The Prison-Industrial Complex
Part Two
The Atlantic Monthly
December 1998; Volume 282, No. 6; pages 51 - 77.
While many families in the north await the return of sons and daughters slowly
earning seniority downstate, families in New York City must endure the absence
of loved ones who seem to have been not just imprisoned for their crimes but
exiled as well. Every Friday night about 800 people, mostly women and children,
almost all of them African-American or Latino, gather at Columbus Circle, in
Manhattan, and board buses for the north. The buses leave through the night and
arrive in time for visiting hours on Saturday. Operation Prison Gap, which runs
the service, was founded by an ex-convict named Ray Simmons who had been
imprisoned upstate and knew how hard it was for the families of inmates to
arrange visits. When the company started, in 1973, it carried passengers in a
single van. Now it charters thirty-five buses and vans on a typical weekend and
a larger number on special occasions, such as Father's Day and Thanksgiving.
Ray Simmons's brother Tyrone, who heads the company, says that despite the
rising inmate population, ridership has fallen a bit over the past few years.
The inconvenience and expense of the long bus trips take their toll. One
customer, however, has for fifteen years faithfully visited her son in Comstock
every weekend. In 1996 she stopped appearing at Columbus Circle; her son had
been released. Six months later he was convicted of another violent crime and
sent back to the same prison. The woman, now in her seventies, still boards the
2:00 A.M. bus for Comstock every weekend. Simmons gives her a discount,
charging her $15 -- the same price she paid on her first trip, in 1983.
The Bare Hill Correctional Facility sits near the town of Malone, fifteen miles
south of the Canadian border. The Franklin Correctional Facility is a quarter
of a mile down the road, and the future site of a new maximum-security prison
is next door. Bare Hill is one of the "cookie cutter" medium-security prisons
that were built during the Cuomo administration. The state has built fourteen
other prisons exactly like it -- a form of penal mass production that saves a
good deal of money. Most of the inmates at Bare Hill are housed in dormitories,
not cells. The dormitories were designed to hold about fifty inmates, each with
his own small cubicle and bunk. In 1990, two years after the prison opened,
double-bunking was introduced as a "temporary" measure to ease the overcrowding
in county jails, which were holding an overflow of state inmates. Eight years
later every dormitory at Bare Hill houses sixty inmates, a third of them
double-bunked. About 90 percent of the inmates come from New York City or one
of its suburbs, eight hours away; about 80 percent are African-American or
Latino. The low walls of the cubicles, which allow little privacy, are covered
with family photographs, pinups, religious postcards. Twenty-four hours a day a
correctional officer sits alone at a desk on a platform that overlooks the
dorm.
The superintendent of Bare Hill, Peter J. Lacy, is genial and gray-haired, tall
and dignified in his striped tie, flannels, and blue blazer. His office feels
light and cheery. Lacy began his career, in 1955, as a correctional officer at
Dannemora; he wore a uniform for twenty-five years, and in the 1980s headed a
special unit that handled prison emergencies and riots. He later served as an
assistant commissioner of the New York Department of Corrections. One of his
sons is now a lieutenant at a downstate prison. As Superintendent Lacy walks
through the prison grounds, he seems like a captain surveying his ship, rightly
proud of its upkeep, familiar with every detail. The lawns are neatly trimmed,
the buildings are well maintained, and the red-brick dorms would not seem out
of place on a college campus, except for the bars in the windows. There is
nothing oppressive about the physical appearance of Bare Hill, about the ball
fields with pine trees in the background, about the brightly colored murals and
rustic stencils on the walls, about the classrooms where instructors teach
inmates how to read, how to write, how to draw a blueprint, how to lay bricks,
how to obtain a Social Security card, how to deal with their anger. For many
inmates Bare Hill is the neatest, cleanest, most well-ordered place they will
ever live. As Lacy passes a group of inmates leaving their dorms for class, the
inmates nod their heads in acknowledgment, and a few of them say, "Hello, sir."
And every so often a young inmate gives Lacy a look filled with a hatred so
pure and so palpable that it would burn Bare Hill to the ground, if only it
could.
