PRISONS AMERICAN STYLE
An American Story
By Gary Brooks
Waid
Go to:
So
you think Guantanamo is tough? Well, try Idaho
By Alasdair Palmer (Filed: 27/01/2002)
THE CORPORATION THAT PAYS ITS 21,000 WORKERS AS LITTLE AS 23 CENTS/HR:
A New Theory to Explain the Boom in Prisons
TWO MILLION--2,000,000!--BEHIND BARS: New Study The U.S. Leads the Way
Record numbers of adults in corrections
The Best of the Best --
An American Story
AUTHOR'S NOTE:
IF YOU ARE NORMAL, with normal thought processes and so forth, then the story
you are about to read will upset you. You won't walk away unaffected.
This piece is not journalism. I don't do that ever; I take a stand, and
for that I make no apology. But truth be told, I didn't write this piece. Not
exactly, anyway. I listened to a man and tried to reproduce some of his words.
Then, as the extent of such a subtly American violation took shape, the story
began to write itself. And I was in the end, occasionally overcome, so
that I had to stop, put the pen down, and compose myself before continuing.
Although this is an army tale, you'll have to excuse my shortcomings with regards to military terms. I never did time in the service, never was conscripted, never joined. I was in college when I flunked my draft physical and was cast aside for more qualified men. I remember I had just finished reading a novel by Dalton Trumbo called Johnny Got His Gun, and it so unnerved me that I was terrified I'd have to do Vietnam. I did everything I could legally do at that draft physical to keep from having to report for duty. A lot of guys didn't see it my way, though. A lot of young men were happy to do what they saw as their duty. It's been thirty years now since the Vietnam war. Sadly, the aftereffects are still with us.
Author Gary Waid's newest picture
My name is Gary Waid and I'm a federal prisoner currently incarcerated by the state of Florida. I'm not new at life inside, I've been down over 6 1/2 years, been given a bunk in at least 19 different facilities. During all of that period I've lived with ex-GI's doing time. They're everywhere. In transit, lockdown, in all the federal and state prisons, every place where there's a cell, you're likely to find a veteran of some foreign war, usually Vietnam, marking time for every imaginable reason. I've befriended a few, not for any particular reason, mind you, but because we happened to be thrown together at some point on the rocky penal road to nowhere.
At FCI Texarkana a huge biker named Ronnie, from the Austin, Texas branch of the Banditos, liked to read my stories. One day I gave him a piece about a biker-bank robber who farted uncontrollably (every beginning writer does farting bikers. Ernest Hemmingway probably did farting biker stories at first.), and when he gave it back he said: "Waid, you should be on medication," which made me feel great. I knew I had talent if a biker wanted to medicate me. Ronnie and I used to talk some, but you had to be careful about what you said. He would get way upset at any perceived disrespect or flapdoodle regarding the POW-MIA thing. Ronnie was still in Vietnam sometimes.
Also at Texarkana there was a guy who helped me considerably with my back pain. He'd done his time in the Vietnam bucket, too, and must've known his cookies when it came to explosives because they called him "The Mad Bomber." The hacks were very careful not to piss off the Mad Bomber, so his expertise in various martial arts must have been reflected in his jacket.
Sometimes a veteran is off his rocker. Or he's not really, but has a reputation he likes to cultivate. At Texarkana an odd sort named Don once asked me if I wanted to bunk in his cell (he had one of the preferred cells with extra room and no direct sunlight in the afternoon), but he always seemed to be kicking old roommates out for imagined infractions, and most of the guys seemed pretty normal to me. They always said he was crazy, so I declined the offer and remained in my own sweltering but familiar box. Don had been a Marine. He did two tours in Vietnam, then became an instructor of something in a country where dictators regularly hired professional help. I didn't need any lessons from pros, thank you.
Here at River Junction W/C all the inmates are older guys. We have more than our share of Vietnam vets, and of course I know a few. Biker Bill Wagener (See Dressing the Pig ) is a vet. My companion on the laundry truck is another. I help a guy named Panabaker with his spelling occasionally and sometimes he tells me a funny story...
...and then there's Sergeant Lawrence Hendrix, my buddy, who during the Hell-for-leather days of the '60s was proud to be a part of an elite group of soldiers within the United States Army of Occupation in the Republic of South Vietnam.
Sgt. Larry Hendrix ain't no joke. He was an Airborne Ranger, one of those guys who jump out of airplanes, and he did three tours of duty in the mud and the blood, with both the 101st Airborne and the U.S. Special Forces. In combat he earned the Silver Star and the Bronze Star with a V for valor. There's a special caveat on Larry's jacket: "Do not approach this inmate with violence," because he used to teach FNGs (fucking new guys) how to survive in the jungle. He was a hand-to-hand combat expert, and an expert at seeing what was in front of him.
I'll get back to Larry in a minute, but first there's something you should know about some of the above guys. Three of them, three out of the seven I've mentioned including Sgt. Larry Hendrix, were compelled at trial to submit their military records, to be used as evidence against them during sentencing.
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Okay, obviously I'm no expert about war. I wouldn't know a Bouncing Betty from a Boomerang. But I'm going to do the best I can to engage you folks in a dialogue, because there's a problem here, a problem similar to the drug war, in that large powerful government agencies and policy knobs think it's appropriate to warehouse American citizens for lifetimes as a means of controlling something they know nothing about. And not just any American citizens, they're participating in the removal of men who were the best we had, but who's training makes them embarrassments.
I've only met a few honest-to-goodness warriors in my life, and Larry Hendrix is one of them. Of course he's also a smartass. He thinks like a Waid. We could be brothers. The other day we had this conversation:
"Hi, Sarge, what's up?"
"Everything but my sentence, Waid," he says scowling. "Your face is red."
"Ah, well, I just got off the yard and shit. Did six billion pushups and shit. But it's gonna rain and shit so --"
"Shit, Waid!" He grins. "Shitty shitty shit. You live a loose life."
"Huh?"
"You got a fixation. Go to the toilet. I thought you were a writer."
"Words is me."
"I can tell. Let's go to chow. I'll trade you my green lumpy shit for your, you know, shit and stuff."
See? Not too many convicts would jink me over such a moronic digression. I mean, you know, it's lonely in here and shit: it's nice to have someone to talk to.
So anyway, Sgt. Larry Hendrix was being a warrior during three consecutive tours of duty, while back home in the world I was a flower child. I was a very good flower child, of course. Still am. But skill-wise my flower child couldn't compare to Larry's bad-to-the-bone. His three tours must've been whiz-bang bitchin' things, because the first time I heard him actually talk about his history in combat my gonads shrank. Words fail me here. His true tales are absolutely the most horrifyingest, terriblest stuff imaginable and I ain't lying. Larry's liver was more death-defying than Rambo ever thought of being.
Actually it was my neighbor Charlie who asked him how someone gets a Bronze Star.
"Well, said Larry, "mostly by being in a situation. You're scared out of your mind and just sort of react."
He must have felt expansive, then, because he rummaged around in his property and pulled out a document and handed it to me. Here's the condensed version of what it said:
"On the morning of some long-ago day, during a firefight in the highlands west of somewhere nobody's ever heard of, when a bunch of wounded men were lying screaming in the middle of a minefield, Sergeant Lawrence Hendrix, with total disregard for his own safety blah blah blah, crawled on his belly through Hell and rescued his men."
The Sarge spent a couple quality hours inching back and forth across a fucking mine field.
I was speechless. "What...I mean, how did...Why - ?
"A lot of stuff was flying around, Waid. you could hear the guys out there...It was like everyone thought I had nerves of steel, but my whole body was shaking. I just kept inching along using my bayonet, sweating bullets, poking my bayonet into the dirt ahead of me, probing around for the mines. You had to find the mines from the side or they'd blow. I crawled in and out of the minefield, another guy started helping, we got all the wounded out and the dead. We humped 'em to another area for dust off. When it was over, I sat in the dirt and pissed all over myself."
