Arizona May Put State Prisons in Private Hands
FLORENCE, Ariz. —
One of the newest residents on Arizona’s death row,
a convicted serial killer named Dale Hausner,
poked his head up from his television to look at
several visitors strolling by, each of whom wore
face masks and vests to protect against the sharp
homemade objects that often are propelled from
the cells of the condemned.
It is a dangerous place to patrol, and Arizona spends
$4.7 million each year to house inmates like Mr. Hausner
in a super-maximum-security prison. But in a first
in the criminal justice world, the state’s death row
inmates could become the responsibility of a private company.
State officials will soon seek bids from private companies
for 9 of the state’s 10 prison complexes that house roughly
40,000 inmates, including the 127 here on death row.
It is the first effort by a state to put its entire prison
system under private control.
The privatization effort, both in its breadth and its financial goals,
demonstrates what states around the country — broke,
desperate and often overburdened with prisoners and
their associated costs — are willing to do to balance the books.
Arizona officials hope the effort will put a $100 million
dent in the state’s roughly $2 billion budget shortfall.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said State Representative Andy Biggs,
a Republican who supports private prisons.
“If we were not in this economic environment,
I don’t think we’d be talking about this with the
same sense of urgency.”
Private prison companies generally build facilities for a state,
then charge them per prisoner to run them.
But under the Arizona legislation, a vendor would pay $100 million
up front to operate one or more prison complexes.
Assuming the company could operate the prisons more cheaply
or efficiently than the state, any savings would be equally divided
between the state and the private firm.
The privatization move has raised questions — including
among some people who work for private prison companies —
about the private sector’s ability to handle the state’s most
hardened criminals. While executions would still be performed
by the state, officials said, the Department of Corrections
would relinquish all other day-to-day operations to the
private operator and pay a per-diem fee for each prisoner.
“I would not want to be the warden of death row,” said Todd Thomas,
the warden of a prison in Eloy, Ariz., run by the
Corrections Corporation of America. The company,
the country’s largest private prison operator, has six prisons
in Arizona with inmates from other states.
“That’s not to say we couldn’t,” Mr. Thomas said.
“But the liability is too great. I don’t think any private
entity would ever want to do that.”
James Austin, a co-author of a Department of Justice
study in 2001 on prison privatization and president
of the JFA Institute, a corrections consulting firm,
said private companies tended to oversee minimum- and
medium-security inmates and had little experience
with the most dangerous prisoners.
“As for death row,” Mr. Austin said, “it is a very visible entity,
and if something bad happens there, you will have a
pretty big news story for the Legislature and governor to explain.”
Arizona is no stranger to private prisons or, for that matter,
aggressive privatization efforts (recently, the state put
up for sale several government buildings housing executive
branch offices in Phoenix). Nearly 30 percent of the state’s
prisoners are being held in prisons operated by private
companies outside the state’s 10 complexes.
In addition, other states, including Alaska and Hawaii,
have contracts with private companies like
Corrections Corporation of America to house their prisoners in Arizona.
For advocates of prison privatization, the push here breathes
a bit of life into a movement that has been on the decline
across the country as cost savings from prison privatizations
have often failed to materialize, corrections officers unions
have resisted the efforts and high-profile problems in
privately run facilities have drawn unwanted publicity
“We have private prisons in Arizona already, and we are
very happy with the performance and the savings we get
from them,” said Representative John Kavanagh, a
Republican who is chairman of the House Appropriations
Committee and an architect of the new legislation authorizing
the privatization. “I think that they are the future of
corrections in Arizona.”
Under the legislation, any bidder would have to take
an entire complex — many of them mazes of multiple
levels of security risks and complexity — and would not
be permitted to pick off the cheapest or easiest
buildings and inmates. The state also wants to
privatize prisoners’ medical care.
Louise Grant, a spokeswoman for Corrections Corporation of America,
said the high-security prisoners would be well within the
company’s management capabilities. “We expect we will
be there to make a proposal to the state” for at
least some of its complexes up for bid, Ms. Grant said.
In pure financial terms, it is not clear how well the
state would make out with the privatization.
The 2001 study for the Department of Justice found
that private prisons saved most states little money
(there has been no equivalent study since). Indeed,
many states, struggling to keep up with the cost of corrections,
have closed prisons when possible, and sought changes in
sentencing to reduce crowding in the last two years.
As tough sentencing laws and the ensuing increase in
prisoners began to press on state resources in the 1980s,
private prison companies attracted some states with
promises of lower costs. The private prison boom lasted
into the 1990s. Throughout the years, there have been
high-profile riots, escapes and other violent incidents.
The companies also do not generally provide the same wages
and benefits as states, which has resulted in resistance
from unions and concerns that the private prisons attract
less-qualified workers.
Then the federal government stepped in, with a
surge of new immigrant prisoners, and began to
contract with the private companies. The number
of federal prisoners in private prisons in the
United States has more than doubled, to 32,712 in 2008
from 15,524 in 2000. The number of state prisoners in
privately run prisons has increased to 93,500 from
75,000 in that time.
With bad economic times again driving many decisions
about state resources, other states are sure to watch
Arizona’s experiment closely.
“There simply isn’t the money to keep these people
incarcerated, and the alternative is to free many of
them or lower cost,” said Ron Utt, a senior research
fellow for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group
whose work for privatization was cited by one Arizona lawmaker.
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