NEWSPRIVATE PRISON

A few months ago a group of earnest and determined stockholders traveled together by bus from Washington, D.C., to Nashville, Tennessee, to attend a shareholders’ meeting for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company in the country. The group included ex-offenders who now each hold one share of stock in the same prison company that once held them captive, and they attended the meeting in the hopes of sharing their perspective on how the privatized prison industry can better serve society by rehabilitating inmates, rather than just serving its own profits by perpetuating the prison cycle.

The group, part of Washington, D.C.’s Church of the Saviour, is named Strength to Love, after the title of one of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sermon collections. Members explain their mission this way:

“The privatized, for-profit prison industry is particularly plagued by a conflict of interest at its core: On the one hand, the industry is responsible to its shareholders to make money, and its income is determined by how many beds are filled. On the other hand, its civil responsibility to the inmates and to the whole of society is to help incarcerated people become their intended selves, and to prepare them to succeed upon release. It is well established that services and programs like job training and education serve to lower the occurrence of re-offense. But it is better for the company’s bottom line to minimize staff and services, let the inmates succeed or fail on their own terms, and reap the financial benefits of strict sentencing laws and high rates of recidivism. It is this experience of exploitation, frequently referred to as a modern day form of slavery, that many members of Strength to Love have personally experienced, and which we have been called to dismantle.”

The United States and Australia have a lot in common: Both are predominantly English-speaking countries. Both are former British colonies, settled by Anglo-Saxons who more or less wiped out the indigenous peoples whose land they stole. They even invaded Iraq together. Good times.

And just like in the U.S., there's a vocal segment of the population in Australia that believes that, its rape and pillaging by European settlers now complete, there is no longer room enough for anyone else -- sorry folks, country's full. That we-got-ours sentiment helps explain, in part, the Australian government's policy of indefinitely detaining anyone who enters the country without a visa, whether they did so in search of better economic opportunities or to flee tyranny and repression.

Now some of those who left home searching for a better life only to end up wasting away, forgotten, in one of Australia's privately run detention centers are drawing attention to their plight with non-violent activism -- and they're making headlines.

Last week, roughly 250 asylum seekers imprisoned on Christmas Island, a remote territory that's actually closer to Indonesia than mainland Australia, began a hunger strike after they learned that one Iraqi man, Ahmad Al Akabi, was the latest detainee to commit suicide after being held for a year away from his family, his asylum application twice denied.

The ACLU and Southern Poverty Law Center filed a class action lawsuit in federal court this week alleging that GEO Group, the nation's second-largest private prison operator, was subjecting young prisoners to "barbaric, unconstitutional conditions" at a Mississippi facility.

The lawsuit presents a laundry list of abuse at the 1,400-bed Walnut Grove Correctional Facility in north Mississippi. And it goes straight after GEO for allowing assaults and denying medical care and education while racking up healthy profits at the prison. The facility was built with $41 million in taxpayer dollars, while GEO has now earned more than $100 million in profit from its management, the suit estimates. The 1,400 boys and young men held there were all sentenced as adults, but two-thirds of them were convicted of non-violent crimes.

When Stacia Hylton retired from the Department of Justice (DOJ) earlier this year, she did what a lot of former federal officials do: she became a consultant, raking in more than $112,000 from her sole client, GEO Group, the second large private prison company in America. Now President Obama wants her to head up the U.S. Marshals where -- guess what? -- she’ll be in a position to oversee the very private prison industry that helped her remodel her kitchen with that inflated consulting fee.

Hylton’s nomination has sparked an outcry from a number of groups, including Public Citizen and the National Lawyers Guild, which allege her close relationship with private prison companies -- the CEO of the largest firm, Corrections Corporation of America, even attended her retirement party -- constitute a clear conflict of interest, pointing out she began forming her consultancy even before leaving DOJ.

As DOJ’s Federal Detention Trustee, Hylton also oversaw the awarding of contracts valued at up to $88 million to GEO Group, her once-and-perhaps-future employer. She also opposed a measure that would have limited the profits private prison firms can make from imprisoning Americans.

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Hylton argued the outcry was much-ado about nothing.

As the Department of Justice (DOJ) employee tasked with overseeing the federal government's detention operations, Stacia Hylton awarded exclusive contracts worth tens of millions of dollars to private prison companies that profit from incarcerating Americans.

Now, even after it was revealed she made more than $112,000 this year as a consultant to one of those very for-profit prison companies, President Obama has nominated her to to one of the country's top law enforcement positions: head of the U.S. Marshals.

Understandably, human rights activists and advocates for the nation's 2.3 million prisoners aren't pleased.

"This is a prime example of the revolving door between the public and for-profit private sectors," says Alex Friedmann, associate editor of Prison Legal News, one of more than a half-dozen organizations calling on Obama to withdraw the nomination.

A news release from the coalition opposing her nomination notes that Hylton, during her nearly six years as DOJ's Federal Detention Trustee, awarded contracts worth up to $88 million to GEO Group, the second largest operator of for-profit prisons (the largest is Corrections Corporation of America, which helped pass Arizona's immigration law and whose president personally attended Hylton's retirement party earlier this year). And while in that role, Hylton specifically objected to a recommendation from DOJ's Office of Inspector General that called for limiting "the amount of profit a state or local jail can earn for housing federal prisoners." Perhaps she had a future private sector career in mind.

