New Age Jail for a New Millennium

Tom, Dick, and Harry are in prison.  They find a magic lamp and rub it.
A genie appears and grants them a wish each.  Tom wishes to be at home with his girlfriend.
Dick wishes to be at home with his mother.  Once they are away, Harry says: "I wonder what I should wish for.
I wish my friends were here to help me make my choice..."
 

by Alan Perrott

The first - and possibly the last - privately run prison in New Zealand is about to open for business in Mt Eden

The invitations are out and the first batch of guests is about to move into the new $40 million Auckland Central Remand Prison.  The awkwardly titled ACRP will be the fIrst - and possibly the last - privately run prison in New Zealand.

For Corrections Minister Matt Robson, the five-year contract issued to Australian Correctional Management is an uncomfortable hangover from the Shipley Administration that he would rather do away with.  He claims that privatising prisons turns them into a growth industry - why would private managers want to reduce their prison population and put themselves out of a job?

But management debates aside, an inspection of the prison suggests that doing time is becoming a little more comfortable.  There is none of the forbidding Colditz feel of that neighbouring rocky ruin, Mt Eden Prison, which Mr Robson wants to see closed by 2003.

The new remand facility boasts a gymnasium (complete with individualised programmes), snooker tables, bathrooms attached to each cell and more than 200 televisions.  Mr Robson is more than happy with the new look: he feels prisons need to break away from the model established by Victorian mental institutions - "grey, damp, secret-looking places hidden behind rows of sad trees and impossibly high fences."

But as an incentive to keep inmates behind bars, the ACM contract includes a $50,000 penalty for every prisoner who manages to find a way out.

Tim Bannatyne, general manager of service purchasing and monitoring for the Department of Corrections, said the new prison was the best facility they could get for the budget available.  He rejects criticism of the abundance of televisions, saying it was common practice for prisoners to be allowed to bring in their own sets.  ACM had decided to provide the sets to minimise the chance of prisoners sneaking in drugs or any other unwanted items inside their own televisions.

But not all welcome the new facility.  Penal reform campaigner Peter Williams, QC, has slammed the remand prison as a "monstrosity" and a "poultry farm."  He says too many people are being locked up already while awaiting trial on what are only minor charges.  He wants remand prisoners to shift from big houses to little halfway houses, hereby reducing the overcrowding in jails like Mt Eden and the stress on prisoners and guards.

Council of Civil Liberties spokesman Barry Wilson agrees, but goes a step further by asking for the Black Maria at the bottom of the cliff to be replaced with jobs at the top.  "While any new accommodation facilities would be an improvement on what we have, I don't think building new prisons is the way to bring the prison population down."  He would rather see the Government create fewer prisons and more jobs, provide more educational opportunities and make special efforts for Maori and Pacific Islanders.

Source: New Zealand Herald Friday 14 July 2000

Profits for Prisoners

by Frank Wu

The proliferation of private prisons threatens the civil rights of us all.  The institutions should trouble members of a free society because they generate profits off the wholesale deprivation of individual liberty and embody a philosophy of punishment that allows us to write off many of our own citizens as beyond civilisation.  In other words, they reward our most punitive impulses.

The corporations that operate penitentiaries have become highly successful commercial ventures.  Crime prevention has been a growth area for government spending, even when the economy has been down.  The incarceration industry now earns an estimated $250 - $400 million in taxpayer-supported annual revenues.

Business is good enough that the leading prison construction companies are willing to build on speculation, erecting giant facilities with the expectation that they will soon receive a lucrative contract delivering the necessary inmates.  Some states, such as Tennessee, have considered turning over all their prisons to independent operators.  Other leaders have proposed exporting criminals to a complex located in Mexico, where labor costs are considerably lower.

Despite a few recent setbacks - California cancelled plans to commission several new detention centers and Pennsylvania declared them unlawful - these market-oriented penal colonies have been expanding since the first one opened in 1984.  Nationwide, there are about 200 of them operated by companies such as market leader Corrections Corporation of America.  Together they are capable of housing well over 100,000 convicts, and many are eagerly starting to accept maximum-security offenders instead of juveniles or the mentally ill.

