CCA At It Again: Held in Contempt for Understaffing Prison and Lying About It
Yesterday, a federal judge in Idaho issued a scathing decision finding the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in contempt of court – illustrating, yet again, that handing control of prisons to for-profit companies is a recipe for abuse, neglect, and misconduct.CCA is the nation's largest owner and operator of for-profit prisons, with annual revenues topping $1.7 billion.
The company runs the Idaho Correctional Center (ICC), a for-profit prison so violent that prisoners call it the "Gladiator School" – a study by the Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC) in 2008 found it had higher levels of violence than Idaho's seven other prisons combined. In 2010, theACLU filed suit against CCA for turning a blind eye to the epidemic violence at ICC, and in 2011, the parties agreed to settle the lawsuit after CCA promised to make a number of improvement, including hiring all the guards required in its contract with IDOC plus three additional guards.But then CCA broke that promise – and lied about it. Repeatedly.
In April of this year, CCA issued a press release claiming that based on "an extensive internal investigation," it had found there were "some inaccuracies" in staffing records over a seven-month period in 2012, and that the company regretted "decisions made by certain ICC staff members." The press release said nothing about the number of hours that had been falsely reported as having been filled. In a separate press release issued by IDOC, however, it was disclosed that there were approximately 4,800 hours of time during those seven months where CCA employees had falsified records to indicate a correctional officer was staffing a security post, but the post was actually left vacant.
https://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights/cca-it-again-held-contempt-understaffing-prison-and-lying-about-it
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