Charlie and I just stared at the Sarge, stunned. I've heard a lot of things in my life. I've seen a lot of things. I've heard prison stories that would burn your ears and I've even been slightly brave a time or two, what with the sailing and the pot smuggling and that. But this was over the top. I'd never heard such a reluctant admission of worth.
That was just one story though. Larry could float something by you that'd give you the willies before you even gathered it all in. Once he told me how he went nuts during an engagement:
"You can read about Vietnam and see movies, Gar, but it's true what they say about being there. You had to be there, at least where I was. I remember one time we were in a big firefight, threatening to get overrun. You could see the VC coming across this open rice paddy and we were hunkered down and I was so damn scared I was blind almost. I'd set up a bunch of claymores out there so I just started watching the enemy and firing off the claymores when they got inside my kill zone. I had all the triggers, so they're coming in, running like crazy and I'm firing my mines off, Blam Blam, shit and bodies and brains are flying, and I'm so fucking freaked that I don't know who's dead. Blam Blam, those claymores raised hell, Waid. Then for some reason I pick up my M-16 and start firing. I'm standing inside the perimeter, Waid, and I empty my clip, eject, jam another clip in, standing there like John Wayne, blowing holes in a bunch of enemy dead. I'm out of ammo so I've got a sidearm on my hip pulled out, I'm screaming, shooting my 45, Boom Boom, and the guys behind me are yelling, "Sarge, sarge...they're dead! It's over!"
"They shipped me to Japan for R&R and evaluation. I'd seen too much combat, they decided. I was gonna go home."
"Thank God for John Wayne," I said.
"But I didn't want to go home. I wanted to win that war, Waid! So they sent me back, but as one of the rear-echelon personnel with the 101st Airborne. When I arrived, shit I said, this is an in-country training camp for FNGs! There's no action here! I was wrong, though. As wrong as I've ever been. During the second or third week, in the middle of training my first group, my point man walked my patrol into a VC ambush."
"Why are you still around, Larry? What's your trip?"
"I was a badass. The first thing I'd taught those guys was what to do in an ambush."
"What do you do in an ambush?"
"You fire, Waid. You don't duck, dodge, run or roll sideways or any of that Hollywood crap. You stand and lay down as much fire as you can in the direction of the ambush. You make the enemy duck, make 'em hide, make 'em wish they'd never seen your ugly asses. I remember I had this kid named Camacho from New York on point. When I saw something weird, I turned and opened up and screamed Ambush left!, and he turned and fired too. And then everybody was shooting. Camacho has some cojones, Waid. We were a patrol of fifteen new guys, and we killed eight VC without losing anybody. Couple guys had minor wounds. And that was in spite of the fact we got caught in the killing zone. When they asked me how it happened, how in hell we got out of that shit, I didn't tell 'em it was an accident. They couldn't believe it."
There are one too many stories and not enough space here. Eventually Lawrence Hendrix came home a bona fide war hero. By the time he got out of the army a few years later, he was involved in broadcasting and music promotions around Ft. Bragg, North Carolina, which led to a larger role as a promoter and producer of talent. He's got a photo album filled with pictures of his family, but also pictures taken of him with various musicians and groups from the '70s.
But back in the late '70s and early '80s, a job in music often meant a life involved with cocaine. Movie stars, politicians, musicians, people from all strata of society were indulging in nose candy, and admitted freely their love of the stuff, or didn't admit it but indulged just the same. They said it was non-addictive. Said it enhanced performance. Said it was a harmless stimulant and great fun. SO Larry became entangled in an imbroglio, a man with a gun tried to kill him, and former Sgt. Lawrence Hendrix, 101st Airborne, Special Forces, 3 tours, silver Star, Bronze Star etc, shot the man first in a him-or-me situation that could have easily been dismissed as self defense had it happened to someone else.
The actual charges aren't relevant now. Larry would have long-ago been released from prison except for a whopping enhancement and a sleight-of-hand at trial in which a firearm element was charged in the information. Except the jury was never instructed about a firearm element, nor was it submitted to the jury for a factual determination. You can't do that. But they did, in spite of Larry's clean record (he'd never been convicted of anything.
But it gets worse.
The judge had ordered a PSI (Pre-Sentence Investigation), which is common practice before sentencing a man to a prison term. The report, when submitted by the prosecutor, was permanently sealed. To this day, Larry has not been allowed to see what was in that report to create such an impossible situation and to paint him as some sort of deranged killer. It was right out of Kafka: You go in a room, you sit, the man behind the desk consults a mysterious book, and you're judged by whatever he finds. Remember, Larry had no record.
So while the judge was considering this sealed PSR, the prosecutor requested a side-bar for the record and said: "The State thinks this defendant may have his own graveyard, your Honor, that we'll never find. He may be guilty of other robberies and assassinations that the jury doesn't know about."
What robberies? What assassinations? Why weren't these allegations made public? Was there a secret agenda? It was like if you were to put huge, gruesome, rusty handcuffs on an accused man, tattoo his face, head, and march him through the judge's bedroom. Or like mounting little devil horns on, say, your grandmother, then parading her before the court, making her stand on a table and growl and bark like a dog. Of course, Larry's not your grandmother. But like I said, he had no record. And why is his PSR still sealed today?
Then the prosecutor used Larry's military record in front of the jury, asking witnesses questions and going on and on about the training and skills of a Special Forces Airborne soldier. He forced a theory that went something like this: Hey, people, it wasn't really a fair fight, wasn't really self-defense, wasn't really cricket at all because this nasty bad-boy defendant here had been a Vietnam killing machine!
So Larry went to prison, sentenced to 75 years hard time.
That's right, 75 years, over two-thirds of which is an enhancement for being a soldier. And his appeals have all gone for naught because whatever was in that PSR has convinced the higher Florida courts to uphold a lie by the lower Florida court, and to ban Larry from submitting anything further pro se (acting as his own counsel). He had his day in court, they said, which is not true because he never got to see the enhancement evidence, and the jury wasn't presented with part of the gun evidence, and some of the other evidence was spoken in side-bar and sounded like an editorial describing Attila, King of the Huns.
All of this is confusing as hell to me, but typical of the crap I hear every day. Except every day a man isn't done in for 75 years! Larry's adjusted out-date is 2021.
Larry's been down a long time now, all of the '90s, most of the '80s, and River Junction Work Camp is the first time he's been allowed to live in a semi-relaxed environment. He's a certified law clerk, a litigator, who fights for the rights of Florida inmates, so if you've go a question or a problem, he's the guy to see. He is admired and respected by everyone in blue behind the wire, and also by the guards who know some of his history.
But his wounds are daily on display, bleeding still. The scars of prison line his face and exhaust his eyes and when he walks he limps with Airborne Ranger pain, but also with the effort it takes to keep his pride and integrity intact in a world that doesn't want him, that doesn't need him, that has never needed him except during one dark day in America's past that we wish would just go away. For Sgt. Lawrence Hendrix, that dark day has turned into thousands of dark nights in dark cells in some of the most violent prisons in one of the most politically corrupt states in the greatest country the world has ever known, the land of the free, the home of the brave.
I wanna be an Airborne Ranger,
Live a life of guts and danger...
Yeah, right. The greatest country in the world has a self-serving president who's own involvement with cocaine is said to have begun when Larry's did, but is somehow excused as youthful indiscretion, which makes it acceptable for him to judge others from on high. The greatest country in the world has an ex-president who pardons smarmy, oily, billionaire profiteers, but didn't have the courage to call a halt to the madness in our courts. The greatest country in the world has a population eager to punish, but that bows to the antics of football players, wreathes them in glory and gives them MVP awards for bravery on the field, toasts them, lets them speak in victory parades, lets them tell us how sorry they were about, you know, the thing outside the bar that time.
