine correctional facilities authorized during the Cuomo years, twenty-eight were built in upstate districts represented by Republican senators.

When most people think of New York, they picture Manhattan. In fact, two thirds of the state's counties are classified as rural. Perhaps no other region in the United States has so wide a gulf between its urban and rural populations. People in the North Country -- which includes the Adirondack State Park, one of the nation's largest wilderness areas -- tend to be politically conservative, taciturn, fond of the outdoors, and white. New York City and the North Country have very little in common. One thing they do share, however, is a high rate of poverty.

Twenty-five years ago the North Country had two prisons; now it has eighteen correctional facilities, and a nineteenth is under construction. They run the gamut from maximum-security prisons to drug-treatment centers and boot camps. One of the first new facilities to open was Ray Brook, a federal prison that occupies the former Olympic Village at Lake Placid. Other prisons have opened in abandoned factories and sanatoriums. For the most part North Country prisons are tucked away, hidden by trees, nearly invisible amid the vastness and beauty of the Adirondacks. But they have brought profound change. Roughly one out of every twenty people in the North Country is a prisoner. The town of Dannemora now has more inmates than inhabitants.

The traditional anchors of the North Country economy -- mining, logging, dairy farms, and manufacturing -- have been in decline for years. Tourism flourishes in most towns during the summer months. According to Ram Chugh, the director of the Rural Services Institute at the State University of New York at Potsdam, the North Country's per capita income has long been about 40 percent lower than the state's average per capita income. The prison boom has provided a huge infusion of state money to an economically depressed region -- one of the largest direct investments the state has ever made there. In addition to the more than $1.5 billion spent to build correctional facilities, the prisons now bring the North Country about $425 million in annual payroll and operating expenditures. That represents an annual subsidy to the region of more than $1,000 per person. The economic impact of the prisons extends beyond the wages they pay and the local services they buy. Prisons are labor-intensive institutions, offering year-round employment. They are recession-proof, usually expanding in size during hard times. And they are nonpolluting -- an important consideration in rural areas where other forms of development are often blocked by environmentalists. Prisons have brought a stable, steady income to a region long accustomed to a highly seasonal, uncertain economy.

posted 05-15-2004 10:45 PM            

HILE many families in the north await the return of sons and daughters slowly earning seniority downstate, families in New York City must endure the absence of loved ones who seem to have been not just imprisoned for their crimes but exiled as well. Every Friday night about 800 people, mostly women and children, almost all of them African-American or Latino, gather at Columbus Circle, in Manhattan, and board buses for the north. The buses leave through the night and arrive in time for visiting hours on Saturday. Operation Prison Gap, which runs the service, was founded by an ex-convict named Ray Simmons who had been imprisoned upstate and knew how hard it was for the families of inmates to arrange visits. When the company started, in 1973, it carried passengers in a single van. Now it charters thirty-five buses and vans on a typical weekend and a larger number on special occasions, such as Father's Day and Thanksgiving. Ray Simmons's brother Tyrone, who heads the company, says that despite the rising inmate population, ridership has fallen a bit over the past few years. The inconvenience and expense of the long bus trips take their toll. One customer, however, has for fifteen years faithfully visited her son in Comstock every weekend. In 1996 she stopped appearing at Columbus Circle; her son had been released. Six months later he was convicted of another violent crime and sent back to the same prison. The woman, now in her seventies, still boards the 2:00 A.M. bus for Comstock every weekend. Simmons gives her a discount, charging her $15 -- the same price she paid on her first trip, in 1983.

The Bare Hill Correctional Facility sits near the town of Malone, fifteen miles south of the Canadian border. The Franklin Correctional Facility is a quarter of a mile down the road, and the future site of a new maximum-security prison is next door. Bare Hill is one of the "cookie cutter" medium-security prisons that were built during the Cuomo administration. The state has built fourteen other prisons exactly like it -- a form of penal mass production that saves a good deal of money. Most of the inmates at Bare Hill are housed in dormitories, not cells. The dormitories were designed to hold about fifty inmates, each with his own small cubicle and bunk. In 1990, two years after the prison opened, double-bunking was introduced as a "temporary" measure to ease the overcrowding in county jails, which were holding an overflow of state inmates. Eight years later every dormitory at Bare Hill houses sixty inmates, a third of them double-bunked. About 90 percent of the inmates come from New York City or one of its suburbs, eight hours away; about 80 percent are African-American or Latino. The low walls of the cubicles, which allow little privacy, are covered with family photographs, pinups, religious postcards. Twenty-four hours a day a correctional officer sits alone at a desk on a platform that overlooks the dorm.

