From the Editor
by Paul Wright
This month’s cover story reports on the ongoing issues with pioneering private prison company CoreCivic, formerly known as Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), in its home state of Tennessee. In 1983, CCA was started in Tennessee as the first American for-profit privately-owned prison company in the United States in over a half century. It promised to cage people for less money than it cost the government, do a better job than the government did (while never actually defining what “better” meant in the prison context) and save tax payers money in the process.
While it likely does cage people for less money than the government does, thanks to its nonunion work force concentrated in Southern “right to work” states, tax payers have never seen any savings. Meanwhile, the company’s track record of killings, escapes, brutality, corruption and fraud over the past 43 years puts them solidly on track to compete with government prisons in all of those categories—which is all the more amazing when we consider that private prison companies do not run maximum or close-custody prisons and get to cherry pick the best-behaved prisoners to house.
At one point, CoreCivic claimed it wanted to run the entire Tennessee prison system. Given the abysmal job they have done with just a few prisons, it is no surprise that that proposal went nowhere. For decades, we have reported on the private prison industry’s ups and downs and it is worth remembering that the industry exists only because politicians choose to give them tax payer money to cage people. This continues despite well documented histories of fraud and corruption to secure and keep those contracts as well as the subpar performance in actually running prisons.
Around the world, the only countries that currently use private prisons at all are the United States, England, Australia and South Africa. At one point, Canada experimented with private prisons and ultimately shut them down and reverted their operation to government control. Generally speaking, in most other countries where private prisons were proposed, the model was dismissed as a labor issue because governments and labor leaders see the private prisons as inherently anti worker and subverting civil service rules. They never even get to the question of human rights abuses and problems over the treatment of prisoners.
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