Big Business
The black-and-white photograph shows an inmate leaning out of a prison cell,
scowling at the camera, his face partially hidden in the shadows. "HOW HE GOT
IN IS YOUR BUSINESS," the ad copy begins. "HOW HE GETS OUT IS OURS." The photo
is on the cover of a glossy brochure promoting AT&T's prison telephone
service, which is called The Authority. BellSouth has a similar service, called
MAX, advertised with a photo of a heavy steel chain dangling from a telephone
receiver in place of a cord. The ad promises "long distance service that lets
inmates go only so far." Although the phone companies rely on clever copy in
their ads, providing telephone service to prisons and jails has become a
serious, highly profitable business. The nearly two million inmates in the
United States are ideal customers: phone calls are one of their few links to
the outside world; most of their calls must be made collect; and they are in no
position to switch long-distance carriers. A pay phone at a prison can generate
as much as $15,000 a year -- about five times the revenue of a typical pay phone
on the street. It is estimated that inmate calls generate a billion dollars or
more in revenues each year. The business has become so lucrative that MCI
installed its inmate phone service, Maximum Security, throughout the California
prison system at no charge. As part of the deal it also offered the California
Department of Corrections a 32 percent share of all the revenues from inmates'
phone calls. MCI Maximum Security adds a $3.00 surcharge to every call. When
free enterprise intersects with a captive market, abuses are bound to occur.
MCI Maximum Security and North American Intelecom have both been caught
overcharging for calls made by inmates; in one state MCI was adding an
additional minute to every call.
Since 1980 spending on corrections at the local, state, and federal levels has
increased about fivefold. What was once a niche business for a handful of
companies has become a multibillion-dollar industry with its own trade shows
and conventions, its own Web sites, mail-order catalogues, and direct-marketing
campaigns. The prison-industrial complex now includes some of the nation's
largest architecture and construction firms, Wall Street investment banks that
handle prison bond issues and invest in private prisons, plumbing-supply
companies, food-service companies, health-care companies, companies that sell
everything from bullet-resistant security cameras to padded cells available in
a "vast color selection." A directory called the Corrections Yellow Pages lists
more than a thousand vendors. Among the items now being advertised for sale: a
"violent prisoner chair," a sadomasochist's fantasy of belts and shackles
attached to a metal frame, with special accessories for juveniles; B.O.S.S., a
"body-orifice security scanner," essentially a metal detector that an inmate
must sit on; and a diverse line of razor wire, with trade names such as Maze,
Supermaze, Detainer Hook Barb, and Silent Swordsman Barbed Tape.
As the prison industry has grown, it has assumed many of the attributes long
associated with the defense industry. The line between the public interest and
private interests has blurred. In much the same way that retired admirals and
generals have long found employment with defense contractors, correctional
officials are now leaving the public sector for jobs with firms that supply the
prison industry. These career opportunities did not exist a generation ago.
Fundamental choices about public safety, employee training, and the denial of
personal freedoms are increasingly being made with an eye to the bottom line.
One clear sign that corrections has become a big business as well as a form of
government service is the emergence of a trade newspaper devoted to the latest
trends in the prison and jail marketplace. Correctional Building News
has become the Variety of the prison world, widely read by
correctional officials, investors, and companies with something to sell. Eli
Gage, its publisher, founded the paper in 1994, after searching for a
high-growth industry not yet served by its own trade journal. Gage is neither a
cheerleader for the industry nor an outspoken critic. He believes that despite
recent declines in violent crime, national spending on corrections will
continue to grow at an annual rate of five to 10 percent. The number of young
people in the prime demographic for committing crimes, ages fifteen to
twenty-four, is about to increase; and the demand for new juvenile-detention
centers is already rising. Correctional Building News runs ads by the
leading companies that build prisons (Turner Construction, CRSS, Brown &
Root) and the leading firms that design them (DMJM, the DLR Group, and KMD
Architects). It features a product of the month, a facility of the month, and a
section titled "People in the News." An advertisement in a recent issue
promoted electrified fences with the line "Don't Touch!"
