Humpday Hall of Shame

As we covered two weeks ago, the "comprehensive immigration reform" measures being debated in Congress could pour even more millions into the pockets of private prison companies like Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group.  The bill passed by the Senate last month would increase funding for programs like Operation Streamline, which funnel immigrants into the federal criminal justice system are result in more immigrants behind bars.  Now that immigration reform has been passed off to the House of Representatives, we've compiled a list of the the six representatives who benefitted the most from for-profit prison money in 2012.

1. Hal Rogers (R-KY), who chairs the powerful Appropriations Committee, and his Help America’s Leaders PAC received a total of $34,500 from CCA, GEO, and MTC.  The number is fitting -- 34,000 is the number of immigrant detention beds Rogers’ committee mandates that Immigration and Customs Enforcement fill every single day.  With more than half of all detention beds operated by private prison corporations, that means big business for CCA, GEO, and their peers.

2.  Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) comes in second on our list, bringing in $24,000 from private prison companies in 2012.  The donations came directly to the Boehner's campaign, through his John Boehner for Speaker Committee, and through The Freedom Project-Friends of John Boehner PAC, which is closely aligned with the speaker.  In fact, CCA was one of TFP's biggest donors, having given it $10,000.  Boehner is not only a promoter of immigrant detention, but also one of the main hinderances to new immigration laws coming before the House.

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A guest column, Privately run prisons offer value to Ohio, ran in the Toledo based paper, The Blade, on Monday.  The authors, economic professors from Temple University, Simon Hakim and Erwin Blackstone, point to findings from their recent study to argue that private for-profit prisons are “proven solutions that deserve a second look” from state governments.  GEO Group, the nation’s second largest private prison operator, posted the piece on their website and lauded the study’s findings on twitter.  

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Back in February we blogged about our concerns with the privatization of food services in correctional facilities and since then have followed the decision-making in Michigan and Ohio where the state governments have been weighing the option.  This week the Association Press covered both states’ recent decisions to contract with private corporation Aramark to provide food service in their prison facilities.  

Our concerns and the ones that are highlighted by the AP article are similar: food quality and portion size is diminished, food workers are paid less, and many other general safety concerns.  The AP digs deeper and describes some of the specific ways in which cost savings is found in compromising quality, including substituting cheaper ingredients for the ones the company claims to be using.

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Last week, we announced that Corrections Corporation of America had lost four contracts in the last month -- two in Texas, one in Idaho, and one in Mississippi.  We just learned that Kentucky has decided to drop its contract with CCA to run the Marion Adjustment Center, bringing the total to 5 contracts lost in as many weeks.

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"You know, just because it is legal doesn't make it ethically and morally right for shareholders to make a profit off of incarceration of our fellow citizens.  I guess with my Christian upbringing, there has always been a conflict with that."

With those words, Justin Jones, director of the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, announced his resignation earlier this week.  Jones, who has held the position since 2005, has been an advocate for policies like Oklahoma’s Justice Reinvestment Initiative, which aims to “ease the fiscal and social strains caused by Oklahoma’s prison overcrowding” by reducing the state’s reliance on incarceration. 

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Quick on the heels of our protest outside the Corrections Corporation of America stockholder meeting, a study emerged last week from Temple University that outlines the fiscal benefits of privatizing prisons.  The researchers concluded that privatization could save the state of Arizona between 14% and 22% without sacrificing quality -- the exact opposite findings of a study by the Tucson Citizen, which found that the price to incarerate someone had increased 13.9% since the contracts began.  Even data from the Arizona Department of Corrections revealed that for-profit prisons cost the state an extra $10 million a year.  We certainly weren’t surprised to find out that the study was funded by "members of the private prison industry." Prison Legal News issued a press release on May 22 which cites numerous other studies CCA has funded to promote its "benefits."

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