Creating Criminals: Prisons and People in a Market Society by Vivien Stern

Author:Vivien Stern
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2006-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

These procedures seemed ‘intended to systematically degrade and humiliate’ all the prisoners.68

Fifteen months after the prison opened, on 25 July 1998, six prisoners escaped in broad daylight. Four of them had been convicted of murder. They were eventually recaptured. A federal judge ordered the District of Columbia to stop sending its prisoners to Youngstown when he found that there was no proper security classification in operation and that prisoners from all sorts of backgrounds were being held together. The Mayor of Youngstown said, ‘It’s been a nightmare. [CCA’s] credibility is zero.’69 The prisoners took a lawsuit against the company because of their bad treatment, wholly inadequate medical care and lack of separation from other prisoners. The company eventually settled the case in 1999 for $1.65 million to the prisoners and $756,000 in legal fees.70 The prison was shut down in July 2001: 500 staff lost their jobs.71

The events at Youngstown were so damaging to the concept of privatized prisons that when the free-market-oriented government of Ontario in Canada was considering privatization, an Ohio senator wrote to the Premier of Ontario Mike Harris to say ‘Ohio’s experiences with private prisons has been to date eventful yet wholly regrettable.’72

After the Youngstown affair the story of CCA continued in a more low-key way. By the year 2000 when the new management came in, business was not good. As many as 12,000 prison beds were up for sale but there were no buyers. Then salvation came in the shape of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. New policies after the events of 11 September 2001 led to a rapid increase in the number of federal prisoners and those detained under immigration powers. In 2005, in the town of Taylor in Texas, the T. Don Hutto Correctional Center run by CCA gained its accreditation with the Commission of Accreditation for Corrections. In June 2004 the prison had lost its contract with the local county and was preparing to close when the federal government stepped in and saved Taylor’s prison.73 Presumably none of those to be held in the new federal prison would know that it was named after the man who served as the Commissioner of Corrections in Arkansas from 1971 to 1976, a time when a District Court described the Arkansas system as ‘a dark and evil world completely alien to the free world’.74

It is not just CCA that has problems. Wackenhut Corrections Corporation is a private security firm based in Florida that came into the incarceration market in 1984.75 In 2000 the US Justice Department sued the State of Louisiana and the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation over the treatment of all the young people held in the Jena Juvenile Justice Center in Louisiana. The Justice Department claimed that the young people were ‘subjected to excessive abuse and neglect’.76 The suit, which was to come up before a US District Court in Baton Rouge, alleged there was violence between the young people and by the staff on the young people, unreasonable use of isolation and restraints, and inadequate medical care.

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