Private prisons reveal with stark clarity that the criminal-justice system is about much more than law and order, preserving the peace and protecting personal safety.  The late French philosopher Michel Foucault, for all his radical fetishism (he would have abolished any concept of crime at all), made an important point in his critical history of the prison system: it is an apparatus of power.  It not only defines and enforces social norms, but also gives the government its greatest coercive force other than the military.

What counts as crime depends on what we choose to condemn.  Reversing trends throughout the Western world, our contemporary list of forbidden conduct has become longer and longer while sanctions have become harsher and harsher.

The debtors' prison of centuries gone by obviously used to regulate the poor.  The modern prison more subtly does so.  The prison, especially a private prison that does not answer to any authority other than itself, is just not the sort of place that most well-to-do people or ordinary folks expect to find themselves or their families in.

Upper- and middle-class Americans are right about that belief, even if it is shameful that they hold it.  They are correct in the sense that socioeconomic status correlates inversely with the likelihood of being imprisoned.  They are wrong, however, to think that should be a birthright, for it cannot be justice that the drug-addicted wealthy are allowed to check into a rehab clinic or diverted to a treatment program, while the poor confront "zero tolerance" and "three strikes, you're out" laws.  Moreover, African Americans and Hispanics make up 2/3 of those behind bars; contrary to stereotype, the overwhelming majority of them have been found guilty of non-violent charges.

In this context, the commercial motives of the prison industry further corrupt the purposes of confinement.  Firms answer to corporate shareholders, not societal stakeholders.  As a function of market dynamics, once private prisons are built, they create demand for bodies to fill them: the more inmates, the more profits.  Impoverished towns already compete to attract the construction of private prisons - which means they are indirectly in the market for prisoners.

Private prisons are an example of benefits that are privatised while costs remain public.  In this case, the money that is made flows to the owners of the private prison.  Meanwhile, the burdens of liability and oversight are still borne by the state.

The consequences become apparent if the felon is beaten to death or escapes, both of which happened in separate incidents at a Youngstown, Ohio, private prison.  Prisoners' rights are extremely difficult to establish and effectively enforce thanks to the unpopularity of the cause.  The additional influence of cost containment will ensure that they are neglected.  Even observers who may not much care about the humanity toward wrongdoers undoubtedly would agree, though, that the risk of a prison break should be minimised if possible.  Measures and treatments that would help either offender or society, or even both, are not likely to be considered, much less implemented, unless they also enhance the bottom line.

Yet the argument against private prisons cannot be merely that they make money from misery.  What distinguishes private prisons from any other ordinary business is that their stock in trade is the control of human beings.  Worse still, the more efficient their operations the more they allow the rest of us to avoid democratic deliberation - or even public consideration - about criminal justice.

Indeed, private prisons should alarm libertarians especially.  The invocation of libertarian principles to support private prisons is ironic.  Liberty and confinement are at odds.

Unfortunately, the public discourse about criminal punishment has become impossible because reform efforts are dismissed.  Being "soft on crime" or even being perceived as "soft on crime" is politically fatal.

Even people who are not persuaded by liberal ideals of rehabilitation should be convinced by pragmatic goals of prevention.  Because the prison creates its own isolated culture, the non-violent offenders who might have had a chance to make it on the outside are turned into violent ones during their stay and the dangerous felons into unrepentent recidivists by time of their release.  A vicious cycle is created.  As the prison population becomes more and more like itself, and less and less like the rest of us, we must subject them to sterner and stronger treatment.  Mandatory minimums give way to life sentences and then to the death penalty in an escalating sequence.

The crisis of private prisons reflects other problems.  Our incarceration rate of more than 400 people per 100,000 is higher than any other nation.  It continues to increase even though the crime rate is decreasing.  Undoubtedly, the fact that running a prison is big business contributes to this increase.  The statistics indict all of us for our collective failure to create a civil society.  It is in our mutual self-interest to improve the situation.  A good start would be eliminating private prisons.

Frank H Wu is an associate professor of law at Howard University.  His e-mail address is fwu@law.howard.edu.

Source: Intellectual Capital where Professor Wu was a regular commentator Thursday 24 Feb 2000

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