There are a lot of vets in prison in America, and some of them are still being punished for their training and their devotion to duty in far flung theatres around the world. Who cares? We don't?
What America wants, but what it won't get is absolution. Neither will it get these men to finally succumb and fall down smooth-faced and porcelain-eyed from all that brain-numbing rejection after rejection. There are minds at work inside here, and emotions - angers, joys, selfless industries, reckless courages, contempts, horrors, memories - men hanging on words, children of a greater God, inferno-hardened but not for what they did, only for what they endure today - and saddened for what will be endured by the next groups that goes to war for liars.
And it's the politician-facilitators that should be recognized as dangerous. They're the serial criminals. They're the ones who are slack-jawed and shrill and constantly afraid of things and asking guys like Larry to do the dirty work.
Everybody reading this should go to the FL DOC website and look up Mr. Lawrence Hendrix, DC #094601. Punch him in, scroll him down, look at the man. Look into the eyes of Sarge. He's the best of the best. The best we ever had. The question someone should ask is not what did Larry do, but when did he do it. And the answer is not 20 years ago when he protected himself from armed attack, but 34 years ago when he crawled on his belly, eyes squinched up and pee-in-your-pants scared, so that the men he was serving with could be redeemed and could live and go home.
Look at the man. There's your Rambo, Folks. In Prison.
FL DOC Website
http://www.dc.state.fl.us/ActiveInmates/inmatesearch.asp
FOR THE RECORD
Sgt. Hendrix's sentence was illegally enhanced by a venal, ignorant American underbelly alive in our legislative bodies and our courts, not to mention Washington. His skills were not needed. He was frightening and embarrassing. After all, we lost the war. We shouldn't have to put up with reminders as distinctive as Larry. And his PSR, written by morons, probably claimed he was an assassin or maybe Spiderman. They enhanced his sentence using a firearm question never presented to any jury, despite a legal requirement to do so. Then they made it stick by dumping all over his record of valor in Vietnam.
I hope this story is coherent enough to be read. I hope that personal stories, their connections and consequences, can help people see the larger picture and take offense at the cruel disparity involved with locking up some longer than others. I encourage anybody who is moved by Larry's plight to circulate this story, to print it up and mail it to diverse people, to talk radio maybe, to republish it, whatever.* Maybe Sylvester Stallone needs a copy. I already asked Kay if there might be lists of pro bono lawyers on the net that may want to tackle an unpopular cause. But if anyone reading this is affiliated with or knows of a law firm willing to provide a little assistance in helping Sgt. H. file a collateral motion, or if any veterans' groups are interested in assisting him, please write:
Lawrence Hendrix
DC # 094601
River Junction Work Camp
300 Pecan Lane
Chattahoochee, Florida 32324
Gary
Waid
River Junction Florida
3-26-01
* Although I retain copyrights on my work for artistic purposes, I assure you I don't wish to restrain it in any way.
From
So
you think Guantanamo is tough? Well, try Idaho
By Alasdair Palmer
(Filed: 27/01/2002)
HE is woken at 4.30 every morning, given a breakfast of powdered eggs, then left incarcerated in a tiny space for the rest of the day and night. The cell is designed to hold just one person, but there are four men sharing it.
The prison generates a number of mortal risks to health, not the least of which come from the other prisoners, some of whom have Aids, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases - never mind the abilty to inflict murderous physical and sexual violence at any moment.
Is the prisoner enduring these risks a member of al-Qa'eda or the Taliban? Is he being humiliated because he's a fanatical Islamic terrorist captured in Afghanistan? No - he's an ordinary American citizen, tried and convicted for a non-violent offence.
Americans who end up in prison could be forgiven for thinking that European politicians and human rights organisations don't care about them, since they have never weighed in on their behalf with the kind of protest which has been generated by the internment of al-Qa'eda terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.
Yet American prisoners endure far worse conditions than the terrorists in the 8 ft x 8 ft cages now stacking up at Guantanamo, and John Walker - an American who knows what he is in for - is probably not in the least relieved to be bound for a cell in Washington DC.
To get an idea of life in an American prison, consider the case of British-born Andy Martin. Mr Martin was first locked up on Rikers Island, New York, with murderers and rapists for companions. Then he was taken in an unventilated van on an eight-day journey to a Florida jail. The journey nearly killed him.
"If, in Britain, you transported animals the way they transported me," he said accurately, "you would be prosecuted for cruelty." Mr Martin is a 55-year-old lawyer, who was standing as a candidate for the Florida Senate when he was arrested, and who had never been in trouble with the law before.
His offence was alleged to be "causing $1,000-worth of damage to a television camera". Like many other American defendants in cases which, in Britain, would never reach the criminal courts, his legs and arms were chained before he had even been sentenced.
Most American jails are hell-holes. Conditions are generally worse than anything that would be tolerated in British or European prisons. "Most prisons are not air conditioned," the Department of Correction in Florida insists in its official publicity hand-out.
It stresses that prisoners must work and grow their own food in order to save taxpayers' money. It adds that "state law now prohibits the purchase of televisions by Florida prisons for recreational purposes". This is PR from state officials eager to show how tough they are.
Court cases involving the US prison system paint a picture of unrelieved bleakness and brutality. Recent litigation has revealed the extent to which prison guards smash the heads of manacled prisoners into walls, break their bones, and scald them with boiling water.
Guards have admitted to raping women prisoners on a regular basis. And if the level of uncontrolled violence from the staff is bad, what the other inmates are capable of is revolting.
In Idaho, for example, a 17-year-old who was in prison for failing to pay a $73 traffic fine was murdered in his cell by the other prisoners after they had tortured him for 12 hours. In another jail in Youngstown, Ohio, two inmates were murdered and 20 stabbed within a single year.
A nationwide investigation found sexual assault by male prisoners on their fellow inmates to be frequent and widespread. No wonder Donald Rumsfeld, the country's Secretary of Defence, says that "to be in an eight-by-eight cell in beautiful sunny Guantanamo Bay is not inhumane treatment". Compared to the conditions in many American prisons, what's on offer to the terrorists in Guantanamo Bay counts as paradise.
That is why the military police have started to complain that the al-Qa'eda members are getting better treatment - hotter food - than they are. It is also why the Pentagon released the pictures of the orange-suited prisoners, manacled and kneeling, with their eyes and ears blocked.
To the Pentagon, as to the American public, the pictures were proof of that they were doing their job properly in looking after the prisoners securely. They didn't have quite that effect in Britain. Still, even here, it is notable that the protest has come from politicians, churchmen, lawyers and journalists, rather than from ordinary voters.
Polls conducted by British newspapers and television stations have come out with heavy majorities in favour of what the Americans are doing. The editor of the Daily Mirror, for instance, who had invited his readers to agree with him that it constituted "torture", discovered that more than 80 per cent of his readers thought there was nothing wrong with what was happening at Guantanamo Bay.
If there is a conflict, it is one between British politicians and the people who vote for them. The conflict between the governed and their governors is present on almost all law and order issues.
Most British voters want tougher and longer sentences, with fewer legal niceties, more defendants convicted and fewer criminals paroled; most politicians (many of whom used to be lawyers) are not convinced of the efficacy of tougher sentencing policies.
And even those who are (such as Michael Howard when he was home secretary) find it very difficult to put their preferences into practical, as opposed to rhetorical, effect. One difference between Britain and America is that in America, the politics of law and order is not insulated in quite the same way from democratic pressure.
America is built on the assumption that only the people ought to be trusted to legislate on crime and punishment - with the result that in many states, many of the top law-enforcement positions, from the senior judges and chief prosecutors to the county sheriffs, are not appointed but elected.