Private-prison companies are the most obvious, the most controversial,
and the fastest-growing segment of the prison-industrial complex. The idea of
private prisons was greeted with enthusiasm during the Reagan and Bush
Administrations; it fit perfectly with a belief in small government and the
privatization of public services. The Clinton Administration, however, has done
far more than its Republican predecessors to legitimize private prisons. It has
encouraged the Justice Department to place illegal aliens and minimum-security
inmates in private correctional facilities, as part of a drive to reduce the
federal work force. The rationale for private prisons is that government
monopolies such as old-fashioned departments of corrections are inherently
wasteful and inefficient, and the private sector, through competition for
contracts, can provide much better service at a much lower cost. The
privatization of prisons is often described as a "win-win" outcome. A
private-prison company generally operates a facility for a government agency,
or builds and operates its own facility. The nation's private prisons accepted
their first inmates in the mid-1980s. Today at least twenty-seven states make
use of private prisons, and approximately 90,000 inmates are being held in
prisons run for profit.
The living conditions in many of the nation's private prisons are
unquestionably superior to conditions in many state-run facilities. At least
forty-five state prison systems are now operating at or above their intended
capacity. In twenty-two states prisons are operating under court-ordered
population caps. In fifteen states prison conditions are being monitored by the
courts. Life in the aging, overcrowded prisons operated by many state agencies
is dangerous and degrading. Most of the 34,000 state inmates currently being
held in the nation's jails for lack of available prison cells live in
conditions that are even worse. Private prisons tend to be brand-new, rarely
overcrowded, and less likely to house violent offenders. Moreover, some private
prisons offer programs, such as drug treatment and vocational training, that a
number of state systems have cut back. And yet something inherent in the idea
of private prisons seems to invite abuse.
The economics of the private-prison industry are in many respects similar to
those of the lodging industry. An inmate at a private prison is like a guest at
a hotel -- a guest whose bill is being paid and whose check-out date is set by
someone else. A hotel has a strong economic incentive to book every available
room and encourage every guest to stay as long as possible. A private prison
has exactly the same incentive. The labor costs constitute the bulk of
operating costs for both kinds of accommodation. The higher the occupancy rate,
the higher the profit margin. Although it might seem unlikely that a private
prison would ever try to keep an inmate longer than was necessary for justice
to be served, New York State's experience with the "fee system" during the
nineteenth century suggests that the temptation to do so is hard to resist.
Under the fee system local sheriffs charged inmates for their stay in jail. A
1902 report by the Correctional Association of New York harshly criticized this
system, warning that judges might be inclined to "sentence a man to jail where
he may be a source of revenue to a friendly sheriff." Whenever the fee system
was abolished in a New York county, the inmate population dropped -- by as much
as half. Last year a Prudential Securities report on private prisons described
some of the potential risks for the industry: a falling crime rate, shorter
prison sentences, a move toward alternative sentences, and changes in the
nation's drug laws. Nonetheless, the report concluded that "the industry
appears to have excellent prospects."
Private-prison companies can often build prisons faster and at lower cost than
state agencies, owing to fewer bureaucratic delays and less red tape. And new
prisons tend to be much less expensive to operate than the old prisons still
used in many states. But most of the savings that private-prison companies
offer are derived from the use of nonunion workers. Labor represents 60 to 80
percent of the operating costs at a prison. Although private-prison companies
are now moving into northern states and even signing agreements with some labor
unions, the overwhelming majority of private-prison cells are in southern and
southwestern states hostile to unions. Correctional officers in these private
prisons usually earn lower wages than officers employed by state governments,
while receiving fewer benefits and no pension. Some private-prison companies
offer their uniformed staff stock options as a retirement plan; the long-term
value of the stock is uncertain. The sort of cost-cutting imposed on
correctional officers does not extend to managers and administrators. They
usually earn much more than their counterparts in the public sector -- a fact
that greatly increases the potential for conflicts of interest and official
corruption.
