The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/category/corrections/private-prisons/)
A settlement approved this week by a federal judge closed a case alleging that private prison operator CoreCivic and its phone provider, Securus Technologies, illegally monitored and recorded inmate calls.
More than 120,000 inmates are housed in facilities operated by private corporations under contract with the federal and state governments. While that amounts to a relatively small fraction of the total U.S. incarcerated population, for-profit prisons “diminish equality” in the nation’s justice system and should be abolished, says a University of Baltimore Law Review paper.
“What’s happening out there is just ugly,” said Joe Allbaugh, recently resigned Oklahoma corrections director. “There’s no other way to describe it. Each time I bring it up, people see dollar signs. They don’t want to hear about money issues.”
At least 20 pension funds and plans have invested in Geo Group or CoreCivic, the two biggest private prison operators. Some of the largest investments, by pension funds for public sector workers such as teachers and firefighters, come from states with “sanctuary” policies, such as New York, California and Oregon.
It becomes the latest large U.S. bank to pull back on doing business with the private-prison industry amid concerns about the treatment of immigrants detained under the administration of President Donald Trump.
Private prison companies poured record amounts of money into the 2018 elections, more than three times as much as the industry spent in any other midterm year. Public records follow the trail of cash from Congress to state and local races.
Shane Bauer of Mother Jones turned his reporting on a private prison into a book, “American Prison.” NPR calls it “both the remarkable story of a journalist who spent four months working as a corrections officer, and a horrifying exposé of how prisoners were treated by a corporation that profited from them.”
Commonwealth authorities have been negotiating with CoreCivic, one of the nation’s leading private corrections companies for the transport of prisoners to Arizona, in an effort to reduce the burden on the island’s antiquated prisons and jails—many of which were rendered uninhabitable by last year’s Hurricane Maria.
The number of people housed in private prisons increased five times faster than the total prison population between 2000 and 2016, and detainees in private immigration facilities increased by 442 percent in same period, says the Sentencing Project, predicting that as overall prison populations decline, corrections companies will “seek profit in other areas of criminal justice services and immigration detention.”
Beyond the ideological debates about prison privatization, privately run corrections facilities are likely to continue to be used by cash-strapped governments. In a new book, Lauren-Brooke Eisen of New York University says it’s time to explore how the private corrections industry can become a partner in reducing recidivism.