Inside Private Prisons

An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration

Lauren-Brooke Eisen

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780231542319
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration—to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen's work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America.

From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America's largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.

CHAPTER ONE

The Prison Buildup and the Birth of Private Prisons

The fact is that the criminal justice system is not enough—or even the most relevant institution—to deal with our crime problems. It makes about as much sense to look to prisons to solve our chronic crime problem as it would to build more funeral parlors to solve a cholera epidemic.

ABNER MIKVA, FORMER ILLINOIS REPRESENTATIVE AND FORMER WHITE HOUSE COUNSEL UNDER PRESIDENT CLINTON

ALMOST NO ONE is ambivalent about private prisons. Justin Jones, former Oklahoma director of corrections, doesn’t see a place for private prisons in American corrections. In 2014 he stated that private prisons “create demand for their services much like drug dealers ensure that their customers are addicted, but not so addicted they die…. CEO profits and shareholder returns have no place in our criminal justice system.”¹ But former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who oversaw the construction of two new private prisons in his state and ran for president on the Libertarian ticket in 2016, stated: “Private prisons stepped in and offered the same goods and services at about two-thirds the cost.”²

This issue engenders so much discord that students across the nation meet weekly to plan divestment advocacy campaigns, Democratic presidential candidates refuse to accept campaign donations from private prison corporations, and hundreds of people gather to protest private prison corporation shareholder meetings. With a little less than 10 percent of the correctional footprint across the nation, why do Americans care so passionately about who runs their prisons?

Perhaps it is because the private prison debate has become entangled with the growing call for an end to mass incarceration. Today, more than 2.1 million Americans are behind bars; more than 1.5 million people are held in state or federal prisons, and more than 720,000 people are held in local jails. This is more people than live in Belize, Fiji, Luxemburg, and the Maldives combined. These inmates are locked up in the nearly 1,800 prisons and 3,000 jails across the nation. At the end of 2016, upward of 40,000 undocumented immigrants were held in immigration detention facilities on any given day. Adam Gopnik wrote that more people are incarcerated in America today than were imprisoned in Stalin’s gulags.³

Prisons provide little rehabilitative programming and often release individuals into communities with little or no reentry support. Without this support, prisoners sometimes turn back to crime. In addition, more mentally ill people are in the nation’s prisons than in its mental hospitals.⁴ Based on these findings, it should be no surprise that recidivism rates in the United States are so high. More than half of all prisoners released return within three years.⁵

Punishment’s Roots

Prisons did not always dot the American landscape. In colonial America, jails housed those awaiting trial or who were delinquent on their debts. Early settlers relied on the laws and practices common in England, which focused on banishment, corporal punishment, and public humiliation. Once convicted, jails were irrelevant; those who were convicted of crimes were subject to swift and severe sanctions. In colonial America, communities were small, and society could not afford to imprison those who violated the law because their labor contributions were needed. Those with means paid fines as punishment, and colonists with little money were often publicly humiliated, thrown in the stockades, or whipped in front of crowds.⁶ These punishments aimed to deter future wrongdoers and simultaneously allowed convicted individuals to quickly return to work.

Incarceration as we know it today began just after the American Revolution. The Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, built in the 1770s, held pretrial defendants and others awaiting sentences handed down by a judge. By the late 1780s, a group of prominent Philadelphia men began to discuss crime as a disease of the mind and advocated for a house of repentance where prisoners could meditate on their crimes. In 1790, a portion of the jail was converted to accommodate convicted criminals. At the Walnut Street Jail, contractors created cells for separate and solitary confinement, a new form of punishment that would eventually become known as the “Pennsylvania System.”⁷ With Philadelphia’s population on the rise, its capacity to house criminals was at a breaking point. The jails were overcrowded, and to achieve the goal of complete isolation a bigger building was needed.

The Philadelphia Society for Alleviating the Miseries of Public Prisons, also known as the Pennsylvania Prison Society, which counted Benjamin Franklin and prominent physician Dr. Benjamin Rush as members, was instrumental in convincing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to authorize construction of a more suitable building. British-born architect John Haviland designed the building, the first of its kind in the Colonies. Seven wings of individual cellblocks were built, replete with central heating, toilets that flushed (not built for the luxury of inmates but to eliminate contact with other inmates), and baths in each private cell.⁸ “The penitentiary boasted luxuries that not even President Andrew Jackson could enjoy at the White House.”⁹ Construction began in 1822, and by 1829 inmates moved into the newly constructed Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, famous for fully implementing the “separate confinement” theory of incarceration.

Eastern State Penitentiary offered a radically different type of punishment, leaving behind corporal punishment in favor of the Quaker-inspired belief that criminals could benefit from spiritual reflection, which could lead them to see the errors in their ways and live a life devoid of crime. The prison reformers in Philadelphia believed that “for the criminal already imprisoned, isolation from his fellow men was to prevent harmful corruption, protect his good resolutions, and give him ample opportunity to ponder on his mistakes and make his peace with God.”¹⁰

Inmates were separated from one another and did not engage in any communication with fellow prisoners. The wardens combined a system of isolation from other prisoners with labor. Inmates were given Bibles to read in their cells and were forbidden to write letters to friends and family members. To keep busy, prisoners spun wool or made shoes in their cells. Prisoners wore hoods when they left their cells to enhance their isolation and to ensure they had no knowledge of where they were housed in relation to the rest of the prison.

