Left Field

by Patricia Nell Warren

As the Presidential election looms ahead, there’s a hair-raising question that neither candidate talks about. Do private corporations have any business running prisons, traditionally the government’s job? In recent years AIDS activists confronted state and federal penal authorities about treatment, condoms, etc. But the 142 private prisons dotting the U.S. have little sense of accountability on AIDS, and operate behind a veil of corporate secrecy.

Latest figures from the Bureau of Prisons should make our skin crawl. Last year for the first time, the U.S. slammed more than two million people behind bars—up from 744,208 in 1985. Nearly forty percent were convicted of nonviolent/victimless crimes. Nearly seventy percent are people of color. An age-group bulge in one-to-ten-year sentences means that these inmates will soon return to families and loved ones—taking with them any undiagnosed contagious disease that they got behind bars.

Private-prison stats are even more troubling. By mid-2003, commercially owned prisons accounted for 90,700 inmates, up from 76,010 in 2000. Today this population has surely topped 100,000. Though it’s only five percent of the total behind bars, it’s the fastest-growing sector of the penal world. Why? Because it includes around 25,000 immigrants, refugees, and undocumented detainees in INS camps that are privately run.

Yet the Bureau of Justice says that violent U.S. crime is down. So…um, why do we need more prisons? Well, several reasons. The prison industry needs growth potential, so its lobby group is working legislators big-time to get what it wants. Legislators are obliging them by creating more new “crimes” (mostly of the nonviolent/victimless variety) with more severe sentencing. After 9/11, stock prices of correctional corporations went through the roof—investors were hoping for a boom in terrorist-related prison building.

A private prison or jail is punishment’s answer to Wal-Mart—it can pop up overnight, often in a rural county where land prices and the tax base are attractive. Quick-built of pre-fab cell units, it provides services to federal, state or local governments on a contractor basis. Owner: one of several U.S.-based corporations. The biggest is Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Others include Cornell Corrections, Management and Training Corp., and GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Correctional Corporation).

“Prisons for profit” promised to be an idea whose time had come. They would warehouse our low-risk inmates (nonviolent, youth, women, elderly, immigrants, mentally ill, etc.) in minimum-security facilities at a lower cost to taxpayers. Ranging from California’s federal Taft Prison to scads of youth “boot camps,” they were to be more efficient and safer than public prisons. They would create new jobs in local communities.

But the promise seldom materialized. There is little Congressional oversight, little state monitoring or auditing. There’s little media or activist scrutiny of what happens behind those walls. When Human Rights Watch contacted Wackenhut’s East Mississippi Correctional Facility asking for information, Wackenhut refused to respond. By 2000 private prisons were neck-deep in cost overruns. CCA had over-expanded, with a huge prison sitting empty and an epic bankruptcy looming. So the Federal Bureau of Prisons gave CCA a yummy bailout that guaranteed $720 million over ten years—not much less than the proposed bailout for United Airlines ($1.6 billion).

With so little oversight, and with corporations doing the Wal-Mart thing of hiring low-cost, non-union, often inexperienced staff, the potential for human-rights violations is explosive. Several Web sites, including South Texas Opposes Private Prisons (STOPP), maintain archives of news stories that document recent court cases and investigations. They detail staff brutality, sexual abuse of minors and women, suspicious inmate deaths, poor security, riots, escapes, and more. During a riot at the CCA-run Crowley County prison in Colorado, the angry inmates almost burned the place to the ground. Some abuses were so bad that Amnesty International wrote them up. With this record, it’s not surprising that correctional corporations—and smaller firms that vend medical services to prisons—have been spotlighted in healthcare scandals.

U.S. inmates supposedly have a constitutional right to healthcare. In 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court held that “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs of prisoners” is a violation of the Eighth Amendment on cruel and unusual punishment. Thomas O’Connor of the Department of Justice Studies at North Carolina Wesleyan College adds: “Most lawsuits by prisoners against the prison have to do with substandard medical treatment.”

So…shouldn’t private corporations be as constitutionally liable as the government for inmate safety and health? Well, no. According to Phil Smith in Covert Action Quarterly, “Under U.S. law, the state is subject to constitutional restraints that do not apply to private entities.” Several recent court decisions, notably Bowman v. CCA, have virtually nixed corporate accountability on prisoner healthcare.

One “prison HMO” that’s been in hot water is Correctional Medical Services. CMS vends healthcare for 270,000 inmates in twenty-nine states—over one-eighth of the U.S. prison population. In 1998 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch investigated CMS and allegedly found “more than 20 cases in which inmates allegedly died as a result of negligence, indifference, understaffing, inadequate training or overzealous cost-cutting.” In South Carolina, suspicious state officials wanted to monitor CMS to ensure accountability. CMS walked away from their four-year contract rather than submit.

