The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The Birmingham News reported this week that the Department of
Corrections has begun transferring male inmates to a private prison in Pine Prairie, La. The prison is operated by Louisiana Corrections
Service, which also operates a facility in Basile, La., where Alabama
has housed about 300 female inmates since 2003.

The reason for using these facilities is the chronic overcrowding of
Alabama's prison system, which is the subject of constant litigation.
The transfer of male inmates -- eventually about 500 of them -- is an
effort to ease the backlog in county jails of state inmates who haven't
been sent to state prisons because there is no space for them.

The overcrowding problem is at present intractable, given Alabama's
sentencing structure and its decades of failing to address the
shortcomings of a system now bulging with almost twice as many inmates as its facilities were designed to handle.

LCS will house the male inmates for $29.50 per day per inmate, but how much of a bargain is that? There are important issues inherent in any private prison operation. This is not someone's hobby; this is a
for-profit enterprise.

That's fine in most pursuits; in fact, it is the core of the American
economy. But incarceration is a solemn obligation of the state.
Depriving individuals of liberty is serious business and the state, even though justified in doing so, has an undeniable responsibility to those individuals.

A for-profit prison has financial considerations that a state facility does not. It has profit expectations from its investors, and these could all too easily lead to dangerous corner-cutting that compromises the safety of inmates and potentially the public as well. Unlike the state, a private prison operator has no stake in the rehabilitation of inmates vs. the mere warehousing of them.

Add to those concerns -- inherent in any private prison operation -- the legal troubles at LSC facilities and it is easy to see why Alabamians should be uncomfortable with this arrangement.

Last week, the News reported, a former supervisor at Pine Prairie was
convicted of rights violations and witness tampering in the beating of an inmate. Earlier, four guards at the Basile facility were indicted on sexual abuse charges.

Problems can occur at state prisons, of course, but there the state has direct authority to act, to set employment standards and to otherwise control the addressing of problems. That is largely lost when private prisons are used.

The private prison issue is not going to fade away. LCS is working with officials in Perry County to open a private prison there. The facility, located outside Uniontown, will be ready in a few months.

The Department of Corrections says there is no agreement for it to place prisoners there, but clearly there will be great political pressure to do so.

This is a poor approach to prison issues. A far better one is broad
reform of Alabama's sentencing structure, which now sends to prison far too many people who could serve their sentences in community-based corrections facilities with drug treatment programs and work
opportunities -- without presenting a significant threat to the safety of the populace. Funneling non-violent offenders into prisons is always costly and seldom productive.

Absent this kind of reform of the current system, inherently unsound
practices such as the use of private prisons will continue -- not
because they are better, but because they are cheaper.
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