Closing private prisons could be costly

Texas towns fear impact from loss of federal dollars

Thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in lucrative government contracts could be in jeopardy in Texas with the Department of Justice’s decision to phase out the use of privately run prisons.

Of the 14 private prisons facing the loss of federal contracts, five are in Texas — the most of any state. The impact will be felt not only in prison yards but also in the tax rolls and cash registers of small towns and local communities.

“We are very concerned about what is going to happen,” said Howard County Judge Kathryn Wiseman in Big Spring, where the GEO Group employs 480 people at its detention facility.

Wiseman said she fears that nearly all of the jobs at the prison will be lost when the company’s federal contract expires in March.

“These are our friends and neighbors; these are people who coach Little League baseball and belong to our civic organization,” she said. “They will leave a hole not just in our economy because they pay taxes, but in our community.”

The Department of Justice recently directed the Bureau of Prisons to wind down its business with private corporations as contracts expire over the next five years. The Department of Homeland Security followed the move by announcing it would also evaluate its partnerships with private companies in running more than twodozen immigrant detention

centers.

The federal government has used private prisons since 1997 to relieve crowding, but a recent investigation by the Office of Inspector General found an array of problems in the privately run prisons, including abuse of solitary confinement and more fights and contraband seizures than in facilities run by the federal Bureau of Prisons.

Phasing out the prisons is perhaps the biggest blow yet in the yearslong debate over whether corporations should be used to keep inmates under lock and key while turning a profit. Critics say it’s about time.

“This is a major victory for those of us who have fought for years to expose the innumerable abuses and indignities in (such) prisons, and we’re overjoyed the Department of Justice has finally listened, however belatedly,” said Terri Burke, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

“Lives have been lost to this broken system,” Burke said. “Good riddance.”

New guidelines

The federal prison population has fallen from a high of 219,298 inmates in 2013 to 193,070 at the end of August, according to the Department of Justice.

New sentencing guidelines that reduce prison time for low-level drug defendants are believed to be among the reasons for the decline.

“Private prisons served an important role during a difficult period, but time has shown that they compare poorly to our own bureau facilities,” Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates said in a memo last month to the Bureau of Prisons.

Private facilities don’t save substantially on costs, don’t provide the same level of safety and security, and are lacking when it comes to educational and job training programs that reduce the likelihood of a person returning to prison, she said.

Twelve percent of the federal prison population — or about 22,660 inmates — were housed in private prisons through $639 million in contracts at the end of 2015, officials said.

Yates instructed the bureau to end the private contracts or substantially reduce them as they come up for renewal. Inmates would be shifted to Bureau of Prisons facilities.

Three companies — the GEO Group, Corrections Corp. of America and the Management and Training Corporation — run private prisons nationwide on behalf of the Department of Justice. They also have contracts with Homeland Security and other entities.

The companies also pay franchise taxes to Texas, but the state comptroller’s office said those amounts are confidential.

The five facilities in Texas are centered in West Texas. The facilities include two side-by-side facilities at the Reeves County Detention Complex in Pecos, west of Midland; the Big Spring Correctional Facility in Howard County; Eden Detention Center in Concho County; and the Giles W. Dalby Correctional Facility in Garza County near Lubbock.

With corporate names instead of U.S. flags on their shoulders, guards ride herd over unique inmate populations.

Prisoners are mostly non-U.S. citizens who have fewer than eight years left on their sentences, are considered to be low security risks and are to be deported from the United States upon their release.

The investigation by the Office of Inspector General report released in August found an array of problems at the facilities.

Prisoners at two lockups in Texas were found to have been kept in solitary confinement just to free up extra bed space. There were also more instances of fights between inmates, as well as between inmates and staff, and more contraband such as cellular phones than in government-run prisons.

In recent years, there have been several incidents involving injury and property damage, the inspectors note, including a 2015 clash at the Willacy County Correctional Center in Raymondville in South Texas in which inmates set fires at the prison. The facility, which had been run by Management and Training Corp., closed later that year.

In 2012, a guard in Adams County, Miss., was killed and 20 people were injured during rioting that reportedly started over concerns about inferior food and medical care.

Challenging cuts

Corrections corporations take exception to the recent Department of Justice decision and appear ready to challenge any further cuts.

“Our company has strongly disputed the findings of the (Office of Inspector General) report, which was severely flawed in its attempts to compare prisons operated by private entities to publicly operated facilities,” said Pablo Paez, vice president of corporate communications for the Miami-based GEO Group, which operates about a dozen institutions in Texas for various entities.

The report does not take into account that the private facilities house a different type of prisoner than those in the government-run prisons, Paez said, and does not attempt to determine whether more contraband is found because

the detection process is more efficient in the private facilities.

He added that the government downplays findings that private facilities had fewer positive drug tests, less sexual misconduct and fewer deaths in custody than governmentrun facilities.

Natasha Metcalf, a vice president for Corrections Corporation of America, said housing inmates exclusively from Central America and Mexico has brought additional challenges, such as vast ties to major gangs that aren’t as prevalent in the Bureau of Prisons population.

Inmates associated with powerful gangs are more likely to be involved in violence and misconduct, she told the Department of Justice in a written response to the report.

“Additionally, these affiliated inmates and geographic groups often have significant rivalries based on conflicts that originated outside the prison system, leading to intergroup conflict and violence,” she said.

The company, known as CCA, operates 17 facilities in Texas, according to its website.

The Management and Training Corp. said the Justice Department’s decision to end the use of contract prisons is based on faulty information.

“If the DOJ’s decision to end the use of contract prisons was based solely on declining inmate populations, there may be some justification, but to base this decision on cost, safety, and security and programming is wrong,” the company said in a written statement on its website. “The facts don’t support the allegations.”

The plans to shutter private prisons support a growing perception that the criminal justice system has been overused, said state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, who chairs the Senate Criminal Justice Committee.

“There is no question there is a realization that sometimes, less means more,” he said. “One of the worst things you can do is lock up people who don’t need to be there.”

He said the funds could instead be shifted to other uses, such as hiring more state troopers or providing educational programs that can cut recidivism. “You have (fewer inmates) and you can do a better job with them, and they won’t come back,” he said.

Gaining momentum

Whether the closures will extend to immigration detention centers is still up in the air.

Lauren-Brooke Eisen, of the New York University School of Law Brennan Center for Justice, just wrapped up a trip to the Texas border region where she is researching privately run detention facilities.

She said Homeland Security will have a far tougher time, especially in Texas, figuring out what to do with detainees in private lockups held for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The agency has 24 detention centers in Texas, of which 17 are run through contracts with private companies, according to the ACLU. The private facilities house more than 17,000 detainees.

Most of the facilities are not owned by the private companies but rather by local governments, ACLU officials said.

Carl Takei, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prisons Project, said the move to end corporate prisons is gaining momentum.

“The lesson is that this two-decade experiment with privatization was a disaster,” he said, “and the Justice Department is explicitly recognizing that in its decision to phase out all of these private prison contracts.”