evolution

The Kansas Legislature is talking about authorizing privately-run corrections facilities in the state:

Topeka — The state’s top prison official said Wednesday that he would rather not have them, but lawmakers are poised to approve private prisons.

“I’m not a fan,” said Kansas Department of Corrections Secretary Roger Werholtz. “I would prefer to operate our own prisons.”

But key lawmakers have been pushing for private prisons for years, and they may have hit a successful strategy by tying the legislation to lawmakers’ desire to increase punishments for sex offenders.

Authorization for private prisons has been folded into a mammoth criminal justice measure that includes a popular proposal to establish lengthy prison sentences without possibility of parole for sex offenders. A House-Senate conference committee is negotiating the bill.

Rep. Jan Pauls, D-Hutchinson, a member of the conference committee, is opposed to the private prisons measure. She said it was “sad” that it was tied to sex offender sentences and should be given “an up or down vote” on its own.

A Google search for “private prisons” turned up some recently-obtained data.

The State of Colorado has had prisoners in privately-run prisons within its borders for twelve years, and had shipped some of its prisoners to private prisons in other states even before that. This 2005 audit (a 73-page PDF) details the performance of those privately-run prisons between September 2004 and March 2005.

At the time of this report, 2,800 of Colorado’s 18,000 prison inmates (16%) were housed in six private prisons. The audit presents several criticisms of the prisons, which are detailed in the report and which I’ve paraphrased here:

• The Colorado Department of Corrections did a poor job of overseeing health care — both mental and physical — for the prisoners;
• Under Colorado law at the time, it was illegal to place anyone classified as “high-custody” — maximum-security — in a private prison, although this was found to have been done on several occasions;
• The private facilities under-staffed their facilities, and hired a few with “questionable backgrounds”, including assault convictions, and allowed staff to begin work before their checks were complete;
• The private facilities did a poor job of screening visitors;
• Both the facilities and the DOC did poor jobs of record-keeping regarding matters like inmate restitution and child-support payments and ensuring compliance with the facilities’ contracts.

That is not encouraging.

Furthermore, this non-partisan research study from 2003 (a 21-page PDF) commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice of private prisons in Texas, Oklahoma, and Florida, the three states where the use of private prisons is most prevalent, found that “competition” for private-prison contracts turned out not to be very competitive. In fact, of the 91 such contracts in these three states, only 17 had been awarded following expiration of a previous contract. The others were still under the original (long-term) contract, or were obtained by what the report calls “non-competitive means.” Of those 17 that were awarded following a prior contract, only one of those was not a renewal — 16 of those contracts were “re-upped” with their previous holders. Such things are, as you may well imagine, prime opportunities for political patronage.

What about some other arguments for private prisons? One is that they reduce costs to the states they inhabit and create jobs for otherwise-moribund regions. I uncovered no evidence that they do reduce costs to the state governments; the evidence I did uncover was contradictory at best. (Repeat my Google Search; I assure you that you will find studies which come to one conclusion or the other with roughly equal frequency.) Another is that they provide an easy way to expand prison capacity. Perhaps money spent doing that is money better spent doing other things, like preventing some problems that send people to prison and seriously evaluating other criminals (for example, many marijuana offenders) who ought not to be in prison in the first place.

Under Kansas statutes:

• (75-52,133) No public or private entity may build, own, or operate any detention facility in Kansas for the detention of inmates from another state. Of course, there are exceptions for fugitives awaiting extradition and federal prisoners. One private facility in Leavenworth, contracted by the U.S. Marshals, houses federal prisoners awaiting trial and/or transfer.
• No statutory prohibition exists to prevent private facilities in Kansas from housing Kansas’s own prisoners. The Secretary of Corrections may, at its own discretion, “acquire, in the name of the state, by lease, purchase or contract additional facilities as may be needed for the housing of persons in the secretary’s custody.” (75-5210(k)) and “may contract with qualified individuals, partnerships, corporations or organizations; with agencies of the state; or with the United States or any political subdivision of the state, or any agency thereof” (75-5210(m)) to provide work-release and rehabilitation programs.
• Finally, cities and counties may contract to private facilities, and the State of Kansas is party to something called the “interstate corrections compact” (76-3002) by where Kansas prisoners may be housed in private facilities in other states.

I am not convinced that private prisons provide significant cost savings and job creation to justify risks to the State, the public, and the prisoners themselves that are presented by privately-run prisons. In addition, what will happen to these companies and the inmates in their charge when their shareholders withdraw their investments and they collapse is not at all clear. Unless facts come to light that I have not seen, I oppose them in Kansas.

The Legislature, however, in their infinite wisdom decided to tie the initiative in the form of an amendment to the Kansas version of “Jessica’s Law” (HB 2576, an 88-page PDF), the tough new penalties imposed upon sex-offenders in this state. Few people oppose it, and I support it as well. However, many people — especially in the light of what I present here — might oppose private prisons. Jessica Lunsford’s father came to Topeka personally to testify in favor of the original 2576, and he has done yeoman’s work in the face of his unspeakable tragedy to advocate for victims of one of the most egregious violations of civil-rights I can conceive of. It will be a shame if the private-prison amendment kills what I feel is a necessary bill.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 31st, 2006 at 22:01 and is filed under kansas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.