Bigotry. Xenophobia. Demagoguery. All help explain the origins of Arizona's draconian immigration law, which allows law enforcement in the state to harass and lock up anyone they suspect may be in the country illegally. But an investigation by NPR reveals what just might be the true driving force behind Arizona's authoritarianism: greed.

After months of reviewing campaign finance documents and corporate lobbying records, NPR discovered that while Arizona Senate Bill 1070 may have been signed into law in Phoenix, its roots actually trace back to a meeting in Washington, DC, between the right-wing drafter of the law and the private prison company that stands to reap the benefits.

“It was last December at the Grand Hyatt,” NPR reports. “Inside, there was a meeting of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council,” or ALEC, whose members include both the chief sponsor of SB 1070, state Sen. Russell Pearce, and the private prison firm that stands to gain the most from such laws: Corrections Corporation of America. And it was at that meeting that Pearce presented his plan.

"I did a presentation," Pearce told NPR. "I went through the facts. I went through the impacts and they said, 'Yeah.'"

The 50 or so members of ALEC in attendance -- ExxonMobil is a member, as is the National Rifle Association -- including at least two from the private prison firm soon endorsed Pearce’s draft bill as a model for the country; since Arizona passed the measure, similar proposals have been offered across the country, including in states such as Florida and Maryland.

“There were no 'no' votes," Pearce said. "I never had one person speak up in objection to this model legislation."

And for good reason: tough anti-immigrant legislation is seen as a potentially huge moneymaker for those who profit from depriving people of their liberty.

Have you ever seen the inside of a prison?

Over at the Atlantic, Sara Mayeux offers some important advice to those of us who advocate for criminal justice reform — and especially to those who've rarely thought about the system. She urges us to step inside and learn more.

Visit the prison cells, police stations and courtrooms where the wheels of justice grind every day, she says. You'll get a new understanding of the ways this system works — and the ways it doesn't.

Her post provides a fresh reminder of the fact that the criminal justice system isn't an idea — it's a sprawling human system, and it's ours. We pay the salaries of police, public defenders and prosecutors. We pay to build prisons and we pay our representatives to make laws. We should know what's being done in our name.

Mayeux offers some great suggestions on how to get involved: Go on a police ride-along. Sit through a day in court. Both are valuable experiences, and the latter, at least, is available to you anytime you feel like dropping by your local county seat on a weekday (or even during the night in many big cities).

She's onto something. Citizen engagement in the system shouldn't be limited to jury duty. Prisons are invisible only because we allow them to be that way. Accordingly, allow me to offer three more suggestions on ways you can get a firsthand look inside the system:

Private prisons have thrived in the United States on the assumption that they save tax dollars by operating more efficiently. But that isn't necessarily true — and fortunately at this point, states are starting to question whether we should outsource incarceration at all.

Take Kentucky, for example. Currently, Kentucky has the country's fastest-growing prison population, and the state is considering using private facilities to handle the thirst for more cells. The state's Chamber of Commerce claims private prisons save the state $2,500 per prisoner, but Kentucky's Legislative Research Commission recently issued a report challenging these numbers, saying the original projection compared different prisoner populations and wasn't accurate. The legislative report also noted that prisoner grievances were twice as high in the state's three private facilities as they were in state-run prisons.

For years, studies have grappled over whether private prisons are more cost-effective — with unconvincing results. A meta-study conducted in five states by the U.S. Government Accounting Office in 1996, for example, found that “studies reported little difference and/or mixed results in comparing private and public facilities.”

Earlier this year, the tiny town of Baldwin, Michigan, eagerly awaited the opening of a new private prison, which locals hoped would deliver badly needed jobs. But this March, it was announced that the federal government was pulling the funding it had promised to the project.

That left the private owner, the GEO Group, holding the buck — in this case, a 1,755-bed prison in the middle of nowhere. The company now reports that it's currently in the process of marketing their expanded facility to “federal, state, and local detention and correctional agencies around the country.”

And as Newsweek reports, in the midst of recession, stories of private prisons like these getting shuttered are hardly unusual.

In Colorado, for example, the Huerfano County Correctional Facility now sits vacant, collecting dust. Before closing, the prison was the second-largest employer in Walsenburg, the town where it was sited. And in Oklahoma, the Diamondback Correctional Facility has been temporarily closed down, leaving 300 hundred people jobless.

One of the country's most notorious prison mercenaries just got bigger. GEO Group — already the nation's second-biggest private prison company — has announced that it plans to buy another private prison group, the Cornell Companies. Sound like good news to you?

The deal's valued at $685 million and is already raising eyebrows, with observers wondering whether the Cornell board failed to get the best price it could, and whether rating agencies will downgrade GEO for the additional debt it had to take on to complete the deal.

Why would GEO take on more debt to make the sale? The answer has grim implications for all of us. GEO wants to own an even more aggressive stake in the booming incarceration business because the company sees the potential to lock up thousands more in the years ahead. GEO can feel confident about the matter because it's hardly a passive actor. The company, for example, is lining Republican pockets in Congress and some states to keep the nation's prisons packed through tough sentencing and immigrations laws.

The company also thinks it can continue to drive down costs as it grows.

But for the rest of us, this deal means that the pool of private prison operators just got a lot smaller, and the keys to hundreds of thousands of cells in this country are now sitting in even fewer hands. Right now, 9% of federal and state prisoners are in private facilities, but a shocking 50% of new prisoners in many states are locked into the revenue stream of companies like GEO and its competitor, the Correction Corporation of America.