Private Prisons: The wrong choice for Alabama

Beginning in the late 1980s, some states turned to private, for-profit companies to operate their prisons in hopes of controlling costs. As Alabama contemplates prison expansion, state officials may be tempted to follow suit in a misguided effort to cut costs. At least one major prison company – GEO Group – has already established a foothold in Alabama by buying a re-entry facility in Columbiana and a vacant building in Perry County.

Private prisons, however, are not the answer. Focused solely on their bottom line, private prisons cut costs wherever possible. While these shortcuts raise profits for the corporations that run these facilities, they don’t necessarily save taxpayers any money – nor do private prisons absolve the state of its responsibility to ensure a constitutional level of care and living conditions to those incarcerated. In fact, the most up-to-date research finds that private prisons cost more than their public counterparts, while having fewer rehabilitative services, inadequately trained corrections officers and remarkably high staff turnover.

In recent years, many states have ended their contracts with such companies, realizing that the long- term cost savings originally promised were largely illusory. Between 1999 and 2010, nine states eliminated their reliance on private prison companies. In addition, Wisconsin has reduced the number of prisoners in private facilities from thousands to dozens.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons announced in late 2016 that it would follow suit by phasing out its use of private prisons in light of findings that the facilities aren’t as safe and effective as government-operated prisons a reform that was reversed only with the changing of administrations in 2017, not the discovery of new evidence buoying the case for such facilities.

Alabama should heed the hard lesson other states have already learned: Private prisons are not the solution.

Private prisons can sometimes appear to cost less than public facilities because private operators favor low- and medium-security prisons that are cheaper to run than maximum-security facilities, where aging prisoners who are more costly to house and treat are incarcerated. But when the differences between populations and practices are taken into account, state-level studies suggest private facilities cost more than public prisons.

In a 2014 survey of state-level cost analyses, the research and policy group In the Public Interest found that the cost of private facilities exceeded the cost of publicly operated counterparts in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, New Mexico, and Ohio. In New Mexico, for instance, annual spending on private prisons increased by 57 percent between 2001 and 2006, despite the only 21 percent increase in the prison population. Most of the increase was due to automatic price increases included in private prison contracts with the state. In Arizona, prisoners in private facilities each cost up to $1,600 more per year than those housed in public prisons – even though private prisons handpicked the healthiest, and therefore least costly, prisoners.

Private prisons have been found to hold people longer than state-run facilities. In a Mississippi study, prisoners in private facilities spent an average of 60 to 90 days longer behind bars than prisoners in state-operated facilities – at an additional cost of at least $3,000 per prisoner. That’s because prisoners in private facilities received twice as many conduct violations, which were used by the state parole board to assess whether they should be granted early release.

Through campaign contributions and lobbying, the private prison industry has also quietly supported laws that place more people in prison and subject them to harsher sentences – changes that offer no rehabilitative value and increase the burden on taxpayers. Reports document the industry’s support of Arizona’s controversial “show me your papers” anti-immigration law, as well as legislation that mandates harsher punishments for drug offenders. Indeed, CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) admitted in a 2010 report to its shareholders that “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”10 In other words, private prisons not only fail to save taxpayer money, they impede efforts to reduce mass incarceration and decrease costs to states in the future.

Cutting staffing costs is the primary strategy private prisons use to lower costs – leading to lower wages, poorly trained staff, chronic understaffing, and high turnover. As a result, both staff and prisoners face a greater risk of violence, while the latter receive lower- quality rehabilitative care.

The Alabama prison system – which is the most overcrowded in the nation and faces a profound staffing crisis – already confronts countless obstacles. Indeed, conditions are so egregious that the U.S. Department of Justice launched an unprecedented investigation into the state’s prisons in 2016. That investigation is still ongoing, but only months after its launch a federal judge deemed mental health care in Alabama’s prisons “horrendously inadequate.” The ruling, the result of an SPLC lawsuit, referred to the broken mental health care system as a driving force behind the “skyrocketing suicide rate” among the state’s prisoners and pointed to understaffing as a contributing factor. Some of Alabama’s prisons are already the most violent in the country; one corrections expert said the frequency of life-threatening assaults at the St. Clair Correctional Facility was the highest he had seen in his 43-year career. Privatizing Alabama prisons would likely only exacerbate these existing staffing and safety issues.

