The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog

The privately owned lockup, built earlier this year by Louisiana-based LCS Corrections for $20 million, was meant to take inmates from Alabama's famously crowded state prisons. But after the state rejected an offer from the company as too expensive, LCS found a better deal.

The prison last month began incarcerating illegal immigrants for the federal government, and now nearly 400 illegal immigrants and a handful of other federal prisoners occupy its three wings. Company officials say they may soon expand, nearly doubling the number of beds, and they hope to eventually follow that with another expansion, bringing the total number of prisoners to 1,500.

Warden Bill Bateman, who walks casually among the minimum-security prisoners even with no guards in sight, said the overwhelming majority of detainees have no criminal background; they're just in the country illegally. They come from Central and South America, Africa, China, Russia and Western Europe.

"We couldn't possibly speak all the languages they speak," he said, pausing to talk to two prisoners who were proficient in English.

Lower bid won

While the detainees came from all over the planet, it was American capitalism that built the prison. LCS, a private company with 3,000 prisoners in eight facilities in the South, built the Perry County prison on speculation, gambling that Alabama had such need for prison beds that it would win a contract to house state inmates.

But in May, Alabama awarded a contract to Louisiana-based Emerald Correctional Management, which offered to take Alabama prisoners in one of its Louisiana prisons for $28 per head per day, versus LCS' bid of $34.50.

Johnny Flowers, a Perry County commissioner and early advocate of the prison, said he then turned to U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions for help, and Sessions helped the county get a U.S. Marshal's Service contract that pays $45 per prisoner per day. Piggy-backed onto that Marshal's Service contract was the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deal to take illegal immigrants awaiting either court hearings or deportation.

Prisons, and private prisons in particular, are controversial economic-development tools. But Flowers said the Perry County prison already is benefiting the community, and he expects it to create more jobs and bring more money to tiny Uniontown.

Richard Harbison, LCS vice president, said the prison employs 110 with a payroll of $2 million a year, and employment soon will increase to 130. Most of the people on the payroll - everyone from guards to cooks - came from Perry and surrounding counties.

All of the prison's employees except the warden and deputy warden technically work for the county, not LCS, because of a quirk in Alabama law, Harbison said. But LCS officials do the hiring and manage the prison's day-to-day operations.

Bateman declined to release specifics about the pay scale for guards and other employees, but Flowers said salaries range from $12,000 a year to $38,000.

Those are low wages in much of the state, but not in a county with a median household income of $20,555, just over half the state average, and talk of an expansion has Flowers excited.

"It's going to make a difference in the neighborhoods and the stores," he said.

Criticizes private prisons

LCS, and the private prison industry in general, are not without critics.

Judy Greene, a policy analyst with Justice Strategies, a nonprofit sentencing reform advocacy group in New York, argues that the profit motive leads private prisons to cut corners.

Private prisons typically offer inmates fewer educational programs and have inferior security, and that translates into more escapes and more violence inside prison walls, she said. Private prisons have 65 percent more prisoner-on-prisoner violence than public ones, and 49 percent more assaults on staff, Greene said, citing a 2001 Bureau of Justice Assistance report.

But U.S. Department of Justice statistics from the same year indicated that the incidence of violence against prison staff was actually lower in private prisons than in public ones, and dozens of studies offer contradictory findings. In its first two months of holding prisoners, the Perry County prison has had no escapes and no serious incidents.

And, according to a controversial study done by the state of Florida, the recidivism rate at private prisons is consistently lower than the rate for public prisons.

Turnover and wages

Greene, who visited the Perry County prison in July, said the problem of violence in private prisons is exacerbated by high turnover among the guards.

A new guard at a publicly owned and operated prison makes an average of about $23,000 a year and can hope to one day make as much as $36,000. But a new guard at a private prison averages $17,628 and tops out at $22,082 - $1,000 less than a rookie guard is paid at a public facility.

The lower salaries mean guards often leave for better-paying or less-stressful jobs. The average annual turnover for guards at private prisons in 2000 was 52 percent, versus 16 percent for public prisons, Greene said.

Bateman, who has run both public and private facilities, said turnover among guards is a problem for everyone, not just private operators. And, he said, guards who make sergeant at the Perry County prison are paid about as well as rank-and-file guards at state prisons.

"And it doesn't take much to make sergeant here," he said.

Greene also said that private prisons typically offer fewer amenities such as libraries and classrooms.

At Perry County Correctional, classrooms built for state prisoners sit empty or are used for storage because there's no need to offer educational services to immigration detainees who will spend a few days or months in the prison, and then be deported, the company said.

Bateman showed a visitor the prison's empty vocational-tech room, also intended for state prisoners, anda library, its bookshelves bare while he tries to arrange to get books.

But the half-dozen or so computers were up and running, and kept busy by detainees accessing law books and working on their cases. The library, like the dorms and other areas that house detainees, were air-conditioned and comfortably cool despite the oppressive summer heat.

One of the most common complaints critics have about private prisons is that they sometimes are built using public money - some local governments have borrowed millions of dollars to finance construction - and taxpayers don't get a return on their investment. But Flowers said Perry County didn't share any of the burden of building the new prison.

"Perry County residents put not 1 cent in that project," he said. "They
(LCS) did it all on faith."

Muted outlook

Just west down U.S. 80, the residents of Uniontown, population 1,500, had little to say about their new neighbor. In the heat of the Alabama summer, nearly every bit of shade downtown sheltered someone who knows somebody who got a job at the prison. But no one seems confident that it will improve their lives.

Robert Malone, who runs a gas station at the center of town, said the biggest boost so far came during construction, when the first new jobs were created. Now, he said, people need to be patient.

"I think eventually it's going to help," he said. "We need something, that's for sure."

http://www.al.com/news/birminghamnews/index.ssf?/base/news/115727505453130.x
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