Bed Brokers and Man-days
Last year a videotape of beatings at a private correctional facility in Texas
provoked a great deal of controversy. The tape showed correctional officers at
the Brazoria County Detention Center kicking inmates who were lying on the
floor, shooting inmates with a stun gun, and ordering a police dog to attack
them. The inmates had been convicted of crimes in Missouri, but were occupying
rented cells in rural Texas. One of the correctional officers in the video had
previously lost his job at a Texas state prison and served time on federal
charges for beating an inmate. The Brazoria County videotape received
nationwide publicity and prompted Missouri to cancel its contract with Capital
Correctional Resources, the private company operating the facility. But the
beatings were unusual only because they were captured on tape. Incidents far
more violent and surreal have become almost commonplace in the private prisons
of Texas.
The private-prison system in Texas arose in response to the violence and
disarray of the state system. In 1980 conditions in Texas state prisons were so
bad that the federal judge William Wayne Justice ruled that they amounted to
"cruel and unusual punishment." He appointed a special overseer for the prison
system and ordered the state to provide at least forty square feet of living
space for each inmate. By the mid-1980s, however, conditions had grown even
worse: Texas prisons were more overcrowded; gang wars between inmates resulted
in dozens of murders; and local jails were so crammed with the overflow of
state inmates that a number of counties later sued the state for relief. In
1986 Judge Justice threatened the state with a fine of $800,000 a day unless it
came up with a plan to ease the overcrowding in its prisons. While the Texas
legislature scrambled to add new prison beds to the system, entrepreneurs
sensed that profits could be made from housing state inmates in private
facilities. Developers cut deals with sheriffs in impoverished rural counties,
providing the capital to build brand-new jails, offering to run them, and
promising to share the profits. Privately run correctional facilities sprang up
throughout rural Texas, much the way oil rigs were once raised by wildcatters.
The founders of one large private-prison developer, N-Group Securities, had
previously sold condominiums and run a Houston disco. One critic quoted by the
Houston Chronicle called the speculative new enterprises "Joe's Bar and
Grill and Prisons."
The private-prison building spree in Texas -- backed by investors such as
Allstate, Merrill Lynch, Shearson Lehman, and American Express -- soon faced an
unanticipated problem. The State of Texas, under the auspices of a liberal
Democratic governor, Ann Richards, began to carry out an ambitious
prison-construction plan of its own in 1991, employing inmate labor and adding
almost 100,000 new beds in just a few years. In effect the state flooded the
market. Private firms turned to "bed brokers" for help, hoping to recruit
prisoners from out of state. By the mid-1990s thousands of inmates from across
the United States were being transported from overcrowded prison systems to
"rent-a-cell" facilities in small Texas towns. The distances involved in this
huge migration at times made it reminiscent of the eighteenth-century transport
schemes that shipped British convicts and debtors to Australia. In 1996 the
Newton County Correctional Center, in Newton, Texas, operated by a company
called the Bobby Ross Group, became the State of Hawaii's third largest
prison.
The private-prison industry usually charges its customers a daily rate for each
inmate; the success or failure of a private prison is determined by the number
of "man-days" it can generate. In a typical rent-a-cell arrangement a state
with a surplus of inmates will contact a well-established bed broker, such as
Dominion Management, of Edmond, Oklahoma. The broker will search for a facility
with empty beds at the right price. The cost per man-day can range from $25 to
$60, depending on the kind of facility and its level of occupancy. The more
crowded a private prison becomes, the less it charges for each additional
inmate. Facilities with individual cells are more expensive than those with
dormitories. Bed brokers earn a commission of $2.50 to $5.50 per man-day,
depending on how tight the market for prison cells is at the time. The
county -- which does not operate the prison but simply gives it legal
status -- sometimes gets a fee of as much as $1.50 a night for each prisoner.
When every bed is filled, the private-prison company, the bed broker, and the
county can do quite well.
