States Look for Ways to Avoid Private Prisons
Source: By Jeff Golimowski and Whitney Stewart, CNSNews.com. August 07, 2007
If you were given 30 days to find a new place to live, could you do it easily? What if every available apartment and house in town was already taken? Multiply this conundrum by 1,200. Now you know how the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADOC) felt last year.
"We had contracts last year in Texas and we got 30-days notice we had to take back 1,200 inmates," said ADOC spokesperson Katie Decker.
........ Some states are satisfied with their private-prison operations. But, increasingly, many states are looking for ways to avoid sending their prisoners out of state or into private prisons in order to keep them in state-run facilities.
"We can do it faster, better, and cheaper," said Decker. "We're in the people business. They're in the profit business."
.......... Free market advocates hailed the move as a way to spur competition and efficiencies in what, until then, had been an exclusively governmental function.
.........But public employee unions and many corrections officials viewed the move to private prisons skeptically. They argued that private prisons would cut corners to raise profits and hurt rehabilitation efforts.