California will continue using private prisons
The Justice Department recently decided to phase out the confinement of federal inmates in private prisons, but tens of thousands of state prisoners — including 10,700 from California — will remain in the corporate-owned institutions, which a government report has criticized over safety and security.
California has transferred prisoners to private institutions, some of them in other states, for more than five years to relieve overcrowding in state prisons, but state, and local, use of them is beginning to be questioned. One Bay Area lawmaker has called for the state to stop sending inmates to pris-
ons far from their families or California inspectors, and another legislator is moving to stop cities and counties in California from contracting with private prisons to hold federal immigration detainees.
“Our state and local governments should not be complicit in this awful practice of profiting off of human suffering,” said state Sen. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens (Los Angeles County), whose bill on immigration detention is nearing final legislative passage.
The Obama administration said Aug. 18 that it would scale back or decline to renew contracts with for-profit companies that hold 22,600 inmates sentenced to prison by federal courts, about 12 percent of all inmates held by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons. A recent report by the Justice Department’s inspector general found more safety and security problems at the private institutions than at federal prisons, including higher rates of assaults on both inmates and guards.
“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources,” nor do they save substantially on costs, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in a department memo announcing the phaseout.
The same corporations, however, will still have contracts to run detention centers for nearly 25,000 immigrants, 62 percent of the total locked up by federal immigration officials for possible deportation. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton says she will eliminate those contracts if elected. The companies also hold inmates for prison systems in many states, including California.
Out of nearly 129,000 inmates serving prison sentences issued by California courts, officials say about 5,900 are held in private prisons within the state. State prison guards and other employees staff the largest private facility, at California City in the Kern County desert, and make up part of the staffs at the other private prisons.
An additional 4,800 are held in private prisons out of state, more than 2,700 of them in Eloy, Ariz., and the rest in Tutwiler, Miss. Both prisons are owned by Corrections Corp. of America, the nation’s largest private prison contractor. The corporation’s own employees work at them, and the California inspector general’s office visits the prisons periodically to examine their operations.
In addition, about 3,700
“Governments should not be complicit in this awful practice of profiting off of human suffering.” State Sen. Ricardo Lara, opponent of private prisons
immigrants, detained by the federal government, are held in private prisons under contracts with four California cities: Bakersfield, San Diego, Adelanto (San Bernardino County) and Calexico (Imperial County).
The state began shifting some inmates to private prisons in response to federal court orders to reduce the serious overcrowding in state prisons, which was judged responsible for substandard health care and the deaths of numerous inmates. The transfers helped Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration reach the court-ordered population levels in early 2015, as did new laws reducing some prison sentences and sending some low-level felons to county jail instead of state prison.
“We hope over the next few years to be able to house all of our prisoners here in California ... and not have to contract our beds out,” said Joe Orlando, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He said the department has not received any reports of abuses at the private prisons, and one prominent critic of the prison system agreed.
“I haven’t heard of any significant problems recently,” said attorney Donald Spector of the Prison Law Office, whose suit on behalf of inmates led to the federal court population reduction order. But he said the state should still stop using private prisons.
“When you take away somebody’s liberty, it should be done only by the government, instead of a private company that has a profit motive,” Spector said.
State Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, chairwoman of the Senate’s Public Safety Committee and its budget subcommittee on Corrections and Public Safety, said California should terminate its contracts with private prisons in other states.
With no state employees at those sites, “we have no way of knowing what’s going on there,” Hancock said. Abuses have been reported at other prisons run by the same company, she said, and their location “makes it almost impossible for families to visit.”
Hancock, who will be termed out of office in January, said there’s not much the Legislature can do about the state’s use of private prisons. But lawmakers are considering a bill to end local governments’ ability to contract with prison companies for detention of immigrants.
Lara’s SB1289 would prohibit cities and counties from signing or renewing private prison contracts, starting in 2018, and would also require the four current private prisons to respect inmates’ legal rights. Despite opposition from county governments and sheriffs’ departments, the bill won state Assembly passage last Tuesday and awaits a final Senate vote this week. Approval would send the bill to Brown’s desk.