Guest Opinion: Privatizing prisons a recipe for disaster
Source: By Caroline Isaacs, Arizona Daily Star (AZ), 06.04.2007
None of the findings in Indiana's report on the riot that occurred in its New Castle facility, where some Arizona inmates are housed, are surprising to anybody who has been paying attention to prison privatization over the past 30 years. Ever since we began this experiment in for-profit incarceration, serious problems have cropped up over and over again in private prisons nationwide.
Many private prisons are woefully understaffed, and high turnover rates mean that staff are inexperienced and unsure of what to do in a crisis. The analysis released by the Indiana Department of Corrections bears this out, citing "unseasoned staff" as a cause of the riot.