The big prison-building corporations evidently have as checkered a record, especially with AIDS.

Americans are finally waking up to the fact that our violent, overcrowded public prisons are a primary vector for infectious disease—HIV, tuberculosis, hepatitis C, other STDs. Despite a national drop in the AIDS death rate, AIDS is still “the single leading cause of inmate death,” according to O’Connor. The BOJ says that almost two percent of our prison population is “known to be” HIV-positive, six times the national average. But these figures don’t tell us how many inmates get infected while in prison as a result of rape, coercive sex, and needle-sharing. Studies suggest that private prisons have the same sexual violence and drug use. So after release, many private inmates will take their undiagnosed infection with them. Risk to black and Latina women is high because of the high incarceration rates of black and Latino men. At a two percent national infection rate, 100,000 private inmates could include many more than the 2,000 who are “known to be infected.”

In private prisons, the expense and complexity of AIDS treatment collides with the profit motive. Expectations of stockholders become a powerful argument for skimping on prevention, testing, and drugs. According to Paul Wright, editor of Prison Legal News, private-prison contracts specify that they don’t have to accept inmates with chronic and expensive illnesses. So, when private prisons move into a new state, they get to cherry-pick healthy prisoners. Existing AIDS cases stay under state authority. Thus, in California, when eight new private prisons popped up, the state’s caseload of 300 male PWAs remained at the state medical facility (female PWAs had their own state HIV/AIDS facility).

When AIDS or other serious chronic illnesses appear in prisoners already in private custody, these inmates should technically be transferred back to state custody where they can get treatment. In real life, they often fall through the cracks.

One typical case: Keith Gabriel, who was originally treated at the federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. In 1990 he was transferred to a CCA-operated federal prison in D.C. Records sent with him didn’t mention his status. When his status was finally “rediscovered,” CCA didn’t transfer him back to federal custody. As NWA News tells it, Gabriel “alleged that as a result of his failure to receive treatment, he suffered a decline in his T-cell count. He also experienced the onset of premature dementia and depression.” Gabriel sued. But the CCA “asked for dismissal, saying it was not a proper defendant because it wasn’t a public entity.”

In another typical story, inmates at two Arkansas prisons operated by Wackenhut “experienced deliberate indifference towards their serious medical needs.” They did not get “proper care, including those with diabetes, HIV and seizure disorders….Staff did not adequately communicate results to inmates who had been tested for diseases like HIV.”

On top of profit motive, the businesspeople who launch correctional corporations often tend to be politically very right-wing. And right-wingers have a track record of hostility towards the rights and health needs of people with HIV/AIDS.

Recent Medscape editorials by Ann S. De Groot, M.D., nail the problem: “There is every reason to expect that the spread of resistant HIV strains will become more commonplace, given the concentration of HIV-infected persons in settings where HIV care is either avoided (by the inmate) or substandard, as a result of systemic constraints.” De Groot calls for “public monitoring of the delivery of HIV care by privatized correctional health care corporations.” Of course, public monitoring is exactly what these corporations do not want.

Since 1980, growing numbers of Americans—labor unions, church groups, citizens groups, Human Rights Watch, the ACLU—clamor against private prisons. A few states have outlawed them. Before he left office, Gov. Gray Davis (D) closed down California’s private state prisons. Even a few conservative politicians now oppose them—including South Carolina’s Rick Quinn (R), who watched the CMS boondoggle in his state and says that prison privatization doesn’t work. In Congress, Rep. Ted Strickland (D-Ohio) was so outraged at the government’s CCA bailout that he and thirty-two co-sponsors introduced the Public Safety Act (H.R. 1764, S. 842). The act effectively outlawed prison privatization in the U.S. Unfortunately it has languished in committee. President Bush retaliated by ordering the Department of Justice to privatize 7,000 federal correctional jobs.

Today most Republicans and conservatives still favor prison privatization. As I write this, California’s new Republican governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is making private-friendly prison noises. Correctional corporations gave handsomely to the Bush campaign, knowing their lives are at stake. In November this year, when Americans go to the polls, they can be sure of one thing. If the Republicans win, there may be more private prisons…and more healthcare questions too.

Take action: Write Rep. Ted Strickland’s office if you support reviving his Public Safety Act www.house.gov/strickland

Further reading:
AlterNet on private prison healthcare
www.alternet.org/story/11870

STOPP news archive
www.stoppcoalition.org/resources.php

Patricia Nell Warren, author of fiction bestsellers like The Front Runner, also writes provocative commentary. Her writings are archived at www.patricianellwarren.com. Reach her by

e-mail at patriciawarren@aol.com.

September 2004

Private Prisons: Public Threat?