Will private prisons work?

The Youngstown VindicatorDecember 11, 2011

Ohio was facing an $8 billion budget shortfall in 2010 when Gov. John Kasich took office. He proposed an ambitious and unprecedented plan to balance the corrections portion of the budget — sell five prisons to private companies.

Lake Erie Corrections Institution, located in Ashtabula County, was the only prison sold. It’s the first state prison in the nation to be sold to a private company.

Correction Corporation of America (CCA) bought the facility for $72.7 million. The state will pay CCA $44.25 per inmate per day in addition to an annual $3.8 million ownership fee.

CCA may be familiar to many because the company operates the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown. The state’s ability to sell only one of five prisons slated for sale was not a concern for the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. “It’s not a disappointment at all,” Annette Chambers-Smith, deputy director of administration told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, “... we thought we would need to sell all five of them to net $50 million.”

Major player

CCA operates 60 facilities in 19 states and the District of Columbia. Those facilities have more than 80,000 beds and currently house about 75,000 offenders. CCA owns 44 of the facilities it operates, representing more than half of all the private prison beds nationwide. According to the company website, CCA with its 17,000 employees is the fifth-largest corrections system in the nation, behind only the federal government and three states.

Privatization may seem like a promising way to generate revenue and cut costs in difficult economic times. Ohio’s prisons are over capacity. As of October, Ohio’s 30 prisons had the capacity to house 38,196 inmates, but actually confined 50,334.

There is an incarceration bubble in America. That bubble may burst as budget woes force states to reduce prison populations andthe federal government look for alternatives to an immigration policy that has been a boon to private prisons.

Prison reduction efforts are obviously not part of the package offered by corporate-run prisons. They have no incentive to explore alternatives to incarceration, such as electronic monitoring, half-way houses or other diversionary efforts to reduce the number of non-violent offenders behind bars.

Ohio, like many states, is trying to reduce its prison population. Nonviolent offenders often serve the shortest sentences. There are about 12,000 inmates in Ohio serving state sentences of less than one year. Some estimate that reducing short term sentences in state prison could trim inmate population by about 4,000 within four years.

The Texas-based criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast recently reprinted portions of CCA’s latest annaul 10-K report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. CCA acknowledged that the company is “dependent upon the governmental agencies with which we have contracts to provide inmates for our managed facilities. We cannot control occupancy levels at our managed facilities ... a decrease in our occupancy rates could cause a decrease in revenues and profitability.”

The report continues, “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by…leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices.”

Federal threat

CCA is not ignoring the threat of leniency or a reduction in occupancy. According the Chattanoogan, citing a report from the National Institute on Money in State Politics, CCA hired 199 lobbyists in 32 states between 2003 and 2010. On the federal level, CCA spent more than $18 million on lobbying between 1999 and 2009.

CCA’s Ohio lobbyist, Don Thibaut, served as Gov. Kasich’s chief of staff when he was in Congress, says The Associated Press. The connections go beyond a lobbyist. Kasich’s corrections director Gary C. Mohr spent five years as a consultant for CCA.

The incarceration bubble, like the real estate bubble before it, will burst, which could mean trouble for Ohio taxpayers.

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Ohio's death penalty derailed

Youngstown Vindicator

Matthew T. Mangino

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Has the tide turned in Ohio? At one point, several months ago, Ohio had executed more prisoners in 2011 than any other state. In 2010, Ohio was behind only Texas in the number of executions carried out. Texas has been the most prolific purvey of state-sponsored death since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

Ohio was literally setting the standard for executions nationwide. In 2009, after a brief moratorium following the botched execution of Romel Broom, Ohio was the first state to move from the standard three-drug execution protocol to a single-drug protocol.

Ohio was the second state to replace the sedative sodium thiopental used as an execution drug, currently in short supply, with pentobarbital. Ohio is the only state with a single-drug protocol using only pentobarbital.

Inconsistencies

That all changed in early July, when U.S. District Court Judge Gregory L. Frost delayed the scheduled execution of death row inmate Kenneth Wayne Smith after finding Ohio enforces some of its execution policies inconsistently.

Judge Frost wrote, “It is the policy of the State of Ohio that the state follows its written execution protocol, except when it does not.” Judge Frost continued, “Sometimes with no physical ramification and sometimes with what has been described as messy if not botched executions.”

The court found that the state failed to have the required medical personnel available, failed to properly document preparation of the execution drugs, or to prepare inmates for lethal injection.

Since then, the Ohio Supreme Court has scheduled two executions for well into 2013 providing additional time to address the concerns with Ohio’s execution protocol. Gov. John Kasich postponed a second execution, this one scheduled for August 16, 2011. The New York Times has suggested that Gov. Kasich’s action “is an admission that Ohio’s management of the death penalty is broken and further proof that the machinery of death cannot be operated responsibly anywhere.”

Ohio is front and center in America’s death penalty debate. The state is a hotbed of prominent politicos who have turned their back on capital punishment. Recently, a number of prominent Ohioans came out publicly in opposition to the death penalty. Earlier this year, Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeiffer declared his opposition to the death penalty in an op-ed published in the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Former Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro recently told the Cincinnati Enquirer, “I used to believe that the death penalty was a crime deterrent and cost less than incarcerating someone for 40 years. I know now it does not save money and is not a deterrent to crime.” Petro and Pfeiffer were both members of the legislature in 1981 when Ohio’s death penalty statute was passed.

Death row

Last year, Ohio moved more offenders off of death row than were placed on death row. There were eight executions and three commutations. Only seven offenders were sentenced to death statewide. At the current rate it would take 38 years to clear Ohio’s death row. Nationwide the numbers are even more abysmal. There are about 3,400 offenders on death row. It would take 73 years to execute everyone on death row at last year’s execution rate — even without adding another person to death row.

The death penalty is in question, not because some killers do not deserve themselves to die, but rather because the act of execution has become so rare as to indicate the presence of caprice if an offender is executed or fortuity if an offender is not. Neither caprice nor fortuity has a place in the criminal justice system.