The superintendent of Bare Hill, Peter J. Lacy, is genial and gray-haired, tall and dignified in his striped tie, flannels, and blue blazer. His office feels light and cheery. Lacy began his career, in 1955, as a correctional officer at Dannemora; he wore a uniform for twenty-five years, and in the 1980s headed a special unit that handled prison emergencies and riots. He later served as an assistant commissioner of the New York Department of Corrections. One of his sons is now a lieutenant at a downstate prison. As Superintendent Lacy walks through the prison grounds, he seems like a captain surveying his ship, rightly proud of its upkeep, familiar with every detail. The lawns are neatly trimmed, the buildings are well maintained, and the red-brick dorms would not seem out of place on a college campus, except for the bars in the windows. There is nothing oppressive about the physical appearance of Bare Hill, about the ball fields with pine trees in the background, about the brightly colored murals and rustic stencils on the walls, about the classrooms where instructors teach inmates how to read, how to write, how to draw a blueprint, how to lay bricks, how to obtain a Social Security card, how to deal with their anger. For many inmates Bare Hill is the neatest, cleanest, most well-ordered place they will ever live. As Lacy passes a group of inmates leaving their dorms for class, the inmates nod their heads in acknowledgment, and a few of them say, "Hello, sir." And every so often a young inmate gives Lacy a look filled with a hatred so pure and so palpable that it would burn Bare Hill to the ground, if only it could.

Big Business

HE black-and-white photograph shows an inmate leaning out of a prison cell, scowling at the camera, his face partially hidden in the shadows. "HOW HE GOT IN IS YOUR BUSINESS," the ad copy begins. "HOW HE GETS OUT IS OURS." The photo is on the cover of a glossy brochure promoting AT&T's prison telephone service, which is called The Authority. BellSouth has a similar service, called MAX, advertised with a photo of a heavy steel chain dangling from a telephone receiver in place of a cord. The ad promises "long distance service that lets inmates go only so far." Although the phone companies rely on clever copy in their ads, providing telephone service to prisons and jails has become a serious, highly profitable business. The nearly two million inmates in the United States are ideal customers: phone calls are one of their few links to the outside world; most of their calls must be made collect; and they are in no position to switch long-distance carriers. A pay phone at a prison can generate as much as $15,000 a year -- about five times the revenue of a typical pay phone on the street. It is estimated that inmate calls generate a billion dollars or more in revenues each year. The business has become so lucrative that MCI installed its inmate phone service, Maximum Security, throughout the California prison system at no charge. As part of the deal it also offered the California Department of Corrections a 32 percent share of all the revenues from inmates' phone calls. MCI Maximum Security adds a $3.00 surcharge to every call. When free enterprise intersects with a captive market, abuses are bound to occur. MCI Maximum Security and North American Intelecom have both been caught overcharging for calls made by inmates; in one state MCI was adding an additional minute to every call.

Since 1980 spending on corrections at the local, state, and federal levels has increased about fivefold. What was once a niche business for a handful of companies has become a multibillion-dollar industry with its own trade shows and conventions, its own Web sites, mail-order catalogues, and direct-marketing campaigns. The prison-industrial complex now includes some of the nation's largest architecture and construction firms, Wall Street investment banks that handle prison bond issues and invest in private prisons, plumbing-supply companies, food-service companies, health-care companies, companies that sell everything from bullet-resistant security cameras to padded cells available in a "vast color selection." A directory called the Corrections Yellow Pages lists more than a thousand vendors. Among the items now being advertised for sale: a "violent prisoner chair," a sadomasochist's fantasy of belts and shackles attached to a metal frame, with special accessories for juveniles; B.O.S.S., a "body-orifice security scanner," essentially a metal detector that an inmate must sit on; and a diverse line of razor wire, with trade names such as Maze, Supermaze, Detainer Hook Barb, and Silent Swordsman Barbed Tape.

As the prison industry has grown, it has assumed many of the attributes long associated with the defense industry. The line between the public interest and private interests has blurred. In much the same way that retired admirals and generals have long found employment with defense contractors, correctional officials are now leaving the public sector for jobs with firms that supply the prison industry. These career opportunities did not exist a generation ago. Fundamental choices about public safety, employee training, and the denial of personal freedoms are increasingly being made with an eye to the bottom line.

