Can Oregon Afford to Go Into the Private Prison Business?

Article by Kathleen Pequeño

Multnomah County Sheriff Bernie Guisto is proposing that Multnomah County move into the prisons-for-profit business, renting an existing jail to the Geo Group, one of the country’s largest private prison companies. But is that the future we want for Oregon and Multnomah County? Let’s ask and answer some questions about this proposal to move Oregon into the prison-for-profit business.

Why would Multnomah County want to allow a private company to lease one of our jails?

Multnomah County has been unable to find the funds to open the Wapato Jail since construction was completed in 2004. Geo Group is proposing to lease an existing jail (the Inverness Jail in Northeast Portland, which they would expand to twice its current capacity) and pay rent to the county. Multnomah County would use the income to open up the Wapato Jail. The Geo Group (formerly known as Wackenhut, one of the largest private prison companies in the world) would operate it as a prison.

Has Oregon tried private prisons in the past?

Although we’ve never had a private prison in Oregon, back in the 1990s Oregon sent prisoners to private prisons elsewhere. This included female prisoners that we sent to a private prison in Arizona. That all ended in 1997 when the women we imprisoned in Arizona reported that they were being sexually assaulted by guards. That and other problems led Oregon’s legislature to pass a ban on sending Oregon prisoners to out-of-state prisons, a ban still in existence today.

Have private prisons been around a long time?

There’s a long history of people and corporations profiting off of people in prison, but private prison corporations have only been around since the 1980s. By 2000, many of the companies had a lengthy record of violence, lawsuits, and poor financial returns, and didn’t have much going for them. But they’re one of the industries that have been able to profit in the post-9/11 world. The post-9/11 wave of federal immigrant detention opened up the market, and the companies have been on the rebound ever since. Now, the typical inventory of a private prison includes not only state prisoners and federal prisoners, but immigrants in federal detention.

“Inventory?” What do you mean, “inventory?”

The “inventory” in the private prison business is human bodies. Private prisons can only make a profit if there are people who can be locked up inexpensively. For the private prison industry, there’s “market growth” in people failing and winding up back in prison on new charges later. The Geo Group’s selling point for a Portland private prison is not that people confined in this prison will be less likely to return to prison… it’s just that they can turn a profit and give us a cut. We’ll be counting on their profits to fund other services, becoming part of a ghoulish equation that depends on locking people up solely to generate income.

The grotesque quality of the private prison business led the State of Utah to back out of a proposed contract with a private prison company (Cornell Corrections) in 2000, because, among other reasons, some key Mormon church members agreed with activists that the private prison business was a “traffic in souls.” But the prison had already been sited, so Cornell Corrections threatened to sue the state, and the state paid them $1 million rather than go to court.

The company got paid for a prison that it didn’t even open? Is that sort of thing typical?

Lawsuits of all sorts go with private prisons. In 2005, the state of Michigan became a defendant in a lawsuit filed because of abuse of youth in a Geo Group youth prison in Lake County, Michigan. The suit focused on mistreatment of the youth, noting—among other problems—an epidemic of 61 suicide attempts in a six-month period. A legislative audit concluded that the prison was unnecessarily expensive. Faced with the lawsuit and a budget crisis, the state terminated their contract. But the company wasn’t satisfied to let the state quietly withdraw, and filed their own lawsuit for wrongful termination. This is what one calls a “Faustian bargain.”

“Faustian bargain?” What’s that?

That’s when a person sells his or her soul to the devil, thinking that he or she is getting something great in the short term. For us, it’s when our county tells us that it needs to raise money for a jail by opening up a prison-for-profit.

It’s when we start wondering how we’re going to pay for drug treatment and we’re told that we can’t have money for treatment, even though it is less expensive than jail beds and would reduce the need for jail beds in our county.

It’s when we invest in a future for Oregon that is not based on better education for our children, or developing a model for healthcare that other states can follow. Instead we lay our money on the line hoping that a prison full of human bodies can pay off for us.

Private prisons are not our future.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 06/Winter 07 issue of Justice Matters.