Politicians have to reflect what the voters think on law and order: if they don't, they lose office. There is no "elite consensus", separate from popular views about crime and punishment. If the electric chair, chain gangs for women prisoners and "three strikes and you're out" is what the voters want, that is what their politicians will give them - and have done so.
We can be sure that, should one of those caged al-Qa'eda members end up in a US prison, he will look back on his days in Guantanamo Bay with wistful nostalgia. That is when he might really need the intervention of organisations dedicated to protecting human rights.
Information appearing on Electronic Telegraph is the copyright of Telegraph Group Limited and must not be reproduced in any medium without licence.
Reproduced gratefully from: telegraph.co.uk
THE CORPORATION THAT PAYS ITS 21,000 WORKERS AS LITTLE AS 23 CENTS/HR:
Federal
Prison Industries, Inc.
Boom Times at FPI
Diane E. Lewis is a staff writer for the Boston Globe. This article was published by the Associated Press in October 1999.
To respond to this article click
here and send us an e mail.
Lisa Watson seems no different from any other factory worker. But she is. After
soldering circuit boards all day, she spends her nights behind bars at the
Federal Correctional Institution in Danbury, Conn.
Watson is one of 21,000 inmates nationwide earning 23 cents to $ 1.15 an hour as
part of a federal prison work program that is reigniting debate around the
country.
At issue: the proposed expansion of Federal Prison Industries Inc., a unit of
the U.S. Justice Department. Its inmates make electronic components, furniture,
clothing, and other items while serving sentences in ninety-four federal
prisons. Last year, FPI reported nearly $ 540 million in sales. Its only
customers: federal agencies.
But that could change. Competing bills heading to Congress could have a lasting
impact on FPI. Under a bill known as the Prison Industries Reform Act, which is
garnering Republican and corporate support, FPI would compete directly for
private contracts while phasing out its relationship with the government over
seven years. A key goal, say sponsors, would be to bring manufacturing back to
the United States (and away from sweatshops overseas) by offering the use of
cheap prison labor.
Supporters contend that expanding prison industries to include private-sector
work would prevent idleness among the nation's burgeoning prison population
while reducing recidivism.
But critics charge that paying prisoners only a fraction of the minimum wage to
produce goods previously made offshore, and then selling those goods on the open
market, would create an unfair competitive advantage that could drive some U.S.
firms out of business and put thousands of American employees out of work.
FPI has its own agenda. Last year, it proposed to its board of directors that it
expand by providing services, as opposed to manufacturing, to private-sector
industries. Laws in place for decades restrict interstate sales of goods made by
prisoners, but do not mention services. As a result, FPI argued, its inmates
should be able to do data entry, kit assembly, packaging, and other services
being done overseas.
After the plan to provide services won board approval in January, 100 female
inmates at a Fort Worth prison began keying data for Chicago-based CCC
Information Services, which provides used-car price reports to auto insurers.
The work had been done in the Philippines.
The FPI expansion has brought together an unlikely group, from unions to the
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to back a second bill filed by U.S. Representatives
Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican, and Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank.
The measure would end FPI's status as the sole supplier of goods and services to
federal agencies, giving small and mid-sized firms a crack at lucrative
government contracts.
"Our view is that FPI is out of control," said Jack Morgan, a
spokesman for the American Apparel Manufacturing Association, which represents
about 250 U.S. firms. Currently, U.S. apparel firms produce 85 percent of all
clothing sold wholesale in this country.
"Right now, FPI has mandatory source preference, which means if the U.S.
Army wants to buy T-shirts and FPI has them, regardless of speed of delivery or
even price, the Army has to buy it from FPI," said Morgan. "Meanwhile,
FPI keeps growing. Originally, it was supposed to minimize its impact on the
private sector. That isn't happening now."
During the Gulf War, he added, the association's members doubled production to
meet military needs. "If our companies go bankrupt, can FPI meet the
demand? We don't think so."
But even though the Hoekstra-Frank bill enjoys wide support, observers say the
Prison Industries Reform Act, sponsored by Representative Bill McCollum, a
Florida Republican, stands a better chance of moving ahead. It has the backing
of Illinois Republican Henry Hyde, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, and
McCollum chairs a House subcommittee on crime.
McCollum said the bill "will benefit American companies by providing a
reliable labor source for those companies that can't find enough workers in
today's low unemployment economy, and it will help reduce labor costs so that
companies can remain competitive with foreign competitors and generate greater
profits for their stockholders."
"For American companies that have resorted to using foreign workers,"
he said, the bill "will provide a means for them to compete using Americans
to make their products and also save the shipping costs, time delays, and the
uncertainty that comes with manufacturing products in a foreign country."
What would prevent a company from replacing American workers with inmates? Under
the bill, said McCollum staffer Susan Dryden, private businesses would be
required to maintain their present level of employment of regular workers for at
least eighteen months after entering into a contract to hire FPI inmates. But
after that, union leaders counter, companies could do as they please.
"Right now, we are banning goods made by prison labor in China from being
sold in the United States," said Frank. "But here, in the United
States, we are giving prison labor a virtual monopoly. I want to see prisoners
rehabilitated, but don't undercut companies that are trying to employ workers
here by competing against them in the government market."
For Steve Schwalb, chief executive of FPI, the bill cosponsored by McCollum and
Virginia Democrat Robert C. Scott could not come at a better time. He says the
nation's federal prison population will increase 50 percent by 2006 to almost
200,000, from 130,000 currently. Of those, about 30,000 prison workers will come
under Schwalb's watch.
"Longer federal sentences, the elimination of parole at the federal level,
and a continued emphasis on drugs and border patrols are responsible for the
growth we are seeing now and expect in the future," said Schwalb. "So,
this is a dilemma for us. How do we achieve enough jobs to keep prisoners
employed, keep them occupied, and prevent recidivism?"
The McCollum bill would require FPI to pay minimum wage to all inmates who make
products sold on the open market -- a requirement that angers unions, which have
fought to raise workers' wages and benefits. Even worse, say union officials,
companies that bring back their manufacturing from overseas could pay inmates
only a fraction of the minimum wage.
At the Danbury facility, Lisa Watson spends most of her week building electronic
cable assemblies and harnesses for the Department of Defense. Of the 1,200 women
housed at the facility, about 250 are working, according to Ken Kaz, associate
warden of industries and education. The prison records $7.5 million to $8.5
million in annual sales.
"One of the aspects of the McCollum bill is that inmates would make more
wages, which means we could extract more money from them, and they could send
more home and pay more on their court assessments," said Kaz.
Watson had not heard about either bill, but she understands the advantages of
being in the FPI work program.
Watson, thirty-seven, a former day-care staffer, was mired in debt when, two
years ago, she walked into her local bank, handed over a note at the teller
window, and walked out with $ 3,700.
She was arrested after a bank employee wrote down her car's license plate
number. Now serving the last year of a thirty-seven month sentence, Watson
believes her work experience will make a difference when it's time to leave.
"I'm working for Mickey Mouse money, but it will help me in the long
run," she said of her job, which pays 92 cents an hour. "It gives you
pride in what you do. An outside company wants to certify us in soldering
techniques. That will help me find a decent job making more than the minimum
wage when I get out."
The debate over privatizing prison work is hardly new. Labor unions have long
argued against it. Over the last two decades, more than thirty states have
passed legislation allowing prisoners to work for private companies, said Gordon
Lafer, a labor professor at the University of Oregon.
"In Oregon, prisoners can be leased for $3 per day, regardless of the
industry," Lafer said. Convicts book flights for TWA in California, he
said, while in Ohio, prisoners make automobile parts for Honda, earning $2 per
hour rather than the $20 to $30 hourly wage negotiated by the United Auto
Workers union.
Although FPI has no prison factories in Massachusetts, some local unions and
small businesses are concerned.
