The Rainmakers: Banking on private prisons in the fleecing of small-town America.

[Heidi]

In These Times | March 5, 2010

The sleepy town of Hardin, Mont., began its foray into the private prison industry in 2004, an adventure that would eventually saddle it with millions in debt and an empty, 464-bed prison collecting dust at the edge of town.

It all started when James Parkey, the founder, owner and president of Texas-based Corplan Corrections, met with then-Montana Gov. Judy Martz (R) at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport while Martz was en route to the Western Governors Association meeting in Santa Fe, N.M.

Since the 1980s, Parkey’s company has developed 33 private jails or detention centers in New Mexico, Texas, Idaho, Louisiana and Colorado. Corplan’s fortunes, along with those of private-prison giants Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Geo Group (formerly Wackenhut), date back to the “tough-on-crime” legislation of the ’80s and ’90s, when mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines pushed the U.S. prison population up to about 2.5 million—an 800 percent increase over the number of people incarcerated in 1970, the year before the commencement of Nixon’s War on Drugs.

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Parkey’s scheme goes like this: he and/or one of his pitchmen approach an economically-depressed and isolated community—preferably within 100 miles of a federal courthouse—and convince local government leaders during a period of wining and dining—and sometimes bribing—that a private prison, jail or immigrant detention center is just the thing to cause long-dormant clouds of cash to burst open and rain prosperity down on their blighted town.

<snip>

The facility is then built, and the community is left to deal with the consequences. Meanwhile, all contractors involved in the development have been paid in advance out of bond sales.

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Had Hardin officials looked into the consortium’s past, they would have discovered that, at about the time Parkey was arriving on their doorstep in 2004, a jail that Corplan and MCM developed in Pioche, Nev., in 1993 had been sitting vacant for more than a decade. That same year, it was purchased by Lincoln County, Nev., for $500,000—pennies on the dollar for the $3.5 million issued in long-since defaulted municipal bonds.

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[BolivarianHero]

1. If you are for prison privatization...

You belong in a concentration camp.

[Heidi]

2. But, but, but...it's economic development!!!!

:sarcasm:

[Echo In Light]

3. k/r

[jody]

4. On other fronts prison employees can make over $200k/year.

Overtime pay may be putting a dent in state's furlough savings

QUOTE
Reporting from Sacramento — Like many other state employees, prison nurse Nellie Larot was hit last year with furloughs that cut her salary: It dropped $10,000, to $92,000.

But she more than made up for it by working extra shifts, raking in $177,512 in overtime, according to state records. Her total $270,000 in earnings last year eclipsed the $225,000 paid to Matthew Cate, head of the entire state prison system.
UNQUOTE

Get a handle on salaries

QUOTE
But the broader problem is unaffordable correctional officer salaries, which averaged $85,386 last year. That's nearly 24 percent higher than the state average, which was the highest in the nation in 2008 and 20 percent higher than the U.S. average.
UNQUOTE

[Mari333]

5. it is the perfect setup

multinational corporations own this country.

outsource jobs til there is nowhere left to work. now you have a huge class of people in poverty.
make sure laws are passed to throw people into prison for ridiculously long periods of time.
put a huge amount of the US population into prisons, (2nd only to china), and voila


you have a ready made cheapass slave labour profit making group of people who will work for nothing.

its always a win win for the multinational corporations. they profit off the backs of the poor.

[TexasObserver]

6. Private prisons are the scourge of America.

They are "hotel" beds whose owners lobby for more and more imprisonments.

We incarcerate so many because those beds have to be filled.

[Heidi]

7. Preying on desperation, that's how I see it.

And we've built a whole economic development, media and law enforcement/corrections culture around preying on people's fears and desperation.