Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
The Arizona Republic is running a multi-part investigative report entitled "The Price of Prisons," examining the private prison bidders who want to build more prisons in Arizona. After two installments, the picture is far worse than we imagined.
On Sunday, the Republic published Arizona prison oversight lacking for private facilities:
The private company that operates the Kingman prison publicly took full responsibility for last year's breakout, in which escapees were charged with the murder of an Oklahoma couple.
But behind the scenes, Management & Training Corp. clashed with the state over a litany of problems revealed after the escapes: How to improve lax security. Whether the state should pay the company for empty beds after the state, responding to the breakout, removed high-risk prisoners and quit sending new inmates there.
Since May, Arizona has paid more than $3 million to MTC for empty beds after the company threatened to sue the state, claiming it was entitled to nearly $10 million.
Now, as Arizona is about to contract for a massive expansion of private-prison beds in the state, critics say that the financial concessions with MTC raise questions about how well the state can hold private-prison operators accountable.
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The state, by law, may contract for private prisons only if they are less expensive or offer more for the money than government-run facilities. But basic operating-cost studies suggest that private prisons actually cost more per bed.
State law also requires Arizona's Department of Corrections to compile and analyze data from its contracts that could show how private and state prisons compare in security, safety and quality of their services. But The Arizona Republic has found the department never followed those requirements.
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Public hearings will be held over the next two weeks in five communities throughout the state. The state plans to award one or more contracts for 5,000 new private-prison beds in September.
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Critics see the back and forth as proof of how hard it is for the state to hold private-prison operators accountable.
"It's disgusting but not surprising," said Caroline Isaacs, a spokeswoman for the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker group that has called for investigating private-prison companies' influence in state politics. "Arizona is strapped for cash, and we don't have the political will or the legal muscle to go up against a corporation like that, so they can operate with something close to impunity."
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Legally, the state can cancel the contract of a company if it fails to meet its obligations. But Isaacs said that is an unrealistic option because the state has few options on where to send inmates.
"We're so desperate because of prison overcrowding. These companies have got the state over a barrel," she said. "When things go wrong, is Ryan really going to cancel the contract? Probably not, and they know that."
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Corrections' budget for this fiscal year is $1.06 billion. But the department can't yet show whether private prisons offer a better deal than publicly run facilities. Do they offer more for the money? Are they safer? More efficient?
In theory, answering such questions should be easy.
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Until now, Corrections hasn't followed the law. It has only conducted annual studies of overall operating costs. Ryan, who took over the department in 2009, said he is correcting this. The first of the more thorough comparisons will be completed in January.
The studies could show for the first time how private and state prisons measure up.
On a national level, independent cost studies have been inconclusive, finding little or no cost savings.
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A recent study for the state of Utah found no cost savings in private prisons.
In Texas . . . For last fiscal year, its study found that, overall, private prison beds are pricier: They cost 3 cents a day less than state prisons for minimum-security inmates (at $46.56 a day) but $4.60 a day more for medium-security inmates (at $53.02 a day). Medium-security inmates make up 43 percent of the total in private prisons, according to the Corrections Department. There are no maximum- security inmates in the state's private prisons.
By state statute, Arizona is supposed to contract with private prisons only if they can offer their services for less than the state or offer better services for the same price. Gov. Jan Brewer and the leaders in the Legislature's Republican majority have pushed for privatization despite the findings of the state cost studies.
On Monday, the Republic examined Corrections Corp. of America (CCA). Prison firm optimistic about Arizona bid despite lawsuits, incidents:
CCA, the largest private-prison operator in the country, hopes to soon add 40,000 new prison beds worth $700 million a year in revenue.
That would include 4,500 beds in Arizona, where CCA is one of four bidders for a new private-prison contract with Arizona's Department of Corrections.
Public hearings on their four proposals are being held throughout the state this week and next to gauge community sentiment.
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City officials in Eloy are welcoming the bid – hardly surprising, since Eloy's mayor is a longtime CCA corrections officer and the company, which already runs six prisons in the area, is a major local employer.
Then, too, Gov. Jan Brewer's senior policy adviser and former campaign manager, Chuck Coughlin, runs a consulting company, HighGround, that lobbies for CCA.
[Note: HighGround also represents a number of state legislators. This is the lobbyist scandal whose name Arizona's political reporters dare not speak. Our shadow governor, Chuck Coughlin, runs the governor's office and represents a number of state legislators in addition to his private prison clients. I am not aware of anywhere in the United States where a lobbying firm exerts this much influence and control over a state government. Chuck Coughlin also represented the Fiesta Bowl that arranged for certain trips and benefits to flow to state legislators, including campaign contributions. [UPDATE: Last week the mining company Curis Resources invited Gov. Brewer to speak at an exclusive dinner as it is trying to convince leaders here to let it open a copper mine near town. The Vancouver, Canada-based company is a client of her top political handler, Chuck Coughlin, and his firm HighGround, Inc.] The opportunity for similar unethical conduct exists with CCA as well, with campaign contributions flowing to Gov. Brewer and state legislators in exchange for their support of private prisons in Arizona, in particular, CCA.]
Last December, California's inspector general found serious security flaws and improper treatment of inmates at the three CCA prisons in Arizona – the La Palma, Red Rock and Florence correctional centers – that hold California inmates.
CCA's facilities here also hold immigration detainees, federal prisoners and inmates from Hawaii and Washington state.
Inspectors found flaws with the incident alarm-response systems at the three prisons because there was no audible alarm. At La Palma and Florence, they found malfunctioning and out-of-focus security cameras.
They found a wide variety of poor security practices, noting, for example, that inmates could – and did – easily get around metal detectors at La Palma because CCA didn't have adequate staff on hand when it was moving inmates.
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Inspectors also said that at Red Rock, CCA's "hiring process does not include a comprehensive criminal-background and arrest-history review," that state arrest records weren't being checked and that at Red Rock and La Palma, the company didn't do enough to check whether people applying for jobs might know or have relationships with inmates.
In California and elsewhere, corrections officers with gang affiliations have been a recurring problem.
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A recent congressional report found that CCA's Eloy Detention Facility had the most deaths of any immigration-detention center in the country last year, with nine fatalities.
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As the operator of more than 60 facilities that house about 75,000 inmates and detainees, CCA has frequently been the target of lawsuits.
Among the most significant pending is one alleging that officers at the company's Idaho Correctional Center, nicknamed "the Gladiator School," intentionally allowed inmates to assault one another.
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CCA, which last year reported $157.2 million in net income on $1.67 billion in revenue, spends heavily on lobbying. From January 2008 through April of last year, according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies, CCA spent $4.4 million lobbying Congress, the federal Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other government bodies.
In Arizona, eight CCA executives contributed $1,080 of the $51,193 in seed money that Brewer received for her gubernatorial campaign.
CCA also gave $10,000 to the "Yes on 100" campaign, pushed by Brewer to temporarily raise the state sales tax by 1 percentage point.
To be continued
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