Kingman can’t even deal with its substance abuse prisoners

by David Safier

The damning assessment of the private, for-profit Kingman prison lays out in detail the systemic sloppiness and mismanagement which have been the hallmarks of the prison. The media has covered many of the the problems listed in the assessment. (Well, actually, the Star hasn't covered the assessment well. In its typical fashion, it prefers to dwell on the grizzly details of the murder of two people in New Mexico and write about the political horse race, not the more important issue of mismanagement of the prison.)

I put together a long list of the most critical passages from the assessment. There's enough there to close the facility and lead to charges of criminal negligence against the top brass of Management Training Corporation. It doesn't look like either is going to happen.

But no one, so far as I know, has talked about how Kingman failed to deliver needed services to its prisoners in the years before it took violent offenders. It was originally set up as a place to house people locked up for DUI offenses, then took general prisoners including substance abusers, but for its first two years, it ducked its contractual obligation to offer substance abuse counseling and services.

An Arizona Department of Corrections document provides a timeline of the prison.

Kingman opened in 2004 with 1,400 inmates serving time for DUI. In 2005, nonviolent, non-DUI inmates were brought in as well.

Kingman was expected to do more than house DUI and other substance abuse inmates. It was contractually obligated to offer substance abuse programs. Yet in 2006, two years after it opened, the programs still weren't staffed — there were "an average 13 vacancies out of 18 positions," according to the timeline — putting Kingman in non-compliance with its contract:

Dec 13, 2006: ADC notified Arizona Legislature (Senate President and Speaker of the House) in a monthly ADC Status Report that ASP-Kingman is in substantial non-compliance with the terms of the contract. Its substance abuse services are deficient and the majority of the full-time employees required by the contract to staff the substance abuse program have been vacant since the facility opened. All of the 1,508 inmates at the facility are in need of substance abuse services including mandated DUI programming per Arizona Administrative Code but fewer than one third (only 448) inmates are receiving services.

MTC simply didn't bother to hire staff to help its inmates deal with their substance abuse problems. But the company happily took state money to pay for those positions.

Dec. 28, 2006: An ADC memo from ADC Contract Beds Administrator E. Pierson to ADC Division Director Sam Sublett identifies that monetary offsets to MTC invoices for staffing non-compliance (vacancy deductions) have been taken since September 2006.

This kind of profit taking is illegal, but it also shows a blatant disregard by MTC for the welfare of its prisoners who needed help they weren't offered.

Was MTC slapped on the wrist and made to cut back on its prison population because of the violations? Far from it. In 2007, legislation was passed "authorizing ADOA to contract for 2,000 general population adult male beds."

Kingman proved it couldn't, or wouldn't, serve its inmate population from 2004 to 2006, so it was rewarded by being given more prisoners.

In December,  2007, murderers were placed in Kingman for the first time.

It sounds like MTC was required to return the money it accepted for staff it never hired. But I see no indication of the company being fined for willfully violating its contractual obligations.

Instead, it was rewarded by being given more prisoners, this time murderers. And on July 30, 2010 three of its most violent prisoners escaped and murdered two innocent people. The last escapee was captured with a cache of weapons in his tent and said he was ready and willing to kill again.

Something is dreadfully wrong here, both with a for-profit system that encourages prisons to cut corners to make money, and with the ADC for continuing to feed the insatiable maw of the private prison system when the parent company proved itself to be unwilling or unable to provide adequate service.