Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration

WHEN I BEGAN this project in 2015, criminal justice reform was a hot issue. President Obama wanted his legacy to include a less punitive society. By the next summer, his administration had taken on the private prison industry. Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates sent a memo to the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in August to curb its reliance on private prisons: “This is the first step in the process of reducing—and ultimately ending—our use of privately operated prisons.”¹ A New York Times editorial argued that this was “a watershed step that should be the beginning of the end of an industry that has had an insidious effect on the American justice system.”²

Six months later, President Trump’s newly confirmed Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent a one-paragraph memo to BOP reversing the Obama Justice Department’s guidance. The next day, CNN reported that the value of the stocks of the two biggest private prison corporations, CoreCivic and GEO Group, had doubled since Election Day.3 By the summer of 2017, the BOP actively sought opportunities to contract with private corporations to house more inmates. The BOP posted a request for proposals for contract facilities to house more than 9,000 prisoners, most of whom are non-citizens with criminal convictions.⁴ In April, GEO Group announced that ICE had awarded them a contract to build and run a $110 million, 1,000-bed immigration detention facility in Conroe, Texas, a town 40 miles north of Houston.⁵ And in a further sign that the private prison industry would benefit from the Trump administration’s policies, its 2018 proposed budget asked for $1.2 billion to expand immigrant detention capacity, which would greatly benefit GEO Group, CoreCivic, and MTC Corp.⁶ Privatization was back in vogue. Just as in the Reagan era push for privatization, President Trump made no secret of his love for increasing the private sector’s role in historically government-run activities. Rumors flew that he would advocate for the privatization of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.⁷ Within months of taking office, Trump tasked his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to oversee a new White House Office of American Innovation, designed in part to figure out how to privatize certain functions of the federal government. Administrations come and go, and for three decades the private prison industry has ridden the rollercoaster of media and political scrutiny, increasing their advantage when administrations favored more rather than less privatization. There is no reason to think the private prison industry will go away anytime soon.

Our overreliance on jails and prisons as a tool to combat crime created space for private prisons to emerge, and ultimately to thrive. Private corporations are in charge of inmates from the food they eat to the programming they are offered. The country is of two minds about it: small towns across America succumb to the promise of hundreds of jobs in their communities and lobby to attract private prisons at the same time that students from the Pacific Northwest to the eastern seaboard are leading divestment campaigns aimed to break all ties between their institutions of higher learning and companies that profit from people behind bars. Front and center on the presidential campaign trail, the politics swirling around the private prison industry made it tricky for private firms to project certain profits, and the industry’s incentives remain at odds with significantly reducing America’s prison population.

Private prison corporations encouraged policymaking that helped fuel their bottom line and the immense rise in incarceration rates. By lobbying policy makers and participating in ALEC, the industry has grown more profitable. A CCA official cochaired the criminal justice task force committee that drafted model state laws encouraging a more draconian stance on sentencing and legislation friendly to the private prison industry. This opened the door to the industry and played an important role in ensuring a long-term need for their facilities. When private prison stock flagged in the late nineties as state correctional budgets shrank, the companies moved into the burgeoning immigration detention business. With the industry faltering, the untapped promise of immigrant detention saved these corporations. By building detention centers on former cornfields and prairies, the industry created a market for the thousands of undocumented citizens who are forced to live behind bars while their paperwork and cases are examined.

What does it look like for incarcerated individuals, their families, policy makers, corrections officers, towns, and industry officials themselves? Eric Daley, an inmate who told me his story, subsequently wrote to me and ended his letter with this: “I just hope and pray you take the correct approach and condemn the privatization of prisons in America, because there is no place for them in the land of the free.”8 Many of my conversations with inmates and former inmates echoed this sentiment. Even with better contract incentives and more stringent monitoring, they wanted to know what private prisons say about our society.

The tough-on-crime philosophy that pervaded U.S. politics for decades pushed policy makers to legislate tougher sentences but at the same time found them unwilling to fund the construction of new prisons. If the United States didn’t have forty years of policy promoting mass incarceration, it couldn’t have sustained a business model allowing for extensive profits on the backs of inmates. With the majority of states facing court orders to reduce overcrowding in prisons in the mid-1980s, the private sector played a pivotal role in building prisons quickly and taking in overflow inmates.

In 1985, Ted Nissen, a former San Quentin guard and owner of Behavioral Systems Southwest, declared: “We have built a prison industry based on concrete walls, guard towers and the overclassification of inmates, and the prisons, instead of being run so that people are in better shape to live in society when they get out, are run so that we have a 50 percent failure (recidivism) rate within five years.”9 Thirty years later, recidivism rates have not changed, and the private sector has not lived up to its promise to improve upon government’s failure.

The distinction between private and public prisons is not as important as the distinction between warehousing individuals and rehabilitating them. For the three decades that private prisons have existed, we have asked little of the industry—only that they prevent escapes, provide some programming, and save us money. This partnership between government and private prison operators to safely warehouse prisoners has not worked. It is time to drastically change that partnership and to encourage private prisons to perform a new state goal: reducing recidivism and preparing inmates for life in the community. The irony is that by meeting these public policy objectives private prison companies may put themselves out of business. That doesn’t have to be the case, however, as improving contract terms can incentivize changes that greatly enhance the futures of those who spend time in their prisons.

In November 1984, Morley Safer aired a 60 Minutes story on the emerging private prison industry. He started the segment saying, “ ‘The business of America is business,’ said Calvin Coolidge, and this story more than confirms that wisdom. ‘Crime Pays’ is not how to get away with it; it’s how to cash in on it. The care and feeding of criminals in this country costs about $10-billion a year. A number of bright entrepreneurs decided, with that kind of cash available and the heat the government’s taking about overcrowding and rehabilitation, that maybe they could do a better job of running corrections than the government.”¹⁰

Safer interviewed CCA President Tom Beasley on the question of incentives. “You—you get recompensed for every prisoner you take care of, look after. Surely, it’s in your interest to keep the prison population high?” Beasley, who cofounded CCA the year before and previously served as chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, replied, “You know, that’s a question that people frequently put to us. There’s no incentive at all for us to worry about that, because every prison is overcrowded.”11

By the end of 1984, the entire prison systems of seven states and Washington, D.C. were under court orders to relieve crowded facilities.¹² In twenty-five other states, at least one major prison was overcrowded and ordered to reduce its inmate population.¹³ “We want to stay in business for a long time,” Beasley told Safer on 60 Minutes. “The great incentive for us, and we believe the long-term great incentive for the private sector, will be that you will be judged on performance. Yet the—the effect of your rehabilitative efforts, your recidivism rate…we intend to be in this business from now on so we don’t want to be guilty. We want the contract renewed next year and the year after.”¹⁴