With 65 to 70 percent of prison operating costs going toward staff salaries, benefits, and overtime, private prison corporations first look to these expenditures to cut costs. In 2015, the U.S. Bureau of Labor statistics found that correctional officers in private facilities made $7,000 less per year than those who were public employees. Private prisons also hire fewer corrections officers – resulting in an average of 6.9 prisoners per officer in private prisons as compared to 5 per officer in facilities owned by the state – and are less inclined to fill staff vacancies. In Tennessee, for instance, public prisons in 2016 reported a vacancy rate of 11 percent compared to a rate of 18.6 rate for privately operated prisons.

As a result of poor working conditions, turnover rates in private prisons are extremely high. A 2008 Texas study reported a 90 percent turnover rate for the state’s seven private prisons, whereas the rate for public facilities was 24 percent. Similarly, a 2002 nationwide study found a staff turnover rate of 52.2 percent in private prisons as compared to 16.6 percent in those run by the government. Private prison personnel tend to be inexperienced as a result: A report from the Arizona Department of Corrections examining the 2010 escape of three prisoners from the private Kingman Arizona State Prison found that the staff was “fairly ‘green’” and that roughly one-third of security staff members had held their position for less than three months.

An overwhelmed and undertrained staff compromises everyone’s safety. According to a recent Department of Justice report, in private facilities these factors lead to more frequent incidents of assault, uses of force, lockdowns, and discoveries of contraband. State-level studies report similar findings. In 2007, written testimony presented to the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee reported 65 percent more inmate-on-inmate assaults and 49 percent more inmate-on-staff assaults in private facilities as compared to comparable public ones, while a later study in Idaho showed prisoners were twice as likely to be assaulted in private rather than public facilities.

Private prisons also perpetuate the racial disparities that plague the criminal justice system. Because people of color are substantially overrepresented in for-profit prisons relative to those that are state- owned, they are more likely to be subjected to the poorer conditions found in these facilities. This is the result of carefully devised contracts that allow private prisons to select less-costly younger, healthier prisoners who – because of the increased targeting of minority communities after the 1970s – are more likely to be people of color. In California, for example, people of color represent 76 percent of the public prison population but 89 percent of the population of private facilities.

Unlike public prisons, which are required to keep meticulous, publicly available records pertaining to costs and conditions, privately owned prisons are not obligated to collect or share comparable data. This lack of accountability shields for-profit prisons from scrutiny while, as a U.S. Government Accountability Office report put it, “key decision makers, including BOP [Bureau of Prisons] managers, OMB, and Congress, are not positioned to have the information needed to make the most cost-effective investment decisions.”

With these poor oversight mechanisms, states have had trouble negotiating fair contracts with the corporations that run private prisons. In Florida, for instance, it took the work of a forensic auditor to uncover the fact that private prison vendors were relying on excessive cost estimates in order to ensure the appearance of savings. In 2011, for instance, the governor’s office promised that the private contractor running six work-release programs would save the state $550,000 annually. In reality, the contract resulted in a loss of $3.3 million over the next three years.

The lack of accountability also prevents states from enforcing contracts with private prisons. In New Mexico, legislators believed both GEO and CCA (now CoreCivic) prisons had allowed staffing vacancies to exceed the 10 percent threshold dictated in their contracts, but – due to spotty record-keeping– the state corrections agency couldn’t decisively verify that the companies were in violation of the provision. When the state ordered the Office of Inspector General to monitor the contracts, however, the state proved to be correct and the two corporations were fined more than $1 million.