America’s private prisons have prison quotas where states must pay them for unused beds

MassPrivateI

A new report suggests that having private companies run prisons might not be the best idea. 

The advocacy group In The Public Interest analyzed 62 contracts between counties and states and private prison contractors. The analysis found 65% of the contracts had clauses that promised to pay for empty beds if they did not lock up a certain number of people.

After three violent inmates escaped from an Arizona private prison in July 2010, prompting a two-week, multi-state manhunt, state corrections officials demanded improvements and stopped sending new inmates to what they called a “dysfunctional” 3,300-bed facility.

Less than a year later, the company that runs the prison, Management & Training Corp., threatened to sue the state. A line in their contract guaranteed that the prison would remain 97 percent full. They argued they had lost nearly $10 million from the reduced inmate population.

State officials renegotiated the contract, but ended up paying $3 million for empty beds as the company continued to address problems, according to state documents and local news accounts.

Far from the exception, Arizona’s contractually obligated promise to fill prison beds is a common provision in a majority of America’s private prison contracts, according to a public records analysis released today by the advocacy group In the Public Interest. The group reviewed more than 60 contracts between private prison companies and state and local governments across the country, and found language mentioning quotas for prisoners in nearly two-thirds of those analyzed.

The prison bed guarantees range between minimums of 70 percent occupancy in a California prison to 100 percent occupancy requirements at some Arizona prisons. Most of the contracts had language mandating that at least 90 percent of prison beds be filled.

Experts argue that such requirements create an incentive for policymakers to focus on filling empty prison beds, as opposed to pursuing long-term policy changes, such as sentencing reform, that could significantly reduce prison populations. In short, many states are effectively obligated to continue to incarcerate people regardless of crime rates and public safety needs, or otherwise hand over taxpayer dollars in order to satisfy private profit-making companies.

“It’s really shortsighted public policy to do anything that ties the hands of the state,” said Michele Deitch, a senior lecturer and criminal justice expert at the University of Texas School of Public Affairs, who has researched the rise of private prisons. “If there are these incentives to keep the private prisons full, then it is reducing the likelihood that states will adopt strategies to reduce prison costs by keeping more people out. When the beds are there, you don’t want to leave them empty.”

“You can’t project years into the future what your prison population is going to look like,” said Shahrzad Habibi, research director with In the Public Interest, who authored the study on prison bed guarantees, which the group calls “lockup quotas.” “If there is a reduction in the prison population, instead of closing these private prisons first, there is an incentive to keep funneling inmates there, to keep giving them business.”
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/19/private-prison-quotas_n_3953483.html 
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/09/private-prisons-occupancy-quota-cca-crime

Too-many prisons and prisoners with little to no media coverage:

David Fathi, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project says he’s seen only a modest increase in news coverage of criminal justice reform despite his sense that the nation is starting to turn the corner on mass incarceration. “I’ve been doing this work since 1990 and there’s been no time that things have looked this hopeful for significant reform in the criminal justice system,” he says.

The policy debate has also gotten more compelling recently, for other reasons. “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”—an explosive book published in 2010—made it impossible to avoid confronting the central role of race in a system that author Michele Alexander wrote has systematically subjugated poor people of color. And the rise of privately owned prisons has raised troubling questions about injecting a profit motive into issues of justice.

The numbers involved are, by any standard, astronomical: 2.3 million Americans, or 1 in about 140, are in custody at any given moment, the highest incarceration rate in the world, six times what it is in Canada—or China, or Iraq, for that matter.

The total number of Americans under correctional control is 7 million—or more than 1 in 50—if you include people on parole or probation. That’s more than the entire state of Massachusetts.

Almost half of all federal prisoners—nearly 100,000 people, or enough for a small city—are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses. Add state prisoners and jail inmates, and the total approaches half a million, or enough for a large city.

“Considering that huge number, there’s hardly anyone on the beat,” Gest says.

Crime and court reporters, still a staple of newsrooms everywhere, tend to see their role as ending after conviction. The number of reporters assigned to cover prisons and criminal justice, even part time, has dwindled due to decades of cuts, beat consolidation—and lack of interest.

“They don’t see this as an important beat,” says Paul Wright, a former Washington state prison inmate who founded the highly regarded Prison Legal News magazine in 1990, when he was behind bars.
http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/watchdogarticle/100022/The-Too-Many-Prisoners-Dilemma.aspx

Congressmen say our prison population costs taxpayers $6 billion push for prison reform:

The United States imprisons almost three times as many black people than were jailed in South Africa during Apartheid, Rep. Spencer Bachus said Thursday in a subcommittee oversight hearing on the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Both sides of the aisle raised alarming statistics like this point by the Alabama Republican over the course of the swift, hour-long meeting of the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security and Investigations.

Their comments highlighted a national problem lurking in the shadow cast by immigration and health care reform.

“There has to be an effort to reduce the population,” BOP Director Charles Samuels Jr. told the subcommittee.

Bachus noted that the U.S. prison population lingered around 24,000 for most of the 1900s until swelling to nearly a quarter of a million inmates in the 1980s, a staggering symptom of the failed War on Drugs.

Rep. Bobby Scott, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, persuaded Bachus to co-sponsor a House prison reform bill with him and Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.

The Public Safety Enhancement Act aims to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the federal prison system through streamlined offender risk-and-needs assessments, individual risk-reduction incentives and rewards, and risk and recidivism reduction.

 “The United States locks up more of its population than any other country in the world,” Scott said, noting that BOP eats $6 billion annually from taxpayers.

 Samuels, the BOP official, noted that the recidivism rate for state and federal prisons is approximately 40 percent.

Scott said the BOP budget can be significantly reduced by increasing home confinement, a simple act that could save taxpayers $100 million annually.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2013/09/19/61291.htm

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