ACLU Takes Aim at ID's Private Prison
Stephen Pevar has sued a lot of prisons in his day. A senior attorney for the ACLU, over the course of his career, he's sued at least 100 jails and prisons. Still though, he says that none of them came even close to the level of violence he's seen at the Idaho Correctional Center.
To say that the center -- sited at the demurely named S. Pleasant Valley Rd -- has gotten something of a bad rap is an understatement. Run by the Nashville-based Corrections Corp. of America (CCA), it's so bad, says the ACLU, that inmates have started calling the place "gladiator school." The center is home to more violence than the rest of Idaho's eight prisons combined -- and what's more, the civil-liberties group says, it's an intentional part of the prison's management culture.
Within the prison -- a prison built and run by taxpayer money -- the ACLU says officials have deliberately crafted a system of "degradation, humiliation, and subjugation" to keep prisoners in check. The ACLU's official complaint cites a situation in which guards effectively play a kind of cruel musical chairs with prisoners as a punitive exercise. The ACLU purports that some, for example, "deliberately arranged assaults" against certain prisoners, while others "refused to remove" prisoners from clearly dangerous environments. According to the ACLU, literally hundreds of assaults have occurred at ICC in just the last four years, including one situation this January that resulted in evidently permanent brain damage to a prisoner.
Prisoners have repeatedly complained, but ICC staff report that frequently, they saw prisoners' complaint forms literally thrown out in the trash.
Even for a corporation that's been forced to settle class-action lawsuits for its failure to pay its employees (to the tune of $7 million) and previously been caught abusing its prisoners as well, this is scraping new lows. Still, though, myth-busters like the ACLU out to dismantle the idea that private prisons can provide quality services on the cheap have a long way to go. Over the past year, its stock has vaulted 85%, and since the start of 2009, CCA's received at least four new federal contracts.
We'll keep an eye on the case, and you can also follow progress on the ACLU's efforts here.
Photo Credit: Tim Pierce, Los Gatos
Te-Ping Chen
Te-Ping Chen is a freelance writer and U.S. Truman Scholar whose writing has appeared in the Nation Magazine, the South China Morning Post magazine, Le Soir, and Slate.com.
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