"The whole Federal Prison Industries expansion issue is a threat to
private-sector employment in the United States and right here in Massachusetts,
especially among textile companies who manufacture uniforms for the
military," said Michael Cavanaugh, secretary-treasurer for the Union of
Needletrade, Industrial and Technical Employees (UNITE) in New England.
At Sterlingwear of Boston Inc., chief executive Jerome Danin worries that the
privatization of FPI would have a negative impact on his business. The
thirty-year-old East Boston firm employs 200 unionized piece workers who make
apparel for the U.S. Air Force and pea coats for the U.S. Navy. Sterlingwear
employees earn, on average, $ 9.50 per hour as well as health, pension, and
vacation benefits.
"Right now, 50 percent of all camouflage uniforms are made by prisoners,
and the two to three companies that used to do that work are now making our
products," said Danin. "So, there's been a domino effect. We used to
employ 400 people. Now, we are constantly on the verge of being put out of
business because the U.S. State Department is buying less. If they privatize FPI,
it will affect us and a lot more companies."
Reproduced from:
TWO
MILLION--2,000,000!--BEHIND BARS: New Study
The U.S. Leads the Way
Justice Policy Institute is a policy development and research body which promotes effective and sensible approaches to America's justice system. JPI is a project of the non-profit Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice.
To respond to this article click
here and send us an e mail.
Washington, DC: The Justice Policy Institute
reports that this year, the U.S. prison and jail population will top two million
for the first time. Using the most up-to-date Justice Department statistics and
trends, the Institute estimates that the U.S. now has the world's largest
incarcerated population, and highest incarceration rate. Just six weeks into the
new millennium, America has earned the distinction of having a quarter of the
world's prison population, despite having less than 5 percent of the world's
population.
"It can truly be said that the 1990s have been our most punishing
decade," stated Vincent Schiraldi, Director of the Justice Policy
Institute. "As we enter the new millennium, the ascendance of prisons as
our decade's major public works project and social program is a sad
legacy."
JPI's report, "The
Punishing Decade: Prison and Jail Estimates at the Millennium," shows
that the imprisoned population grew at a faster rate during the 1990s than
during any decade in recorded history. America entered the 1990s with 1,145,300
inmates in its jails and prisons. December 31, 1999, there were an estimated
1,983,084 adults behind bars, and by the end of the year there will be
2,073,969. Given the latest Justice Department data, the Institute guestimates
that the U.S. will surpass 2 million prisoners on February 15.
The prison growth during the 1990s dwarfed the growth of any previous decade; it
exceeded the prison growth of the 1980s by 61 percent, and is nearly thirty
times the average prison population growth of any decade prior to the 1970s.
The Institute estimated that $39 billion will be spent to operate America's
prisons and jails by year end 1999, a figure which will grow to $41 billion by
year end 2000. The Institute also reported that, in 1995, states around the
country spent more building prisons than building universities for the first
time and that two-thirds of those incarcerated in prison and jail (approximately
1.2 million inmates) are imprisoned for non-violent offenses.
"Halfway through black history month, our prisons and jails represent the
sad reality that one out of three young African American males are under some
form of criminal justice control," stated Jason Ziedenberg, Policy Analyst
at the Institute. "Two million prisoners is too many, and the nation must
find alternatives to incarceration to solve America's pressing social
problems."
Reproduced from:
Monday, August 27, 2001
Record
numbers of adults in corrections
<http://inq.philly.com/content/inquirer/2001/08/27/national/PRISONS27.htm>
Last year, 6.4 million were in prison or on probation or parole.
An ACLU official called it "overwhelming."
By Jennifer Loven
ASSOCIATED PRESS
WASHINGTON - The number of adults behind bars, on parole or on probation
reached a record 6.4 million in 2000 - or one in 32 American adults, the
government reported yesterday.
On the positive side, the percentage increase from 1999 was half the
average annual rate since 1990.
Jails and prisons held 30 percent of the adults in the corrections system,
or 1,933,503. People on probation accounted for 59 percent of the total, or
3,839,532. And 725,527 adults were on parole, a period of supervision after
release from prison.
Over the last two decades, the number of adults in the corrections system
has tripled, so that number is now 3.1 percent of the country's adult
population, compared with 1 percent in 1980, said Allen J. Beck, a chief
researcher with the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics.
"It's just overwhelming," said Kara Gotsch, a spokeswoman for the
American
Civil Liberties Union's National Prison Project, which advocates
alternatives to incarceration. "It just shows that we need to put much more
into prevention."
During the 1990s, the corrections population increased 49 percent. By the
end of last year, there were 2.1 million more adults in the system than
there were in 1990.
The rate of growth was 2 percent between 1999 and 2000, compared with an
average of 4 percent during the 1990s. Beck attributed the slowing growth
to the cumulative effect of a general drop in crime rates that began in the
1990s.
"This could be the beginning of a peak," said James Alan Fox, a
criminal
justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
Nearly 2.5 million people were released from parole or probation in
2000. Among parolees, half successfully completed the terms of their
release in 1990. By 2000, just 43 percent completed parole and stayed out
through the end of the year.
Among those released from community supervision in 2000, 15 percent of
probationers and 42 percent of parolees were sent back to prison or jail
that year for new violations. Fox said that figure underestimated the large
number who would probably be convicted again.
Beck said that the number of Americans who had returned to prison had
remained stable over time.
To Gotsch, that shows the shortsightedness of corrections policies that
focus more on punishment and less on rehabilitation.
"It's no wonder that they're re-offending at incredibly high rates because
we don't teach them anything else," she said.
The report also showed:
Among those on probation, 52 percent were convicted of felonies, the most
frequent of which was driving under the influence, followed by drug offenses.
The percentage of women in the prison population, as well as their
percentages among probationers and parolees, rose.
The states with the largest percentage of their adult population in the
corrections system were Georgia, 6.8 percent, and Texas, 5 percent. At the
other end were West Virginia, New Hampshire and North Dakota, each with 0.9
percent.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines01/1106-05.htm
Published on Tuesday, November 6, 2001 in the Wall Street Journal
Going Backwards Federal Government Saves Private Prisons As State Convict Population Levels Off
by Joseph T. Hallinan
CALIFORNIA CITY, Calif. -- Like pioneers from an earlier time, Corrections Corp. of America nearly met its demise here in the Mojave Desert. The private-prison operator spent $106 million in 1998 to build a giant prison in the sand, confident it would land a contract to house California prisoners. What CCA officials didn't anticipate, however, was a sudden stall in the growth of California's prison population and fierce opposition from unionized state prison guards worried about their jobs. The prison remained empty and helped push CCA, then struggling with management problems and mounting debt, to the brink of financial disaster.
The company's desperation should have presented an opportunity to Uncle Sam. While state prison populations appeared to be leveling off, the head counts in federal prisons were growing more rapidly than ever, fueled by tougher drug and immigration laws. The U.S. Bureau of Prisons needed more beds, and the empty prison here offered immediately available capacity. Presumably, the bureau could negotiate a fire-sale price.
Bonanza for CCA
As it turned out, the contract signed last year was a bonanza for CCA. The Bureau of Prisons agreed to pay above-market prices and, on top of that, big cash bonuses if the company achieved vaguely defined performance targets.
Most important, the Bureau of Prisons guaranteed CCA a 95% occupancy rate -- an arrangement almost never included in state private-prison contracts, which typically base payment on the number of beds actually filled. Here in California City, the federal government agreed to pay for 95% of the beds, whether it needs them or not. For now, the prison is full, but the guarantee provides important insurance if demand flags again.
The government didn't stop with CCA, which sparked the creation of the private-prison market nearly 20 years ago and now commands 52% of it. Of the five private prisons now operating under contract with the Bureau of Prisons, three belong to CCA and two to Wackenhut Corrections Corp., the industry's No. 2 player, which has had its own financial problems. All of the contracts are generous by conventional industry standards, as they include occupancy guarantees and long-term renewal options.
