Too Much Jail!  All In!

Not enough staff, lots of violence, and fees for toilet paper: The privatization of prisons in the U.S. turns prisoners into big business.

Wilkes-Barre is a sleepy small town on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. The area used to thrive on coal mining, but nowadays there isn’t much going on there. Nevertheless, in the 2000s, the city managed to make headlines — for having one of the highest rates of teenagers serving juvenile sentences. At first, it was unclear what caused this, but in 2008, it became obvious: All you had to do was follow the money to understand that there was not so much a deterioration of youth at play as an unbeatable law of the free market economy. It all came down to a lot of money — specifically 2.6 million dollars — which two judges received to assign as many teenagers as possible to a private prison operator with the caring name of PA Child Care. And so, after three or four minutes of court hearings for minor offenses, these teenagers ended up in juvenile detention. Each one of them was a deal for the operator, financed by taxpayer money.

Kids for Cash

This justice scandal was later aptly named: Kids for Cash. The case shows what can happen when incarceration becomes a multibillion-dollar industry. When people make money by putting as many other people as possible behind bars. They become inventive and greedy. Without regard for the consequences. Capitalism bites back. And in cities like Wilkes-Barre, it devours children.

In America, prisons are big business. According to U.S. Department of Justice figures from 2020, nearly 100,000 people were incarcerated in prisons operated by private companies. A negotiated fee is charged for this service: Usually, the state or municipalities pay per day per inmate. The more incarcerated, the better. In Oklahoma, for example, the state is billed an average of $45.77 per person per day. For a prison like the Lawton Correctional Facility with almost 2,700 inmates, that amounts to more than $45 million per year.

From the East to the West Coast of the U.S., there are thousands of specialized providers who profit from the mass, racially charged criminalization and imprisonment. The two largest players are publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange: CoreCivic and GEO Group. These are international mega-corporations, but the lion’s share of their earnings are from the U.S. Corecivic alone reported revenues of $1.9 billion in 2020 — 82% of which came from the operation of private prisons.

Private Prisons Exist in 26 of the 50 States

Most of them in the South’s so-called Bible and Sun Belts. There, things can sometimes swerve into especially conservative and backward ideology. Slightly more than 8% of all U.S. inmates are housed in private facilities. That doesn’t sound like a lot at first. And private incarceration also exists in other countries. The big difference is the sheer number of inmates: Nearly two million people are incarcerated in federal, state, and district prisons, juvenile correctional facilities, immigrant detention centers, closed psychiatric institutions, and military prisons. That’s almost one-fifth of all prisoners worldwide.

Providing for so many people costs money. A lot of money. According to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, it costs nearly $81 billion every year. That’s where private providers come in. The supposed argument is that these providers work with business-like efficiency and are therefore more cost-effective than the public sector.

However, civil rights organizations, activists, and journalists have pointed out for decades that this is problematic for many reasons. Scandals continue to demonstrate how broken and inhumane this profit-maximizing system is. Journalist Mia Armstrong-López has researched issues related to U.S. criminal justice for years. She says the problem is not just about getting rid of private prisons. Private service providers also make money from public incarceration. “It is common that public prisons decide to outsource many services to private companies, like healthcare, food, transport, finances, and communication. And private companies are also making a lot of money with reentry programs and electronic monitoring. The role of the private sector is slightly more complicated than it first seems. Private companies are very much involved in the lives of incarcerated people throughout the U.S.,” says Armstrong-López. It all started in the 1980s when then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan declared the War on Drugs, and incarceration numbers exploded so quickly that the state couldn’t keep up. The relentless flow of prisoners threatened to break the system. Fortunately, a few savvy businesspeople took on the problem. As politician Jerry Brown once said, the War on Drugs isn’t a war — it’s a business!

The first private prison was opened in 1984 by CoreCivic (formerly CCA — Corrections Corporation of America) in Tennessee. It was the birth of the modern, profit-oriented prison industry. The business was so good that until a few years ago, all the major American banks — from Wells Fargo to JPMorgan Chase — as well as conglomerates — like General Electric and Amazon — were involved with significant investments. However, that is now changing. In the last three years, many companies have announced their exit, arguably out of fear of a bad image.

Over the Past Few Years, It Has Become Increasingly Clear What Is Wrong with Private Prisons

Because they save money at every turn, there are often miserable conditions that are difficult to verify. The companies allow almost no one into their prisons and are not forthcoming with information. None of the five facilities contacted for this article responded to queries. Nothing about life in prison is supposed to leak out. Saving money doesn’t just apply to the prisoners but also to the staff: There aren’t enough of them, the pay is low, and the training is often insufficient.

Shane Bauer earned nine dollars an hour when he signed up at a CoreCivic prison in 2014. Twelve-hour shifts, no paid sick days. As an undercover reporter, he secretly filmed and later wrote about what he experienced as a guard at the Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield, Louisiana, over four months. Underground security standards, completely broken prisoners, sexual assaults, and stabbings. The staff received instructions never to intervene in violence among prisoners. 176 inmates are under the supervision of one guard. One prisoner had to have his legs and fingers amputated due to untreated gangrene because the prison administration refused to take him to a hospital in time. Every admission costs the company money, which is why private prisons rarely accept prisoners with pre-existing conditions in the first place. They often go to public jails instead. In addition, the institutions charge inmates for toilet paper and toothpaste, which the state provides to the private operator for free.

A New Business Opportunity

An official 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the findings from the undercover investigations. The verdict: Private prisons are less secure, more dangerous for inmates, and more repressive in their care. And gradually, it is becoming clear that they are not as cheap as originally thought. This is due to falsified billing and the fact that inmates serve longer sentences in private prisons than in public facilities on average. In the same year, President Barack Obama imposed a halt on contract extensions with private operators, but this did not affect the contracts in individual states. During Trump’s tenure, private providers discovered a new business: The number of detention centers established by the U.S. immigration authorities for undocumented immigrants suddenly skyrocketed, says Isra Chaker, who works for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Under Trump, many millions of taxpayer dollars ended up in these facilities, which are 80% privately owned. Even though the number fell to half that under Biden, 25,000 people were still in such camps in 2021.

“Many of these sites have well-established records of horrific conditions,” says Isra Chaker. “Several states, such as New Jersey and Illinois, have therefore already passed laws banning immigration detention.” Nonetheless, GEO Group and CoreCivic have still made more than a quarter of their revenue from these practices in recent years.The situation in California illustrates the complexity of the struggle over private prisons. The state wanted to abolish private prisons and passed a corresponding law in 2019. GEO Group sued lawmakers, in part because the company had just signed a 15-year contract with the Trump administration for several immigration camps in California — a matter for the federal government, not the state. The legal dispute is still ongoing. The latest status: In September 2022, a federal appeals court temporarily sided with the lawsuit. The private state prisons are empty, but the immigration camps remain for the time being.

The private players have already begun digging in other places: The Californian ban has generous exemptions for so-called community correction programs: counseling centers, rehabilitation centers, and psychiatric facilities for former prisoners. It’s a business worth $200 million a year.

This article first appeared in DUMMY Magazin, no. 77 in winter 2022. The topic of this issue was privatization. Thank you DUMMY Magazin for kindly approving the republication!

09/2023