One clear sign that corrections has become a big business as well as a form of government service is the emergence of a trade newspaper devoted to the latest trends in the prison and jail marketplace. Correctional Building News has become the Variety of the prison world, widely read by correctional officials, investors, and companies with something to sell. Eli Gage, its publisher, founded the paper in 1994, after searching for a high-growth industry not yet served by its own trade journal. Gage is neither a cheerleader for the industry nor an outspoken critic. He believes that despite recent declines in violent crime, national spending on corrections will continue to grow at an annual rate of five to 10 percent. The number of young people in the prime demographic for committing crimes, ages fifteen to twenty-four, is about to increase; and the demand for new juvenile-detention centers is already rising. Correctional Building News runs ads by the leading companies that build prisons (Turner Construction, CRSS, Brown & Root) and the leading firms that design them (DMJM, the DLR Group, and KMD Architects). It features a product of the month, a facility of the month, and a section titled "People in the News." An advertisement in a recent issue promoted electrified fences with the line "Don't Touch!"

RIVATE-prison companies are the most obvious, the most controversial, and the fastest-growing segment of the prison-industrial complex. The idea of private prisons was greeted with enthusiasm during the Reagan and Bush Administrations; it fit perfectly with a belief in small government and the privatization of public services. The Clinton Administration, however, has done far more than its Republican predecessors to legitimize private prisons. It has encouraged the Justice Department to place illegal aliens and minimum-security inmates in private correctional facilities, as part of a drive to reduce the federal work force. The rationale for private prisons is that government monopolies such as old-fashioned departments of corrections are inherently wasteful and inefficient, and the private sector, through competition for contracts, can provide much better service at a much lower cost. The privatization of prisons is often described as a "win-win" outcome. A private-prison company generally operates a facility for a government agency, or builds and operates its own facility. The nation's private prisons accepted their first inmates in the mid-1980s. Today at least twenty-seven states make use of private prisons, and approximately 90,000 inmates are being held in prisons run for profit.

The living conditions in many of the nation's private prisons are unquestionably superior to conditions in many state-run facilities. At least forty-five state prison systems are now operating at or above their intended capacity. In twenty-two states prisons are operating under court-ordered population caps. In fifteen states prison conditions are being monitored by the courts. Life in the aging, overcrowded prisons operated by many state agencies is dangerous and degrading. Most of the 34,000 state inmates currently being held in the nation's jails for lack of available prison cells live in conditions that are even worse. Private prisons tend to be brand-new, rarely overcrowded, and less likely to house violent offenders. Moreover, some private prisons offer programs, such as drug treatment and vocational training, that a number of state systems have cut back. And yet something inherent in the idea of private prisons seems to invite abuse.

The economics of the private-prison industry are in many respects similar to those of the lodging industry. An inmate at a private prison is like a guest at a hotel -- a guest whose bill is being paid and whose check-out date is set by someone else. A hotel has a strong economic incentive to book every available room and encourage every guest to stay as long as possible. A private prison has exactly the same incentive. The labor costs constitute the bulk of operating costs for both kinds of accommodation. The higher the occupancy rate, the higher the profit margin. Although it might seem unlikely that a private prison would ever try to keep an inmate longer than was necessary for justice to be served, New York State's experience with the "fee system" during the nineteenth century suggests that the temptation to do so is hard to resist. Under the fee system local sheriffs charged inmates for their stay in jail. A 1902 report by the Correctional Association of New York harshly criticized this system, warning that judges might be inclined to "sentence a man to jail where he may be a source of revenue to a friendly sheriff." Whenever the fee system was abolished in a New York county, the inmate population dropped -- by as much as half. Last year a Prudential Securities report on private prisons described some of the potential risks for the industry: a falling crime rate, shorter prison sentences, a move toward alternative sentences, and changes in the nation's drug laws. Nonetheless, the report concluded that "the industry appears to have excellent prospects."

Private-prison companies can often build prisons faster and at lower cost than state agencies, owing to fewer bureaucratic delays and less red tape. And new prisons tend to be much less expensive to operate than the old prisons still used in many states. But most of the savings that private-prison companies offer are derived from the use of nonunion workers. Labor represents 60 to 80 percent of the operating costs at a prison. Although private-prison companies are now moving into northern states and even signing agreements with some labor unions, the overwhelming majority of private-prison cells are in southern and southwestern states hostile to unions. Correctional officers in these private prisons usually earn lower wages than officers employed by state governments, while receiving fewer benefits and no pension. Some private-prison companies offer their uniformed staff stock options as a retirement plan; the long-term value of the stock is uncertain. The sort of cost-cutting imposed on correctional officers does not extend to managers and administrators. They usually earn much more than their counterparts in the public sector -- a fact that greatly increases the potential for conflicts of interest and official corruption.