What's more, the Bureau of Prisons is expected in coming months to announce additional similarly structured private-prison deals, involving a total of 6,000 beds and more than $1 billion in potential revenue over time. The bureau's offer of occupancy guarantees is "the reason why we're so excited about the federal side," Steven Logan, chairman and chief executive of Cornell Cos., the No. 3 publicly traded prison company, told Wall Street analysts in June. Federal officials, he added, "cut you that check every month," whether or not the cells are full.
For more than three years, the private-prison business has been floundering. A decade-long prison-building boom among states has slowed markedly, while bad publicity about escapes and violence at certain for-profit lockups has raised questions about the companies' competence.
Now, even as the national economy slogs through a recession and a disaster-era federal budget tightens, Washington is effectively throwing the industry a life preserver.
The Bureau of Prisons says its purpose isn't to rescue CCA and the other companies. Bureau officials at first resisted the push for privatization during the mid-1990s by the Clinton administration and Congress. And bureau officials still disagree with the industry contention that outsourcing prisons saves taxpayers money.
In fact, the federal prison agency's ambivalence over privatization helps explain why it has been so generous to the prison companies. Forced by higher political authorities to do business with the industry, a proud and reluctant U.S. prison bureaucracy has embraced the idea that to replicate its own high standards, it has to pay the private sector a premium.
Expensive Experiment
If privatization at the federal level turns out to be an expensive experiment, the chances that Congress or the White House would push for broad-scale outsourcing of federal prisons would diminish. The public system would survive largely intact, and public employees would keep their jobs.
Bureau officials say privatization gives them more flexibility to deal with surges in particular inmate populations, such as illegal immigrants. "We don't sit around and strategize how we can make the contractors look bad or look more expensive," Michael Janus, the bureau's outsourcing chief, says.
Asked to explain the above-market contracts and bonuses, he responds that "price is way down on the list" of factors important to his agency. The federal government, he adds, wants the best prisons, not necessarily the cheapest.
It doesn't hurt relations between the companies and the federal government that CCA and Wackenhut have hired numerous former Bureau of Prisons officials, including those who now serve as wardens of all five of the federal prisons that have been privatized so far. A Bureau of Prisons spokesman says the hiring of former officials has no bearing on contracting decisions.
For their part, CCA officials say that at California City they are providing an almost-new facility and top-notch services that merit premium pay. Even with the recent addition of five private prisons to the federal government's 100 publicly owned and operated facilities, the federally run lockups still have more inmates overall than their stated capacity. "We think [the Bureau of Prisons] could probably use us more," says CCA's chief executive, John Ferguson.
Since CCA opened its pioneering private prison in Tennessee in 1984, government use of such facilities has been controversial. Critics argue that only officials accountable to the public should be trusted with the welfare of inmates.
But prisons cost a fortune -- $50 million and up, as a rule of thumb -- and private industry long had argued that it could house and manage prisoners less expensively than government. By 1997, CCA, based in Nashville, Tenn., had 47 prisons, healthy profits and a soaring stock price.
Encouraged by a national trend toward locking up more drug felons for longer periods of time, CCA built prisons based on speculation that states would rent space in them. In 1998, it acted "on spec" when it put up the one here in California City.
But then trouble struck. After California's prison population jumped by 22% from 1993 to 1996, the growth rate began to slow -- to 3.9% in 1998 and then to only 0.7% in 1999. That made the state a less-eager potential customer. Resistance from the politically potent prison-guard union, which feared privatization of public-sector jobs, ended any hope that state inmates would fill the California City facility.
And CCA was having difficulties elsewhere. A rash of inmate escapes and guard-brutality cases led to harsh media attention and contributed to jitters on Wall Street about prison companies' stock. In one of the most-notorious examples, two inmates were killed by other inmates and six escaped from a medium-security CCA prison in Ohio during separate incidents in 1998.
Privatization opponents pointed to such events as evidence that the industry was incompetent or negligent. CCA and its rivals countered that the incidents illustrated only isolated problems and that, on the whole, private prisons are on a par with public.
Meanwhile, CCA's financial management was faltering. Long-term debt taken on to finance its building boom climbed to $1.09 billion in 1999, from $127 million only two years earlier. The company began losing money -- $730 million in 2000. Its stock dropped to $4.50 a share in 1999, from nearly $45 in 1997. In 2000, it fell as low as 19 cents.
As states around the country began to ease the Draconian sentencing laws that helped the industry get established in the first place, the future looked bleak for CCA. The one ray of hope came from Washington.
Founded in 1930, the Bureau of Prisons remains in the shadow of its parent agency, the U.S. Justice Department. But the BOP, as it's known in Washington, prides itself on being the class operation in its field.
The BOP had resisted suggestions from the Clinton administration that the federal government privatize prisons. "The BOP was adamantly opposed to it," says a former career Justice Department official involved in internal discussions about privatization. "Although they would never say it," the official adds, "I think they were afraid of the camel's nose," meaning that even a small move toward privatization could lead to the eventual outsourcing of most federal prison work.
In a July 1999 "Message to All Bureau of Prisons Employees Regarding Privatization," the agency's director, Kathleen Hawk Sawyer, tried to reassure subordinates that they weren't going to lose their jobs to privatization. For one thing, she wrote, the prison companies hadn't "established an acceptable track record" for "the incarceration of medium- or high-security inmates."
Nevertheless Clinton administration officials intent on "reinventing" government did see privatization as a means of holding down the growth in the BOP's work force, which had nearly doubled during the 1980s, to 19,000 employees. In 1995, as part of his budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year, President Clinton said his administration planned to privatize the management and operations "of most future federal [prison] facilities under construction."
This proposal was enthusiastically received in Congress, where CCA, Wackenhut and Cornell were lobbying for broader privatization. From 1995 to 2000, the three companies made a total of more than $528,000 in federal campaign contributions -- much of it in "soft money" given to the political parties, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C.
The Justice Department, acting on behalf of the BOP, continued to raise safety concerns about privatization, but the momentum was too strong. A Republican-controlled Senate appropriations subcommittee put language in a spending bill in 1996, directing the BOP to launch its first privately operated prison, in Taft, Calif. A spokesman for Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the subcommittee chairman at the time, declines to comment.
The bureau had little choice but to comply. It hired Wackenhut for the job. Congress intervened again in 1997, ordering the BOP to take responsibility for certain inmates in Washington, D.C.'s corrections system.
The BOP didn't warm quickly to privatization. "We did not pursue this change in the Bureau's approach to private contracting," Dr. Sawyer, a BOP veteran who holds a doctorate in counseling and rehabilitation, wrote in her 1999 memorandum.
She noted that "private prison companies often seek business by promising to federal and state legislators that they can provide comparable services at a reduced cost." These industry claims "have not been proven," she stated. But "we cannot ignore them. Some legislators and other policymakers are convinced the cost savings are real."
The BOP opposed broad privatization but recognized that many in Congress viewed outsourcing as a thrifty strategy. Meanwhile, the federal-prison population was expanding rapidly.
By the end of the 1990s, declining rates of violent and property crime, combined with some easing of state sentencing laws, contributed to an apparent leveling off in state prison head counts. But the opposite was happening in the smaller federal system. Harsher federal drug-sentencing laws enacted in the 1980s kept tens of thousands of inmates in federal prisons for longer terms. And tough immigration legislation in 1996 led to sharp increases in the arrest and incarceration of so-called criminal aliens.
Last year, the federal inmate population expanded at a brisk 7.5% rate, to a total of 145,416. BOP officials say they had no choice but to go along with additional outsourcing to handle some of the growth.
