That is why Vermont must get out of the private prison business.
It costs about the same to house a prisoner of the same needs, security, behavior and other requirements in a prison bed, no matter where you put it or who runs it, if you meet the same standards — health, sanitation, food, mental health, treatment, etc.
What is different about the private sector in a seller’s market is that it can be highly selective about what kind of inmate it is willing to take. If you only house inmates with no serious health or mental health problems, and no security, behavior or escape risk history, who have long sentences and are willing to do their time, it is relatively cheap to provide the constitutional minimums, and a little more, like smoking “privileges.” For these inmates, the private prison doesn’t have to hire trained or specialized staff. It can go where the labor is cheaper, and heating costs are low.
This leaves the public prisons to house the most expensive inmates: those requiring high security, intensive medical or mental health care, or evidence-based treatment to reduce risk. It also leaves the public prisons with the thousands of people who are arrested, lodged and released on bail or after a plea, who bring with them the high costs of the first few days in jail – search, suicide prevention, close monitoring, medical screening and intervention, detoxification, and mental health intervention, and who have to be available to go to court in the county where they committed their (alleged) crimes.
The private prison gets to skip out on all these major operating costs, and, since it only needs market share to grow and can borrow from the financial sector rather than the taxpayer and build where it wants rather than where the voters will allow it, then the per-capita costs are bound to be lower. The private prison can also control its crowding. If you build a prison and maintain the population within the capacity, the costs are predictable. This predictability makes the private prison attractive to investors and to banks.
A public prison, which must accept anyone the courts or police send to it, cannot control crowding. It can only respond to it by: 1. Overcrowding its prisons (which reduces per-capita costs but increases overall costs by requiring additional staffing and reduced effectiveness in reducing recidivism); 2. Building or expanding existing prisons (which meets the NIMBY opposition and the public capital cost financing); or 3. Outsourcing to the private sector.
Privatization is not necessarily bad. If the overcrowding of prisons is legitimate and meets the fundamental purpose of government, that is to protect the citizens from that which they cannot protect themselves, then privatization is an effective and efficient remedy.
However, the apparent lower cost of privatization can influence legislators and judges to minimize their consideration of the costs, and order more of it, for less serious crimes, and for less dangerous criminals. This is exactly the market share that the private sector wants.
It is in the explicit interest of the private prison industry to increase sentencing for less serious crimes, and lengthen sentences for criminals who are easier to manage (both in prison and in the community). So, they lobby legislatures, governors and the departments of corrections to market their product.
The problem with privatization is not that the prisons were privatized. The problem with privatization is that a private company will seek to expand its market, as well as its market share. The private prison industry, led by Corrections Corporation of America, has invested heavily in lobbying state legislatures to criminalize behaviors that were not previously criminalized. In fact, in 2007, Forbes Magazine (not a liberal journal) noted that CCA was the most effective company in America in lobbying state legislatures. CCA had lobbyists in every single state legislature throughout the 1990s and 2000s lobbying for longer and longer sentencing for more and more crimes.
The bottom line is this: The only way to save money in corrections, in either the long run or in the short term, is to reduce demand. We have become more and more addicted to incarceration as the solution to our fear, as we are more and more addicted to fossil fuels, or to heroin or cocaine or alcohol.
The science is clear: Community intervention produces better outcomes for recidivism. The data show that communities can manage most offenders in restorative and rehabilitative alternatives, with better outcomes and lower costs. Not putting people in prison who don’t pose a threat to us is a lot cheaper than putting them in any kind of prison, public or private.
So long as it is in the interest of the private sector to expand the market, it will attempt to do so. We are not going to reduce prison costs until we reduce the use of incarceration.
