The Recession is Closing Private Prisons

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.

Maybe most surprisingly, Newsweek is reporting that two California prisons, operated by Cornell Companies, are expected “to remain empty through 2010;” and that the Correction Corporation of America had 11,600 unoccupied beds in their facilities in early May.

As Matt reported a few days ago, overall, such closures are a positive development. It might not be obvious, but there are economic benefits to closing rural prisons. After all, prison construction is neither an ethical nor reliable jobs plan for small towns, and private prison closures are something we should applaud.

But what are the implications of such U.S. closures? Currently, in order to make up for the revenue loss from closed U.S. facilities, private prison companies are casting a wider net — branching out, offering new services, and even building prison overseas. GEO has opened facilities in Australia and the United Kingdom, and they are thinking about moving into New Zealand and South Africa as well. Meanwhile, Cornell Companies has moved into halfway houses, juvenile prisons, rehab and job placement and reentry.

In the case of Cornell Companies, there's something so deeply cynical about its transformation — a company willing to make millions by locking people up one day is now cashing in to provide reentry services the next. It sends a little chill up my spine.

Photo Credit: me and the sysop