But, Dr. Sawyer wrote in her 1999 memo, "we must be cost-competitive with the private-sector companies in order to argue against further congressional mandates for privatization." One way she has done that is cutting the BOP's own costs.
Another factor that has helped keep the BOP cost-competitive with the private sector is the relatively high cost of the bureau's private-prison contracts.
The BOP's approach to determining how much to pay prison contractors indicated a remarkable solicitousness toward the industry's financial concerns. The bureau's Mr. Janus says that the agency held two rounds of "interchange" meetings with industry representatives, the first in 1995 and the second about two years ago. The bureau organized the meetings, which were private and held with one company at a time, because it was "searching for ideas of mutual benefit to both the government and contracting community," he says.
Marvin H. Wiebe, senior vice president for government affairs with Cornell, says the meeting he attended in late 1998 or early 1999 at the BOP's Washington office, was "outstanding, phenomenal." He recalls that as many as 10 bureau officials listened as he outlined the contracting terms his company would like to see in federal-prison contracts. "We were asking for 100% occupancy" guaranteed, he says. "And they came back with what I thought was a very fair and creative plan, which is that they guaranteed 95% occupancy."
Louise Green, a spokeswoman for CCA, says employees currently with the company "didn't have any conversations" of this sort with the BOP, although ex-employees may have. Wackenhut employees attended meetings with bureau officials, says Margaret Pearson, a company spokeswoman. But the company declines to make those employees available or comment further.
BOP officials decline to discuss in detail why they went along with the industry's suggestion of occupancy guarantees, sometimes known as take-or-pay provisions. In a written statement responding to questions on the topic, the bureau says: "In formulating our approach, we solicited input from the corrections industry and other independent correctional experts. Based on our own data and feedback from the private-corrections industry, we determined that payment for 95% of designated capacity was appropriate."
Mr. Janus adds that paying for the exclusive use of an entire prison gives the federal government more leverage in determining how a facility is managed. That reasoning is roughly akin to that of a company that rents an entire hotel for a conference, instead of just the rooms its employees occupy -- an analogy that Mr. Janus accepts.
As an additional plum, the BOP promised companies substantial bonuses for "optimum performance" in three areas: overall work quality, responsiveness and management of "quality-control" programs.
The idea of awarding performance bonuses and agreeing to take-or-pay guarantees startles some state-prison officials, who otherwise generally express respect for their federal counterparts. Montana, for example, offers neither take-or-pay nor bonuses to CCA, which operates a 500-bed medium-security prison in the town of Shelby. "We expect them to do a good job," says Pat Smith, contracting chief for the Montana Department of Corrections. "If they don't, we fire them."
Asked whether any CCA customers, other than the federal government, provide bonus payments, company spokesman Steven M. Owen says, "I'm not aware of any that come to mind." None of Wackenhut's state contracts has bonus provisions, either, says Ms. Pearson.
Apart from financial considerations, the BOP didn't see the highly publicized incidents of violence or escapes at some private prisons as an obstacle to hiring the industry. The bureau's Mr. Janus says those kinds of events happen periodically in all prison systems, including the BOP.
Still, the bureau shares the view of many private-prison skeptics that the industry lacks sufficient competence to handle medium- and high-security inmates. That is why the BOP limited its private contracts to only the least-risky inmates, those classified as low- or minimum-security, Mr. Janus says. Most inmates in the bureau's growing population of criminal aliens fall into those categories.
In the fall of 1999, the BOP sought industry proposals for housing criminal-alien prisoners in the Southwest. CCA put in the winning proposal.
In June 2000, with CCA losing money and its California City facility sitting empty, the BOP awarded the company the biggest contract in private-prison history. Covering both California City and a second CCA facility in Cibola County, N.M., the deal promised the company a minimum of $68.7 million a year in revenue, the equivalent of 22% of CCA's total 2000 revenue. The deal, which spanned three years, with seven one-year options to renew, could be worth $760 million over the 10-year period. The day it was announced, CCA's stock rose 56%.
Almost all of the roughly 2,300 criminal aliens held at the California City prison have been convicted of one of three offenses: illegal entry into the country, illegal re-entry, or possession or trafficking of drugs. As low- and minimum-security inmates, they are less expensive to guard than more-dangerous prisoners, who require greater security.
Yet the BOP agreed to pay an annual average of $21,880 per inmate at California City, or slightly more than the $21,601 the agency spends, on average, throughout the entire federal system, including medium- and high-security inmates.
As a result of its occupancy guarantees, the BOP sometimes pays more than the $21,880 average. California City is fully occupied now. But as of Oct. 11, at its sister CCA prison in Cibola County, N.M., 877 of 961 beds under contract -- 91% -- were occupied. The cost of paying for the extra 4%, to fulfill its take-or-pay guarantee, has hiked the BOP's annualized per-prisoner cost at Cibola to $23,777 -- 10% higher than the average cost at BOP-run prisons overall.
The BOP has included the 95% guarantee in all five of its existing private prisons, three of which are operating below capacity. Future federal-prison contracts are also expected to include such guarantees.
The good news for CCA doesn't end there. In May, the company learned it would receive a $520,000 bonus for its successful operation of the prison at California City and a third facility it operates for the BOP, at Eloy, Ariz. For a company that had a loss of $5.3 million for the first quarter this year, that's a significant amount.
As set out in the written BOP contract, the objective of the bonus "is to afford the contractor an opportunity to earn [an] increased fee commensurate with the achievement of the optimum performance." Unofficially, says Mr. Janus, "it avoids the haggling that sometimes takes place in a contractual negotiation." Since privatization of federal prisons began in 1997, the BOP says it has paid a total of $2.3 million in bonuses to CCA and Wackenhut.
A look at what states pay private prisons makes CCA's federal contract look even richer. Here in California City, the company receives $57.48 per inmate a day at full occupancy. In Mississippi, by contrast, CCA gets just $28.29 a head a day. In Idaho, it gets $37.60; in Montana, $51.59.
"Do we pay a little bit more?" asks the BOP's Mr. Janus. "Probably. But I think we get a better service."
By service, Mr. Janus says, he means a range of things, from the recreational programs a prison offers inmates to how accommodating it is in meeting BOP requests. For instance, he says, the occupancy guarantees and bonuses ensure that when the BOP doubles to 80 from 40 the number of prisoners it delivers to California City during a particular week, CCA won't grumble. The government values another kind of flexibility, as well, he adds. Rather than financing construction of new prisons for criminal aliens, the BOP has committed itself to only three years of service at California City. After that, if illegal immigration eases or there is a move to legalize some of those who have entered the country unlawfully, the BOP can walk away from the private prison.
At the California City facility, 120 miles northeast of Los Angeles, Warden Percy Pitzer says that high on the list of services that warrant generous pay is inmate rehabilitation. In the hobby-craft room, for instance, inmates spend their days at plywood tables making elaborate jewelry boxes from toothpicks and Popsicle sticks. In an indication of how rarely violence is a problem here, the inmates are allowed to use razor-blade-equipped box cutters in their craft work.
Privatization of federal prisons will continue to expand, the BOP predicts. CCA's Mr. Ferguson says he very much looks forward to more federal contracts. "We treasure the Bureau," he says.
"There are but two powers in the world, the sword and the mind. In the long run the sword is always beaten by the mind." Napoleon Bonaparte
THREE STRIKES AND YOU'RE OUT. HUMAN RIGHTS, US STYLE
As Americans shrug off criticism of Camp X-Ray, thousands of their countrymen suffer cruel but all-too-usual punishment
LONDON/UK GUARDIAN by Duncan Campbell in Los Angeles
Copyright Saturday January 26, 2002, Guardian Unlimited, Guardian Newspapers Limited, http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,639791,00.html
The scene is a battered old green and white bungalow in the heart of South Central, Los Angeles, which serves as the local Quakers' meeting house. There are around 20 people here, heads bowed and holding hands as one of their number, Carmen Ewell, asks the Lord for his help in the mighty task facing them.
