Lege Ponders "Jails 'R' Us"

The Travis County Community Justice Center has already had a bad experience with privatization. (Photo By Jana Birchum)

In the area of criminal justice, tight budgets can be both painful and dangerous. Case in point: Facing a 7% immediate fiscal year agency budget cut and 12.5% cut for the next biennium, two members of the House Corrections Committee have filed bills that propose privatizing the entire state jail system -- facilities that house the state's lowest level felony offenders. House Bills 1480 and 1669, authored by committee Chairman Ray Allen, R-Grand Prairie, along with HB 2190, authored by Austin legislative freshman and former Travis Co. Assistant District Attorney Jack Stick, would allow private prison companies to take over the nearly 20,000-bed state jail system through vendor-operated contracts with the Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice. Legislators are clearly focused on the prison industry's claims of "cost savings" to the state through privatization -- a seductive notion coming from the PR mouths of large corporations like Wackenhut or Corrections Corporation of America, especially in cash-strapped times. Indeed, prison privatization already has a toehold in Texas; private contractors account for nearly 18,700 inmate beds of more than 150,000 beds systemwide.

Allen is aware that such large-scale privatization will meet strong skepticism, and on March 27 he formed a committee "working group" to submit reports on the issue. But reports were due March 31, public testimony was heard April 15 (see "Naked City"), and proposals from corporations interested in operating state facilities are due April 30 -- all in a fast-track attempt to facilitate possible passage by the end of the session.

Three reports available for review at press time seem resoundingly opposed to privatization -- even including that submitted by TDCJ, which takes pains to avoid directly taking sides. The agency cannot take a formal position, but its analysis suggests the cost-savings of privatization are mostly myth. "Let me give it to you in a bumper sticker," said TDCJ spokesman Larry Todd, "you've got to compare apples to apples and not apples to something else." While private firms claim they can house offenders for less per diem -- about $31 per day per offender as opposed to just over $37 per diem for TDCJ -- the TDCJ rate covers all inmate costs while the for-profits' per diem does not. For example, under private contracts, the state still picks up the tab for health care, transportation, inmate classification, and administration (e.g. contract compliance monitoring) -- among other expenditures. Additionally, there are costs that don't come from TDCJ's appropriation -- for example, a nearly $2 per diem allocation from the Texas Education Agency budget to cover inmate educational services from the Windham School District, as well as a nearly $5 per diem general revenue expense allotted to cover employee-benefit programs -- that the state would still have to pay. With these costs included, the private-contract per diem is on par with what the state already pays.

In his agency report, TDCJ Executive Director Gary Johnson notes several ways to rework private vendor contracts to maximize "positive fiscal impact" for the state -- yet none of them appear particularly beneficial. To save money, for example, the state could extend the length of private contracts, remove some programmatic requirements, eliminate facility accreditation requirements, remove performance measures, and reduce staffing requirements. Yet all these adjustments would diminish the effectiveness or safety of the prisons, and Johnson emphasizes, "one primary consideration should be that the state -- specifically TDCJ -- ultimately remains responsible for the safe, secure, and constitutional operation of vendor operated facilities."

Meredith Martin Rountree, director of the ACLU's Prison and Jail Accountability Project, makes a similar argument in her report. "Modern private prisons do not offer Texas a cheaper, safer alternative to the publicly run facilities currently operated by [TDCJ]," she writes. "On the contrary, recent history strongly suggests that expanded reliance on private prisons will shift significant financial obligations back onto Texas. Further," she continues, "delegating the management of an entire division of TDCJ to private prison contractors threatens to embroil TDCJ and Texas once again in litigation over how it treats prisoners, just as Texas emerges from judicial oversight of its prison system."

Private prison corporations have not secured sterling reputations -- of which Stick should be well aware. Under a subcontract with Travis Co., Wackenhut Corrections Corporation assumed operations of the Travis Co. Criminal Justice Complex and also ran operations of the jail from 1997-99. In 1999 the relationship ended under a cloud of criminal allegations, including numerous charges of sexual assault of inmates by guards -- a handful of the cases are still pending in district court -- as well as allegations of misappropriation of funds. Similar allegations have followed the corrections giants around the country and across Texas, most notably in Wackenhut facilities in Harris Co. and Caldwell Co., where a former inmate said she was repeatedly raped over a four-month period by a guard.

The well-publicized allegations of corruption and abuse inside private prisons often come down to a single problem: Private prisons are profit-driven. In essence, in order make a profit on a prison contract, a contractor must spend less money than the state does while providing the same or better services. When the contract obligations conflict with the company's bottom line, it's generally no contest. In Travis Co., critics charged, Wackenhut profited by cutting back on essentials: eliminating programming and reducing the number of correction officers. Indeed, private prisons offer few benefits and significantly lower pay -- starting at just $8 an hour versus nearly $10, according to TDCJ (at Wackenhut's Travis Co. facility, guards made just $6 an hour) -- conditions that make for a nearly 53% annual employee turnover rate, says Dee Simpson, the Texas political director for the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME also issued a report opposing privatization). "At these [pay] rates, these folks say, 'Screw these guys, I can work at Colonel Chicken,'" he said. "And in [employee] turnover, there are more hidden costs to the state -- nearly $40 million per year to train new guards."

Although private vendors have a very uneven record of providing effective educational programs, they are being considered for the responsibility of managing state jails -- which house the system's lowest-level felony offenders. The state-jail system is largely populated by nonviolent drug offenders and other fourth-degree felons sentenced to short stints in jail and was conceived by a group of district attorneys -- including Travis Co. DA Ronnie Earle -- as a place where offenders could get access to education and other rehabilitative programs in order to reduce recidivism. "If they're going to drain our resources to hand out contracts for no good reason, then we're not going to make progress," said Simpson. "You can't just begin to think of the public sector as a series of profit centers. The state really has the responsibility for care-giving here."