Bad Optics – the Nexus of Mass Incarceration and Private Prison Profit

In the past few weeks, I have had numerous conversations on the issue of racial profiling and the recent event involving 68-year-old Eli Davis.  One of the more interesting things is how much the reaction of white and blacks diverge, not only on this incident, but on the issue of the treatment of blacks and minorities by the criminal justice system as a whole.

Public relations people use the term “optics” to describe how something will look like to the outside world, and one of the problems is that police interactions and criminal justice interactions with minority populations suffer from poor optics.  When one group is disproportionately involved in the criminal justice system, regardless of the myriad of reasons for that, the optics look bad.

The problem of mass incarceration is very broad and it extends from the disproportionate numbers of Americans that are incarcerated – a disproportionate number of whom are black.  Indeed, from 1980 to 2008, the number of people incarcerated went from 500,000 to 2.3 million.

The US has 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners.

African-Americans are incarcerated at six times the rate of whites.  African-Americans and Hispanics constitute 58 percent of all prisoners, with African-Americans comprising 1 million of the 2.3 million total.

Wrote Michelle Alexander, whose book The New Jim Crow has focused attention on this issue, “If you take into account prisoners, a large majority of African American men in some urban areas, like Chicago, have been labeled felons for life. These men are part of a growing undercaste — not class, caste — a group of people who are permanently relegated, by law, to an inferior second-class status. They can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits — much as their grandparents and great-grandparents once were during the Jim Crow era.”

While some cast this phenomena in terms of crime rates, Ms. Alexander points out, “Crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the past few decades — and currently are at historical lows — but imprisonment rates have soared. Quintupled.”

She notes, “The vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth.”

The optics for mass incarceration are bad, especially when you start drilling down into the discrepancy between the crime rate and the incarceration rate.  However, it becomes worse because of the rise of the private prison industry.

The only thing that looks worse than a perceived injustice is the idea that someone is profiting from that injustice.

In a 2011 report from the ACLU, they find, “Mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group – the private prison industry – even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole.”

They continue, “As the public good suffers from mass incarceration, private prison companies obtain more and more government dollars, and private prison executives at the leading companies rake in enormous compensation packages, in some cases totaling millions of dollars.”

“Leading private prison companies essentially admit that their business model depends on high rates of incarceration,” the ACLU reports. They cite a 2010 Annual Report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company, who stated: “The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by . . . leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices . . . .”

The ACLU adds, “As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits.”

NPR did their report in November 2011: “Critics have long questioned the quality of private prisons and the promises of economic benefits where they are built. But proponents say private prisons not only save taxpayers money, but they also generate income for the surrounding community.”

There are a number of problems with private prisons.  In April of 2012, for instance, Margaret Winter of the National Prison Project and Gabriel Eber of the ACLU National Prison Project wrote, “For the past two years, the ACLU and the Southern Poverty Law Center have been investigating and exposing a horrifying pattern of abuse against juveniles and the mentally ill in two Mississippi prisons operated by the GEO Group, one of the biggest for-profit prison operators in the world.”

The good news was that the Mississippi Department of Corrections has ended its contract with GEO.  The bad news is that they are looking for another for-profit prison contractor to run the three state prisons formerly run by GEO.

The problem, however, goes deeper than one bad apple.  As the report notes, “There is no reason whatsoever to believe that the situation will be improved by replacing GEO with a different prison profiteer. In fact, two other big private prison contractors – Corrections Corporation of America and Wexford – are already operating the medical and mental health systems in some Mississippi prisons, and the Department of Corrections is well aware that those private contractors are providing abysmal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health needs.”

The problem is that these companies have an incentive to try to maximize profits, which might work okay if they are producing widgets – but running a prison is not a productivity exercise, it’s a service industry, and the charge is that these prisons are cutting corners with regard to prisoner health and safety.

Even as more and more of these type of horror stories come out, and the report out of GEO is pretty bad, more states are looking to save money on incarceration rather than looking at alternatives to mass incarceration.

The ACLU’s report is chilling.

GEO claimed it was backing out of its Mississippi contract because the prison was “financially underperforming” to the point where it was expected to generate about $21.7 million in losses.

However, the ACLU’s report shows something appalling: “An ACLU medical expert documented case after case of inmates losing upwards of 10 and as many as 30 pounds after a few months in GEO custody … the ACLU and SPLC have collected massive evidence that GEO has been starving the mentally ill prisoners, denying them basic mental health care, punishing them with solitary confinement, and exposing them to such systemic abuse and neglect that suicides and suicide attempts are rampant.”

In the meantime, the optics of private prisons and profiting from mass incarceration is only beginning to hit the street.

This weekend, rapper Kanye West debuts his new song, “New Slaves.”

He writes, “I know that we the new slaves…; Meanwhile the DEA, teamed up with the CCA; They tryina lock n—s up, they tryna make new slaves; See that’s the privately owned prison, get your piece today; They prolly all in the Hamptons, braggin ’bout what they made.”

“They tryina lock n—s up, they tryna make new slaves,” he raps.

The ACLU notes, “Two disturbing trends – the increasing overincarceration of people of color and the rise of a massive immigration detention machinery – have fueled the growth of a new heir to the convict lease system that rakes in billions of dollars a year for CCA and other for-profit prison companies.”

The optics are set – mass incarceration at private prisons is the new slavery.  The truth is that in a world without context and optics, you can justify both based on crime and economics, but the optics of what it looks like to profit off of incarceration of scores of young black males is a damaging issue that we could be dealing with for years.

Not to mention that introducing profit into the prison industry produces perverse incentive structures for public policy that would be better to avoid.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

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