eventeen-year-old Pennsylvania resident Hillary Transue was sentenced to three months at a privately run “wilderness camp” correctional facility for juveniles after her assistant high school principal filed a harassment petition against her. Her crime: the creation of a fake Myspace page featuring the administrator, a page that was meant as a joke and even included a disclaimer. She had no lawyer present at her sentence hearing, and was not informed of her legal right to counsel before Judge Mark Ciaverella of Luzerne County handed down the unusually harsh sentence.
When Transue’s mother took her case to Juvenile Law Center (a juvenile rights advocacy group), they uncovered numerous other questionable juvenile cases on the records of Ciavrella and Michael Conahan, another Luzerne County judge. The cases were very similar: the judges were handing out extremely harsh punishments to young people who had either waved their right to an attorney (something that is only possible in a few states), or simply were never informed that they possessed this right. The juveniles were also often sentenced over the protests of their probation officers.
A subsequent investigation by the U.S. attorney’s office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania uncovered a secret deal between two private correctional facility operator companies, Pennsylvania Child Care and its sister company Western Pennsylvania Child care, and the judges. The judges were paid a total of 2.6 million dollars over multiple years in exchange for sentencing some 5,000 juveniles to serve time at private facilities run by the Pennsylvania Child Care companies, and for “facilitating” the construction and operation of the same facilities. Eighteen-year-old Jamie Quinn spent about a year bouncing around various privately run juvenile detention centers after he was found guilty of a simple assault charge resulting from a teenage slap-fight. Twenty-two year-old Kurt Kruger, charged as a lookout in a Wal-Mart shoplifting incident, describes the farce of his sentencing experience with Judge Ciaverlla:
"And I was then sentenced in a 90-second hearing. I was sentenced to Camp Adams for a minimum of ninety days. And I was never offered a lawyer, never explained my rights to a lawyer or what benefits it would have. I was just sent away to Camp Adams for at least ninety days, and I spent the better part of four-and-a-half months there."
Undoubtedly, countless other stories will come to light in the ongoing review of the estimated 5,000 questionable cases. The companies, who have not yet been charged with any crimes, claim the corrupt judges extorted them.
It’s tempting to view this as a simple, isolated case of abused authority, but that would ignore the systematic corruption that facilitated this egregious instance. The American prison industrial complex is growing, and it behooves us all to take a serious look at its potential consequences (good or bad) for our criminal justice system.
The prison industrial complex refers to the increasingly powerful interest groups that represent organizations involved in corrections. The complex includes correctional worker unions, construction companies, surveillance technology firms, private prison management firms, and more. The recent growth of the prison industrial complex can be traced back to the beginning of the private industry boom around’84. By’97, less than 15 years after its emergence, private prisons had become a billion-dollar industry. The rapid expansion of the private prison industry stems from multiple factors. First, the number of inmates began to rise dramatically around’70, and continues to increase. This can be attributed to a combination of factors, including (but not limited to) harsher sentencing policies, stricter drug laws and enforcement, and the emergence of illegal immigrant detention. Around this time, states and the federal government began relying more heavily on the private sector to build and operate prisons because they were quicker and cheaper. As of 2000, nearly all new prisons were privately built and operated, and the private sector accounted for nearly a quarter of total prisons by 2005. We should expect to see many more new private prisons as the inmate population continues to grow (at about 3-5 percent a year), and state and federal officials increase their reliance on the private correctional industry.
Proponents of the private corrections industry argue that the private sector is efficient and effective. It is true that private companies can build prisons more quickly than a state or the federal government can, and that private prisons are in some sense cheaper than public ones. However, private prisons are inferior to public ones in many important ways for one reason: profit motive. The ultimate goal of a private prison is to profit, and their management decisions reflect this end. They generally utilize non-union labor and pay their staff less across the board. Furthermore, a report commissioned by the Federal Bureau of Prisons called Growth and Quality of U.S. Private Prisons (2001) found that private prisons have “systematic problems in maintaining secure facilities.” They generally have a higher frequency of inmate escapes, fewer staff members, inexperienced staff, higher frequencies of structural problems, and the report described their living conditions as “spartan.” They concluded that there were “systematic problems in the private-prison sector,” which did not exist within the public sector, caused by practices that cater to the financial bottom line like cutting worker wages and training.
Private prisons are also less likely than their public counterparts to have vocational and academic programs, which are shown to reduce recidivism rates, but cost extra money to implement. Joseph Hallinan, the author of Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation, argued that the focus of a private prison shifts from inmate rehabilitation (integral in reducing recidivism) to reducing “average daily inmate costs.” The “systematic problems” associated with private prisons end up costing the public money, so the prison corporations essentially offset their own costs onto the public. When inmates escape, the public suffers the consequences financially and otherwise. When poorly trained guards mistreat prisoners, the public has to step in and pay medical bills. In addition, the public (as in me and you) pay for private prisons in a more direct way through subsidies given to private construction companies to build and operate these prisons. About seventy percent of the sixty or so private prisons with 500 or more beds (big prisons) received one or more public development subsidies. So we end up paying more, while private prison companies up their profits.
Perhaps the most troubling consequence of the private prison industry is the growing number of powerful and financially capable corporations who now have a reason to push for tougher laws and sentencing policies. Groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, who have been active in lobbying for truth in sentencing and three strike laws (both of which might not sound that bad but are controversial and lead to more prisoners with longer sentences), receive substantial funding from the private corrections industry. In fact, the ALEC’s Criminal Justice Task Force is co-chaired by a former director of business development at Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest private corrections firms in the country. One industry observer describes the private prison corporations as having “paid handsomely to play the public policy game, and…likely [to] do so again.” And privately run prisons have the ability and incentive to influence parole hearings, since from an economic standpoint it simply doesn’t make sense to release prisoners early.
Dwight D. Eisenhower used his farewell address to warn the public of the dangers of a powe
rful military industrial complex. He said:
"…We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."
The same should be said for the prison-industrial complex. The Pennsylvania Judge debacle is a clear example of some of the worst consequences of “disastrous misplaced power.” We have already allowed for the “acquisition of unwarranted influence” in the form of the growing corporate support for proponents of tougher laws and sentencing policies. Furthermore, the apparent benefits of private prisons do not withstand scrutiny. Private prisons are not actually more cost effective to build or run from a public perspective when you consider that the private sector can build and operate them for less only by transferring the cost to the public sector both directly and indirectly. Mark Ciaverella and Michael Conahan are an extreme example of what can go wrong when prisoners become a commodity, but there are less provocative ways in which the profit motive is degrading the fragile integrity of our criminal justice system.
