I hate anyone who makes a profit by incarcerating human beings.
Monday, March 8, 2010
Unintended Consequences of a Prison Closure
CCA is closing its Huerfano County (CO) Correctional Facility at the end of this month, after they lost a contract renewal bid with the state of Arizona to house 700 prisoners. Not only will 200 people lose their jobs; the sheriff's department and a local theater will suffer as well. How, you ask? Well part of the contract with CCA permitted for a "Prison Authority Fund," which provided subsidies to both those entities. Now that the prison is closing the theater will need to come up with a few extra hundred dollars per month to pay its utilities, and vehicle purchases and youth programs from the sheriff's department could also take a hit. It's just a shame to see these areas suffer from an inevtiable turn of events.
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MIKE....ARE YOU A DISGRUNTLED EMPLOYEE? HAVE YOU EVER WORKED IN CORRECTIONS? DO YOU HAVE ANY CLUE ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE SAYING IN ANY OF YOUR STATEMENTS? THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT NEW WAYS OF HOUSING INMATES HAS TO BE ADDRESSED AND HANDLED, AS THE NUMBERS OF INMATES INCREASES DAILY. THE QUESTION WOULD SEEM TO BE....WOULD YOU FEEL SAFER KNOWING THAT INMATES ARE SECURE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD HOUSED IN A PRIVATE PRISON, OR RUNNING LOOSE IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD? UNFORTUNATLEY, THERE IS NO "COLLEGE" FOR CORRECTION OFFICERS SPECIFICALLY,SO AS TO COME TO A CORRECTIONS SETTING WITH ALL THE KNOWLEDGE THAT IS NEEDED. MY HAT GOES OFF TO THE "AVERAGE JOE AND JOANNE" WHO HAS THE STUFF TO COME INTO THAT KIND OF SETTING, AND HANDLE UP. COMMUNITIES SHOULD BE PROUD OF THEIR CITIZENS TO BE A PART OF SUCH AN IMPORTANT ROLE IN SOCIETY. A BADLY NEEDED ROLE, STATE OR PRIVATE. AS A PROUD CORRECTIONS OFFICER IN CCA, I HOPE EVERYONE IS NOT AS NARROW MINDED AS YOU. PLEASE SPEAK ONLY OF WHAT YOU KNOW FIRST HAND.
ReplyDeleteNo Linda, I am not a former or current CCA employee, nor do I personally know anyone who has worked there. I do however know some folks who have been there and I myself have been researching them and the private prison industry for years, so that is where I speak from.
ReplyDeleteGenerally speaking, I think that drawing a profit from incarcerating people is just wrong. Morally, ethically, whatever. From what I have seen, these companies pay their employees less than government facilities in salary and benefits, and provide less training. There is high turnover among staff, and the staff that do stay on are not as well-trained to handle a correctional environment as a government corrections officer. So I actually blame the companies for poorly preparing their employees to deal with such a potentially volatile environment as prison. I don't think anyone can come into a corrections setting and know how to manage it properly without a lot of training.
Additionally, the private companies are notorious for short-staffing their facilities, which again leaves staff more vulnerable. Don't get me wrong, I completely support the folks who work as corrections officers in these companies because, as you said, they are playing a very important role in society. But what I cannot ignore are the higher levels of violence, assaults, and escapes at private prisons, even though they house primarily low-level offenders (who should be less prone to those sorts of things). I don't think any company should be placing its employees in such a seemingly unecessarily dangerous workplace. I even mentioned in my initial comment how bad it was that 200 of CCA's employees would lose their jobs, so please don't think I don't support them or the work they do.
In an ideal world, I'd like to see governments (state and federal) focus on reducing the critically overcrowded situations that plague our prison and jail systems. Our country operated for a long time without private prisons, as our incarceration rate remained steady, but with the War on Drugs and now the war on immigrants, the prison rate surged and private companies came into the mix. Essentially, I think incarcerating people is an inherently governmental function (and a few courts would agree with me), and that the government does it better anyway. Yes, private companies can increase capacity rapidly and respond instantly to spikes in the prison population, but we need to focus on getting more nonviolent and low-level people out of prison. We spend $70 BILLION dollars a year just locking people up in this country - more than one in every 100 adults in this country is in prison. That's the issue, when you get right down to it. I would like to see the prison population reduced, thereby eliminating the need to turn to private companies to lock people up. CCA made $40 million in profit in the last quarter of 2009 - from October to December, 2009, from taxpayer dollars. That's just not right.
So while I appreciate your insight, because information coming from those inside private prisons is all to sparse, that's what I believe