Photo:
Lance Page/t r u t h o u t
While New Hampshire’s corrections department reviews proposals from
private companies seeking to build and operate its prisons, the state’s
residents are learning how prison privatization has played out
elsewhere—namely, in Arizona.
Arizona has embraced prison privatization. Currently, five state
prisons are run by private companies, housing 13% of the prison
population, and the state recently signed a contract for an additional
1,500 beds. Arizona is also home to six prisons run by the Corrections
Corporation of America, which imports prisoners from other states and
from the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
But Arizona’s track record with for-profit prison companies shows
problems with accountability and public safety—not to mention that they
don’t save the state money, says
Caroline Isaacs, program director for AFSC’s Tucson office.
Caroline has worked on criminal justice reform in her state since the
mid-1990s. Her research and mobilization against for-profit prisons has
put her at the forefront of the movement to stop prison privatization.
At
a series of public presentations in New Hampshire in early September, she shared insight from her work in Arizona, which has included
publishing a report on private prisons and
suing Arizona to uphold its statute to compare the performance of public and private prisons.
Three companies bidding for contracts in New Hampshire—GEO Group
(formerly Wackenhut), the Management and Training Corporation, and the
Corrections Corporation of America—currently run prisons in Arizona.
Arnie Alpert, program coordinator with AFSC in New Hampshire,
organized the speaking tour so that his state could learn firsthand from
Arizona’s experience.
“The record these corporations have created is the best way to
predict what would happen if any of them gained control of prisons
here,” he says.
Caroline visited regions of the state that one company is considering
as potential prison sites. A diverse audience came out to hear the
presentations; attendees included religious leaders, corrections
workers, elected officials, candidates for public office, college
students, and community activists.
In addition to walking her audience through a litany of documented
problems, incidents, and contradictions that reveal why private prisons
are hurting—not helping—the criminal justice system in Arizona, Caroline
stressed the moral issue at hand.
“Is it right for a for-profit corporation to make money from
incarceration?” she asked. “How does the profit motive affect a
company’s incentive to rehabilitate offenders? Is privatization an
abdication of a fundamental state government responsibility?”
The fact that Arizona has not comprehensively analyzed the
performance of its private prisons is significant—there are no data to
measure recidivism rates or quality of rehabilitation programs, and
little knowledge of safety issues. For their part, the prison
corporations are accountable to their shareholders, not to the public,
even though their funding comes from taxpayers, she pointed out.
Caroline authored the
AFSC report
that filled this gap in analysis where data were available, identifying
serious problems stemming from staffing and security practices.
What the state has analyzed itself are costs—and what it found is
that private prisons cost more to operate than state-run prisons.
“The bottom line is we were losing money,” Caroline says. In three
years covered by the state’s own analysis, Arizona overpaid more than
$10 million to the private prison companies.
“Caroline Isaacs was right on target,” says Peg Fargo of the League
of Women Voters, who organized a presentation at a Concord retirement
community. “Having facts about the current situation in Arizona
clarifies the issues we face in New Hampshire.”
MGT of America, the consulting firm helping New Hampshire review the
private prison bids, is expected to submit a report to the Department of
Administrative Services by Oct. 5. By mid-November, the department will
produce another report, which would become the basis for public
discussion. Any contract with a private prison company would have to be
approved by the governor and the Executive Council.
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