Bed Brokers and Man-days

AST year a videotape of beatings at a private correctional facility in Texas provoked a great deal of controversy. The tape showed correctional officers at the Brazoria County Detention Center kicking inmates who were lying on the floor, shooting inmates with a stun gun, and ordering a police dog to attack them. The inmates had been convicted of crimes in Missouri, but were occupying rented cells in rural Texas. One of the correctional officers in the video had previously lost his job at a Texas state prison and served time on federal charges for beating an inmate. The Brazoria County videotape received nationwide publicity and prompted Missouri to cancel its contract with Capital Correctional Resources, the private company operating the facility. But the beatings were unusual only because they were captured on tape. Incidents far more violent and surreal have become almost commonplace in the private prisons of Texas.

The private-prison system in Texas arose in response to the violence and disarray of the state system. In 1980 conditions in Texas state prisons were so bad that the federal judge William Wayne Justice ruled that they amounted to "cruel and unusual punishment." He appointed a special overseer for the prison system and ordered the state to provide at least forty square feet of living space for each inmate. By the mid-1980s, however, conditions had grown even worse: Texas prisons were more overcrowded; gang wars between inmates resulted in dozens of murders; and local jails were so crammed with the overflow of state inmates that a number of counties later sued the state for relief. In 1986 Judge Justice threatened the state with a fine of $800,000 a day unless it came up with a plan to ease the overcrowding in its prisons. While the Texas legislature scrambled to add new prison beds to the system, entrepreneurs sensed that profits could be made from housing state inmates in private facilities. Developers cut deals with sheriffs in impoverished rural counties, providing the capital to build brand-new jails, offering to run them, and promising to share the profits. Privately run correctional facilities sprang up throughout rural Texas, much the way oil rigs were once raised by wildcatters. The founders of one large private-prison developer, N-Group Securities, had previously sold condominiums and run a Houston disco. One critic quoted by the Houston Chronicle called the speculative new enterprises "Joe's Bar and Grill and Prisons."

Shift change, Clinton prison, Dannemora, N.Y.
(Click on the photo above to see a larger version.)

The private-prison building spree in Texas -- backed by investors such as Allstate, Merrill Lynch, Shearson Lehman, and American Express -- soon faced an unanticipated problem. The State of Texas, under the auspices of a liberal Democratic governor, Ann Richards, began to carry out an ambitious prison-construction plan of its own in 1991, employing inmate labor and adding almost 100,000 new beds in just a few years. In effect the state flooded the market. Private firms turned to "bed brokers" for help, hoping to recruit prisoners from out of state. By the mid-1990s thousands of inmates from across the United States were being transported from overcrowded prison systems to "rent-a-cell" facilities in small Texas towns. The distances involved in this huge migration at times made it reminiscent of the eighteenth-century transport schemes that shipped British convicts and debtors to Australia. In 1996 the Newton County Correctional Center, in Newton, Texas, operated by a company called the Bobby Ross Group, became the State of Hawaii's third largest prison.

The private-prison industry usually charges its customers a daily rate for each inmate; the success or failure of a private prison is determined by the number of "man-days" it can generate. In a typical rent-a-cell arrangement a state with a surplus of inmates will contact a well-established bed broker, such as Dominion Management, of Edmond, Oklahoma. The broker will search for a facility with empty beds at the right price. The cost per man-day can range from $25 to $60, depending on the kind of facility and its level of occupancy. The more crowded a private prison becomes, the less it charges for each additional inmate. Facilities with individual cells are more expensive than those with dormitories. Bed brokers earn a commission of $2.50 to $5.50 per man-day, depending on how tight the market for prison cells is at the time. The county -- which does not operate the prison but simply gives it legal status -- sometimes gets a fee of as much as $1.50 a night for each prisoner. When every bed is filled, the private-prison company, the bed broker, and the county can do quite well.