That task involves changing one of the most controversial statutes in the US, the three strikes law, so the people now serving prison sentences of 25 years to life for offences including stealing four cookies, and possession of $10 worth of drugs will be able to return to their lives.
In a week that has been dominated in Europe by debate about the way al-Qaida suspects are being treated in Guantanamo Bay, in the US itself the public mood is utterly unflustered by such human rights issues. For this is the country that has jailed a higher percentage of its citizens than any other in the world. And this is the country that has embraced the three strikes law.
The law was introduced after the horrific murder of a 12-year-old girl called Polly Klaas in 1993. Her abductor and murderer, Richard Allen Davis, was a three-time offender who was on parole. In the wake of the outrage over the crime, Californians voted for an initiative which called for three-time felons to be jailed for a minimum of 25 years. The initiative became law, and now more than 30 states in the US have adopted their own versions of it.
Under three strikes, violent criminals like Davis have been locked up for life. But it has also been used to sweep thousands of homeless people, drug addicts and petty offenders off the streets and into jail with sentences that bear little relationship to the crime. Critics of the law claim it has created a Siberia of forgotten prisoners, mainly black and Latino, who are the victims of cruel and unusual punishment.
Gregory Taylor, for instance, was a homeless man who used to hang around outside St Joseph's church in Los Angeles and would often ask the priest for food. The priest was usually able to find him something over the nine or so years he knew him. Shortly after 4am one morning in 1997, Taylor decided he could not wait for the friendly priest and pried open the church's kitchen door. security guard spotted him and the police were called. He is now serving 25 years to life because the break-in was his third felony. When he appealed unsuccessfully against his sentence last year, one of the dissenting judges said the case was "like something from Les Misérables".
Taylor's case is far from isolated. At this meeting of the South Central chapter of Families to Amend California's Three Strikes (Facts) there are mothers and fathers and girlfriends and wives of other prisoners who face dying in prison for offences which in other parts of the world might not even merit a fine. "This is an insane law," says Geri Silva, who is chairing the meeting. "It's like cutting off a hand for stealing a slice of bread."
"The United States is a very unforgiving country at the moment," says Gail Blackwell, who works at the Facts office in South Central. Her friend, Joey Buckhalter, was jailed for 75 years to life for stealing a wallet with $24 in it. "People are more interested in punishment and revenge than in rehabilitation. People don't even care about the 2m people in jail in their country in terrible conditions."
Fred Zullo, another Facts supporter, is the father of 24-year-old Philip Zullo, now facing 75 years to life for making threatening phone calls. He is mentally ill, suffering from a bipolar and obsessive compulsive disorder. Mr Zullo says his son's offence arose out of a desire to commit "suicide-by-cop", a not-uncommon scenario in which disturbed people threaten the police, often with dummy weapons, in the hope they will be shot.
Philip Zullo telephoned an ex-girlfriend and her family, another girlfriend and her mother and threatened them with horrific violence. He then told the police he was wearing a bulletproof vest and had an AK-47 and said they would have to shoot him in the head to kill him. He has never owned a gun. But because he made three threats, a maximum 25-year sentence for each offence is multiplied three times.
"He is mentally ill," Fred Zullo says. "Never in his life has he harmed anyone. He didn't even remember the calls. He just said, 'Dad, I screwed up again.'"
The prosecution has indicated that it will seek the maximum sentence. The local district attorney has a reputation as a hardliner; his ranch is called Hang 'em High. He has already turned down a plea not to pursue the three strikes option. Of the law, Fred Zullo says wryly: "I was in favour of it, unfortunately. A lot of people didn't realise what it meant."
He has met Joe Klaas, the grandfather of the murdered Polly who now says the family's intention was never that the law should be used to incarcerate inadequates, minor non-violent offenders or the mentally ill. Indeed Mr Klaas even signed a personal ad that ran in the New York Times in which he said: "My family regrets that the law cast in her name has cast too wide a net."
He pointed out that 50% of three-strikers are non-violent performers: "Does three strikes offer enough benefits to justify its huge fiscal and societal impact? It's too late to bring Polly back but it's not too late to make California a wiser, safer state."
Ricky Fontenot is serving 27 years to life for being in a car with a friend in which a gun was found. His last previous serious felony was in 1979 when he was 18. He had since become involved in community action, had a full-time job and was married with three children. The prosecution offered him a deal whereby he would serve only four years but he insisted he was innocent and was thus hit with the maximum.
"We have dedicated our lives to trying to get him out," says his stepfather, Roland McFarland, after the South Central meeting. "It's expensive - you've got to come up with that almighty dollar. There are some vicious crimes that should be addressed and I would support a three strikes law for that but not for people who have never even threatened anyone."
These are just a tiny sample of the cases. Probably the most famous is still that of Jerry Dewayne Williams, who at the age of 27 was sentenced to 25 years to life for stealing a slice of pepperoni pizza. He was eventually freed on appeal after six years. Kevin Weber stole four cookies from a Santa Ana restaurant in 1995 and was jailed for 25 years. Duane Silva, a 23-year-old with manic depression and an IQ of 70, received 30 years to life sentence for stealing a video recorder and a coin collection from his neighbours. His previous convictions were for setting fire to rubbish bins and to the glove compartment of a car. Then there is Doug Rosh, doing 25 years for possession of $10 worth of cocaine. Mary Thompson, doing 25 years for petty theft. Joyce Demeyers, doing 25 years for $20 worth of cocaine. Constantine Aguilar, doing 25 years for receiving stolen property. Chano Orozco, doing 25 years to life for possession of about $10 worth of heroin. Frederick Morgan, doing 25 years to life for simple possession of drugs and petty theft.
A total of 6,700 people are now serving 25 years to life under the law and Facts says more than 3,350 of them are non-violent offenders, with 350 serving 25 years for petty theft. Of those serving third strike sentences, 44% are black and 26% Latino.
One of the main arguments for the three strikes law is that it has cut crime in California. Certainly crime has dropped in the period during which it has been in place but it has fallen yet further in states with no three strikes law. The San Francisco area, where prosecutors rarely use the law for non-violent offenders, has also seen a sharp drop. New York state, with no three strikes law, and California showed the same crime reduction of 41% between 1993 and 1999, according to the Sentencing Project in Washington.
Those campaigning to change the law are now pinning their hopes on Jackie Goldberg, a Democratic state assemblywoman who is introducing a bill to limit the heaviest application of the law to criminals convicted of violent or serious crimes. The day she announced her bill, a survey carried out jointly by Facts and Citizens Against Violent Crime showed that 65% of Californians believe that the law should be used only against violent felons.
But this is election year in California. Governor Gray Davis, already accused of seriously mishandling the state's power crisis, is in no mood for reform as he runs for re-election. Bill Jones, a Republican eyeing his job, said this week that changing the law would give criminals a "get out of jail free card".
The Los Angeles district attorney, Steve Cooley, agrees that the law has been wrongly applied in the past, but says there is little chance of retrospective action to free those jailed for minor non-violent offences because few politicians want to be accused of being soft on crime.
There is also a powerful prison-industrial complex which has a very clear financial incentive in maintaining the three strikes law. California spends $5.7bn a year on its prisons and there would be fierce lobbying against any reduction in the budget. The prison officers' union is a powerful political player and fights any reform that might put members out of work. It has donated $2m to Governor Davis's campaign.
Back at the South Central meeting, Carmen Ewell, whose husband is in jail for passing a dud cheque, calls on the Lord for his help in persuading the law-makers that the three strikes law is indeed cruel if it is no longer unusual. But, for the time being at least, it would seem that Les Misérables is assured of a long run in California.
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