|
Thanks to distortion of our legislative procedures a bill clearly against the interests of public safety and protection of Kansas taxpayers may soon win passage.
Senate Majority Leader Derek Schmidt from Independence has inserted special interest, for-profit prison language into a veto-proof sexual offender bill, HB2576. For three years,
Schmidt’s similar bills were unable to win passage on their own merits.
|
|
|
Frank Smith
|
|
The bill is presently in conference committee and will be considered when the legislature returns from adjournment. It is
one of the worst bills for organized labor this session, the privatization nose under the tent.
At a time when the attention of the public has been focused on deal-making in Washington by the exposure of scandals such
as the crimes of Jack Abramoff and ex-Representative “Duke” Cunningham, as well as the budget “earmarks” leading to
funding of the $230 million Alaska “Bridge to Nowhere,” this legislative “bundling” tactic is particularly brazen.
Through dozens of substantial contributions from the for-profit GEO Group and its lobbyists, Schmidt’s colleagues and leadership committees are amply
rewarded for ignoring the public interest.
Private Prisons More Expensive
 GEO Group and the for-profit industry claim to save
taxpayers money. In fact, lobbying through the rabidly anti- worker American Legislative Exchange Council, it produces nationwide “model” legislation guaranteed to
produce far more prisoners, doing much more time, resulting in a decline in funds available for higher education in particular. More convicts to them equal
more market and more market share: Hence the proliferation of “tough on crime,” “three strikes” and “truth in sentencing” legislation.
An Arizona study released last month revealed that public prisons are 8.5%-13.5% less costly
than private prisons. Governor Sibelius has requested $20 million to expand existing facilities.
Our Kansas Department Of Corrections Secretary, Roger Werholtz, regularly testified that such expansion would save Kansas considerable revenues.
Low Pay, High Turnover Jobs
Guard applicants require clean criminal and domestic violence records, a GED or H.S. diploma,
and need to be capable enough to physically handle the extremely stressful, sometimes physical and dangerous shift-work environment. The for-profits endure 52% annual staff turnover, over
three times that of better-paying public facilities. As a result there is no mentoring process going
on. It’s as if there were almost no one on the job but apprentices, with few journeymen and no masters.
Benefits are terrible with high deductibles, co-pays and premiums. Retirement benefits are a joke
. A Cornell employee told me $10 hourly workers in Pennsylvania were cut to 15 days combined vacation and sick leave yearly when juveniles were costing counties hundreds of dollars
daily. The state caused that prison to be shut down years ago after 15 substantiated cases of sexual abuse and 16 of physical abuse, plus many escapes.
Guards making $8 hourly or less commonly work two jobs, depriving them of the alertness necessary to protect themselves, other staff, inmates and the public alike.
On a panel in St. Louis in November, shared with a professor from UCLA and Radcliffe, and the
Vice President of CCA who was the former head of Ohio Department of Corrections and a Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, I pointed out to members of the Commission
on Safety and Inmate Abuse in America’s prisons that CCA’s Kentucky guards had been making
$7.61 an hour. When Commissioners asked him if that were true, he responded that he didn’t
“know what prison (they have three there) Mr. Smith was referencing.” Another asked him what
kind of workers they got “for $7.61 an hour?” He avoided answering. I pointed out to
Commissioners that he’d only been on the job for ten months and was making $270,000 a year and had been awarded 17,100 shares of stock nine months earlier, worth about 2/3rds of a
million dollars. A few months later he got a raise that exceed what those guards made yearly.
Abuses at Private Prisons
In Tulsa the local paper found out that the CCA county jail substance abuse program manager,
after he was accused of sexually assaulting two women prisoners, had done 17 years in prison. Further investigation by the World found that 20 CCA employees had recent local criminal and/or
domestic violence records. GRW, which operates two Kansas minimum facilities, was found to have five ex-felons on their staff after women from three states had been sexually assaulted. The
warden and two guards were recently convicted of offenses relating to the scandals.
A GEO (formerly Wackenhut) guard in New Mexico was making $7.95 an hour at the time he
was murdered by inmates. In high wage California, MTC paid guards $8 hourly at an isolated prison when state prison correctional officers at prisons only 20 miles away were starting at more
than twice that, with great benefits. It closed weeks after rioting Hispanic prisoners killed two black inmates. Eight were charged in the murders. Similarly, in Alaska, Cornell Companies
workers were making $8.50 an hour, less than half that of state employees.
Kansas sent 100 prisoners to Texas a couple of years ago due to overcrowding. In talks with
three CiviGenics prison sergeants there, they told me that guards were starting as low as $6.45 an hour and sergeants were making $7.25.
A 2001 Mother Jones article, “How Did We Get To Two Million?” contended, “Housing each
prisoner costs taxpayers around $20,000 per year -- money that often comes at the expense of other social programs. Between 1980 and 1996, prison spending shot up in every state, while
spending on higher education declined in 19 states. In May, Colorado lawmakers diverted $59 million earmarked for improving colleges and universities into paying for prison expansion.”
Economic Development ?
Rural Woodson County was misled to believe a private prison would provide an economic boon
. National studies from six universities, in Washington, Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina and Kentucky and research from a D.C. think tank that indicate that even public prisons, where staff
are often paid twice as much as in the privates, don’t help the economy. Communities within a 50
-mile radius lack the available workforce to staff such a facility. There’s a provision to mandate a
vote from county residents to approve any such “rent-a-pen” but GEO Group and it’s arch-rival
Corrections Corporation of America, are billion dollar corporations. That buys an awful lot of favorable press and can present quite a temptation to politicians.
Inadequate Safeguards
The sex offender bill’s existing private prison provisions don’t truly protect Kansas. Instead it
encourages wholesale importation and private transport of out-of-state robbers, rapists, and murderers. Annual surveys show for-profits have 30-45 times more escapes than public facilities.
Closed facilities, frequently shuttered following rapes and grotesque maltreatment by poorly
screened staff, litter the national landscape. Imported convicts have rioted in a half dozen states.
After summer 2004 riots by out-of-state prisoners at the Corrections Corporation of America facilities at Crowley, Colorado and Beattyville, Kentucky, scores of low-paid employees
immediately quit their jobs.
Although the measure has a provision allowing a Kansas state takeover of failed private pens, it
doesn’t adequately address “real world” problems. For instance, it’s difficult to imagine how
GEO could provide adequate insurance for its operations. Examples of potential exposure include situations like the murder of a Montana prisoner by Hawaiian convicts at BRG’s Texas prison.
Hawaiians twice torched that facility.
The Kansas DOC already has substantial difficulty filling vacancies though money has been
budgeted that would increase pay this coming year. The notion that it could immediately provide hundreds of trained officers and support staff to operate a remote for-profit if workers had
resigned en masse or went on strike is simply ludicrous. The Department lacks the authority to incarcerate other states’ prisoners, but a private pen in Kansas would inevitably house many
hundreds of dangerous criminals from distant jurisdictions.
For-profit salesmen testifying before legislative committees claimed staff from other states could
fill in, but they often are already unable to meet contractual staffing level requirements in those distant locations.
Kansas has already experienced perils of privatization; witness the imprisonment of Reno County
Sheriff Larry Leslie for accepting and laundering $284,000 in bribes for privatizing his jail.
Kansas would be wise to heed the call for a moratorium on construction of or outright abolition
of these “Rent-a-pens” by denominations ranging from Catholic, Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian and the United Church of Christ.
|
