Private Prisons Keep On Growin'

by Matt Kelley · 2009-09-01 17:46:00 UTC
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The GEO Group, America’s second-largest private prison operator, announced yesterday that it had acquired a smaller prison operator, Just Care Inc., and raised its expected profits for the year ahead. It’s good to see that at least somebody likes the way our criminal justice is going. GEO incarcerates 60,000 people around the world, and it's showing no signs of slowing.

And GEO’s not the only one expanding as quickly as possible to profit off our crowded prisons. An analyst at Seeking Alpha recently looked at the stock of Corrections Corporation of America (the biggest in the U.S.), and found the company growing like gangbusters and its financial outlook extremely strong, writing (apparently with a straight face) that CCA is “uniquely positioned to offer governments an efficient incarceration solution.” I was glad to see some commentors on the site let the author have it. The comments come from both sides, however, and they’re worth a read for a glimpse at how both sides (at an investment website) view the morality of private prisons.

In other CCA news this week, author and think-tanker Eric Lotke discussed his 1999 battle against the company in an interview with Joan Brunwasser at OpEd News. Lotke was the director of the DC Prisoners Legal Services Project when the organization sued CCA for the treatment of prisoners who had been outsourced from DC to a private facility in Youngstown, Ohio. He said his fight (and win) against CCA inspired him to write his first novel, "2044," a sci-fi thriller that came out this summer. He said of the lawsuit:

Problems started with small things, like food service. When the guys started to fuss and holler - even though they were locked in their cells - the corrections staff fired tear gas at them. But the tear gas was only safe for outdoor use. These people were confined in small interior quarters. They stayed gassed in their cells until their skin started to melt.

That's not supposed to happen. That's not consistent with the private corrections marketing myth of a better product at a better cost.

Photo: GEO’s Reeves County Detention Complex in Texas, the largest privately run prison in the world.

Matt Kelley is the Online Communications Manager at the Innocence Project and a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. Follow him on Twitter @mattjkelley.
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