The interstate commerce in prisoners, like many new industries, developed
without much government regulation. In 1996 the State of Texas encountered a
number of unexpected legal problems. Its private prisons were housing roughly
5,000 inmates from fourteen states. In August of that year two Oregon sex
offenders escaped from a Houston facility operated by the Corrections
Corporation of America. The facility normally held illegal aliens, under
contract to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Faced with empty beds,
CCA had imported 240 sex offenders from Oregon. Texas officials had no idea
that violent offenders from another state were being housed in this
minimum-security facility. The escaped prisoners were eventually
recaptured -- but they could not be prosecuted for escaping, because running away
from a private prison was not a violation of any Texas state law. The following
month a riot erupted at the Frio Detention Center, a private facility operated
by the Dove Development Corporation, which housed about 300 inmates from Utah
and Missouri. The Texas Department of Criminal Justice had to send thirty of
its officers in riot gear to regain control of the prison. A month later two
Utah prisoners, one of them a convicted murderer, escaped from the same
facility. A manhunt by state authorities failed to recapture them. Six other
Utah inmates had previously escaped from facilities run by Dove Development;
three were murderers. Last year the Texas legislature passed a bill that made
it illegal for an offender from any state to escape from a private prison and
that held the owners of such facilities responsible for any public expense
stemming from riots or escapes. Few other states have even attempted to pass
legislation dealing with these issues.
The private companies that now transport thousands of inmates across the United
States every day face even less government oversight than private-prison
companies. Indeed, federal regulations concerning the interstate shipment of
cattle are much stricter than those concerning the interstate shipment of
prisoners. Sheriff's deputies and U.S. marshals have traditionally been used to
pick up inmates in one state and deliver them to another. During the late 1980s
private companies began to offer the same service for about half the cost. The
firms saved money by employing nonunion guards and making multiple pickups and
deliveries on each trip. Prisoners today may spend as long as a month on the
road, visiting dozens of states, sitting for days in the backs of old station
wagons and vans, locked up alongside defendants awaiting trial and offenders on
their way to prison. Driving one of these transport vehicles is a dangerous
job, one that combines the stresses encountered by correctional officers with
those of long-distance truckers. Moreover, prisoners tend to view their days in
transit as an excellent time to attempt an escape. The turnover rate among the
transport guards and drivers is high; the pay is relatively low; and training
for the job rarely lasts more than a week. As a result, violent criminals are
frequently shipped from state to state in the custody of people who are ill
equipped to deal with them. Local authorities often don't learn that inmates
are passing through their towns until something goes wrong.
In August of 1996 Rick Carter and Sue Smith, the husband-and-wife operators of
R and S Prisoner Transport, were taking five murderers and a rapist from Iowa
to New Mexico. At a public rest stop in the Texas Panhandle one of the convicts
assaulted Carter on the way to the men's room. The others overpowered his wife
and seized the van. Carter and Smith, who had set off unarmed, were taken
hostage. A passing motorist dialed 911, and the six inmates were recaptured by
Texas police officers after a chase. On July 30 of last year Dennis Patrick
Glick -- a convicted rapist, sentenced to two life terms, who was being
transported from Utah to Arkansas -- commandeered a van owned by the Federal
Extradition Agency, a private company. One of the guards had fallen asleep, and
Glick borrowed his gun. Glick took the guard and seven other inmates hostage in
Ordway, Colorado; abandoned the van; took a local rancher hostage; stole two
more vehicles and a horse; eluded sixty law-enforcement officers through the
night; and was captured the next morning on horseback. In December of last year
Homer D. Land, a prisoner being transported from Kansas to Florida, escaped
from a van operated by TransCor America. The van had stopped at a Burger King
in Owatonna, Minnesota. While one guard went inside and bought eleven
hamburgers, the other guard (who had been a TransCor America employee for less
than a month) opened the van's back doors for ventilation, enabling Land and
two other inmates to get away. Land took a married couple hostage and spent the
night at their house in Owatonna before being recaptured in Chicago. The same
TransCor America van had been commandeered four days earlier by Whatley
Roylene, a prisoner traveling from New Mexico to Massachusetts and facing
charges of murder and armed robbery. At a gas station in Sterling, Colorado,
Roylene grabbed a shotgun from a sleeping guard. Officers from the Colorado
state police and the local sheriff's department surrounded the van; the
standoff ended, according to a local official, when other prisoners persuaded
Roylene to hand over the gun.
Eric Schlosser is a correspondent of The
Atlantic. His article "A Grief Like No Other," about the families of murder
victims, was The Atlantic's cover story for September, 1997.