Thus was born America’s first “penitentiary,” from the Medieval Latin “paenitentia,” the root of which means “repentance.” Motivated by the Quaker belief that this form of punishment would create “genuine regret and penitence in the criminal’s heart,” Eastern State Penitentiary quickly became a tourist attraction.¹¹ It enticed French political scientist and historian Alexis de Tocqueville and English writer and literary critic Charles Dickens to separately visit the prison soon after it was built.¹²

Dickens visited in 1842. He spoke to men in their cells and wrote down his impressions of America’s earliest inmates.

There was a sailor who had been there upwards of eleven years, and who in a few months’ time would be free. Eleven years of solitary confinement! “I am very glad to hear your time is nearly out.” What does he say? Nothing. Why does he stare at his hands, and pick the flesh upon his fingers, and raise his eyes for an instant, every now and then, to those bare walls which have seen his head turn grey?¹³

Dickens was wholly unimpressed by this new form of “penitence”: “I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye,…and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore I the more denounce it, as a secret punishment in which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.”¹⁴

Ironically, as American ideals of freedom and independence became celebrated, prisons became more isolating and sterile. David Rothman, professor of Social Medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, wrote: “at the very moment that Americans began to pride themselves on the openness of their society, when the boundless frontier became the symbol of opportunity and equality, an idea developed: those convicted of crimes would be confined behind walls, in single cells, and would follow rigid and unyielding routines.”¹⁵ In 1817, New York constructed a state prison in Auburn, 250 miles northwest of New York City in central New York. In 1821, the Auburn State Penitentiary warden pioneered a “congregate system”: inmates were isolated at night but worked with fellow inmates by day. Despite working and eating together (which was not permitted at Eastern State Penitentiary), prisoners were forbidden to speak to one another when working and during meals. In an attempt to implement a disciplinary regime at the prison, Auburn’s warden, Captain Elam Lynds, a veteran of the War of 1812, required the inmates to walk in lock-step and wear uniforms with prison stripes so escaped prisoners would be immediately recognizable. Instead of using prisoner’s names, Lynds instituted prison numbers.

Auburn also pioneered the practice of using inmates for cheap labor. The state of New York negotiated contracts with manufacturers, and inmates—many of whom were imprisoned at Auburn—produced shoes, carpets, tools, clothing, and furniture. This convict labor helped fund the institution. Auburn inmates also played an instrumental role in building the Sing Sing prison upstate in Mount Pleasant-on-the-Hudson. In 1825, Lynds chose one hundred inmates who he relocated to build the prison. In 1910, Lynds “led them to the spot and camped on the bank of the Hudson without a place to receive or walls to secure his dangerous companions. He made everyone a mason, carpenter or other useful laborer with no other power than the firmness of his character and the energy of his will and thus for several years the convicts were engaged in building their own prison.”¹⁶ Lynds became the warden at Sing Sing when the prison opened its doors in 1828.

Before Alexis de Tocqueville wrote Democracy in America, he and his friend attorney Gustave de Beaumont traveled to the United States under a commission from King Louis-Phillipe to inspect American prison systems for the French government. They began their study in Newport, Rhode Island, in the spring of 1831 and visited a great many American prisons, including Sing Sing in New York and the Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania. The United States represented principles of individualism and equality, and after the French Revolution Europeans often traveled to America to observe how the government operated. After visiting prisons from New England, to New Orleans, and even Michigan, Tocqueville and Beaumont returned to France in 1832. In the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, they wrote: “To sum up the whole on this point, it must be acknowledged that the penitentiary system in America is severe. While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism. The citizens subject to the law are protected by it; they only cease to be free when they become wicked.”¹⁷

Throughout most of the 1800s federal prisoners were housed in state prisons. The U.S. government paid the state prisons boarding fees to compensate them for housing the inmates and allowed them to use federal inmates to work at the facilities in prison labor jobs.¹⁸ This practice received a major blow in 1887 when Congress passed legislation eliminating the contracting of federal inmates to private employers. Without the ability to use federal inmates for labor, these prisoners were not as attractive to state penitentiaries. The Federal Prison System was established in 1891, and the first federal prison was under construction at Leavenworth, Kansas, in 1897.¹⁹ The second federal prison was built in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1902, and the first federal women’s prison was erec...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Prison Buildup and the Birth of Private Prisons
• 2. How the Government Privatized
• 3. Prisoners as Commodities
• 4. The Prison Industrial Complex
• 5. Private Prisons and the American Heartland
• 6. The Prison Divestment Movement
• 7. The Politics of Private Prisons
• 8. Shadow Prisons: Inside Private Immigrant Detention Centers
• 9. Public Prisons Versus Private Prisons
• 10. Wrestling with the Concept of Private Prisons
• 11. The Future of Private Prisons
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index