The interstate commerce in prisoners, like many new industries, developed without much government regulation. In 1996 the State of Texas encountered a number of unexpected legal problems. Its private prisons were housing roughly 5,000 inmates from fourteen states. In August of that year two Oregon sex offenders escaped from a Houston facility operated by the Corrections Corporation of America. The facility normally held illegal aliens, under contract to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Faced with empty beds, CCA had imported 240 sex offenders from Oregon. Texas officials had no idea that violent offenders from another state were being housed in this minimum-security facility. The escaped prisoners were eventually recaptured -- but they could not be prosecuted for escaping, because running away from a private prison was not a violation of any Texas state law. The following month a riot erupted at the Frio Detention Center, a private facility operated by the Dove Development Corporation, which housed about 300 inmates from Utah and Missouri. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice had to send thirty of its officers in riot gear to regain control of the prison. A month later two Utah prisoners, one of them a convicted murderer, escaped from the same facility. A manhunt by state authorities failed to recapture them. Six other Utah inmates had previously escaped from facilities run by Dove Development; three were murderers. Last year the Texas legislature passed a bill that made it illegal for an offender from any state to escape from a private prison and that held the owners of such facilities responsible for any public expense stemming from riots or escapes. Few other states have even attempted to pass legislation dealing with these issues.

The private companies that now transport thousands of inmates across the United States every day face even less government oversight than private-prison companies. Indeed, federal regulations concerning the interstate shipment of cattle are much stricter than those concerning the interstate shipment of prisoners. Sheriff's deputies and U.S. marshals have traditionally been used to pick up inmates in one state and deliver them to another. During the late 1980s private companies began to offer the same service for about half the cost. The firms saved money by employing nonunion guards and making multiple pickups and deliveries on each trip. Prisoners today may spend as long as a month on the road, visiting dozens of states, sitting for days in the backs of old station wagons and vans, locked up alongside defendants awaiting trial and offenders on their way to prison. Driving one of these transport vehicles is a dangerous job, one that combines the stresses encountered by correctional officers with those of long-distance truckers. Moreover, prisoners tend to view their days in transit as an excellent time to attempt an escape. The turnover rate among the transport guards and drivers is high; the pay is relatively low; and training for the job rarely lasts more than a week. As a result, violent criminals are frequently shipped from state to state in the custody of people who are ill equipped to deal with them. Local authorities often don't learn that inmates are passing through their towns until something goes wrong.

posted 05-15-2004 10:47 PM            

The Bobby Ross Group, based in Austin, Texas, has proved to be one of the more troubled private-prison companies. The company's founder, Bobby Ross, was a sheriff in Texas and a successful bed broker before starting his own business, in 1993. He eventually set up operations at seven Texas facilities and one Georgia facility, signing contracts to accept inmates from states including Colorado, Hawaii, Montana, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Virginia. It did not take long for problems to begin. In January of 1996 nearly 500 Colorado inmates, many of them sex offenders, were transferred to a Bobby Ross facility in Karnes County, Texas; two later escaped, and a full day passed before state authorities were notified. At the Bobby Ross prison in Dickens County, Texas, fights broke out between inmates from Montana and Hawaii that spring. A few months later a protest about the poor quality of food and medical care turned into a riot, and the warden ordered guards to shoot live rounds. The warden was replaced.

Montana canceled its contract with the Bobby Ross Group in September of last year. Three Montana inmates had escaped, and one had been killed by an inmate from Hawaii. Montana investigators found that many of the inmates at the Dickens County prison were going hungry and waiting days to see a doctor. "We really dislike losing a customer," an attorney representing Bobby Ross said to a reporter. In October an inspector for the Texas Commission on Jail Standards gave the Dickens County prison the highest possible ratings. A month later the same inspector acknowledged that in addition to his official duties he worked as a "consultant" for the Bobby Ross Group, which paid him $42,000 a year. In December eleven inmates from Hawaii escaped from their dormitory at the Newton County facility operated by Bobby Ross, released nearly 300 other inmates, and set fire to one of the buildings. In February of this year inmates rioted again at Newton and set fire to the prison commissary. In brighter days, before the riots and fires, Bobby Ross had explained the usefulness of employing William Sessions, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as a "special adviser" to the company. "He goes with us on sales calls to potential clients," Ross told a reporter for the Colorado paper Westword. "That kind of thing."

The U.S. Corrections Corporation, for years the nation's third largest private-prison company, has encountered legal difficulties even more serious than those of the Bobby Ross Group. In 1993 an investigation by the Louisville Courier-Journal discovered that the company was using unpaid prison labor in Kentucky. Inmates were being forced to perform a variety of jobs, including construction work on nine small buildings at the Lee County prison; construction work on one church and renovation work on three others attended by company employees; renovation work on a company employee's game-room business; painting and maintenance at a country club; and painting at a private school attended by a prison warden's daughter. The Courier-Journal concluded that "U