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Midland Mirror Aug 24/01

Super jail hires administrator

Aug 24, 2001

Warden plans to address privatization fears

Janis Trites: The Mirror

Aug 31, 2001

Doug Thomson has barely moved into his office at the Penetanguishene super jail but already his phone is ringing off the hook.

Thomson, facility administrator or warden, began his job on Aug. 27 and said he's looking forward to new challenges at the Central North Correctional Centre (CCNC).

"I've worked in corrections for 22 years and I enjoy the challenges of dealing with the offenders' behaviour and social aspects," Thomson said. "I also enjoy dealing with complicated labour issues and ensuring that I'm running an efficient place while being creative."

He used the example of how the government wakes up all offenders at the same time every day.

"In a private system, you can be creative while still getting the job done. We have the flexibility to take a look at the past structures and can start fresh at mandating new programs," said Thomson.

He believes offering skill-training programs at the jail will keep the inmates and staff happy.

"In the long term, the goal is to ensure the programs are enhanced and maintained. If an offender is kept busy, they have less time to worry about planning an escape. I believe in reaching rehabilitation through training and education," he said.

"I also want to ensure that staff training is up-to-date."

Thomson said the modern facility in Penetanguishene will help him keep everyone safe.

"We have a commitment to public safety, visitors' safety, offender's safety and staff safety, and there are specific procedures we have to follow. It's a balance between dynamics and cameras, and this is a high-tech security facility with less blind spots," said Thomson.

"Another short-term challenge is to alleviate the community's fears of privatization. The perception they have is from television and movies, and we have to explain the business of corrections to them. Anybody on our staff is sensitive to that, but once people come into the jail and see it for themselves, we're hoping they will feel more at ease," he said.

Before any inmates arrive in late-November, Thomson has a chance to settle into his office and has some decorating to do.

"The approach I want is professionalism and I want to inspire people to come to work. This is a tough job and I'll be bringing in plants and some teamwork type of prints," said Thomson.

He also said he plans on keeping staff, police and the public informed about what's happening.

"I will involve those who need to be involved in discussions. This isn't a dictatorship, staff can write, e-mail or come knock on my door to let me know their input," said Thomson.

An open house of the CCNC facility is planned in the next few months, although a date has not been set.

So far, 56 new correctional officers have been hired, 15 kitchen staff, 16 medical staff and six administrators, which includes Thomson. A total of 308 staff members will eventually work in the facility.

"Another short-term challenge is to alleviate the community's fears of privatization ... once people come into the jail and see it for themselves, we're hoping they will feel more at ease."

The Providence Journal-Bulletin (Providence, RI)

August 31, 2001

GUARDS' UNION CHIEF FACES STEROID CHARGES

Maryland: Private escapee (Wackenhut) caught by public police

The Baltimore Sun - August 30, 2001

Police catch Porter on tip;
Escapee fled court in Ellicott City, is captured in W.Va.;
Arrest made at motel;
$500 reward elicits information needed to find fugitive

Tulsa World - August 29, 2001

CCA imposes discipline after escape

Ex-Guards Indicted in Beating of Inmate

Crime: Two officers fired by the private outfit
running Seal Beach jail allegedly orchestrated the violence.

State buying prison in North Las Vegas

AP - September 11, 2001
CARSON CITY, Nev.

AP - September 12, 2001

Prisoner hijacks transport van in attempted escape

A P - September 20, 2001

Former jail employee pleads guilty to smuggling substance into facility

Profits & Convicts
It's about saving money.

No, it's about doing a better
job on rehabilitation.
That's only one of the contradictions
as Ontario makes its pitch for prisons-for-profit

The tour of the 15-month-old operation has been arranged for a dozen visitors from Penetanguishene, Ont., a quiet Georgian Bay outpost where Canada's first privately run provincial prison will open in October. MTC, in May, won the five-year, $170-million contract to run the just-constructed 1,184-bed "superjail."

Mike Murphy, MTC's marketing director, has brought the town dignitaries to Conneaut for an information-gathering session, including chats with Conneaut town officials, meals at upscale local eateries and two nights at the Ashtabula Holiday Inn, all expenses paid (though not for a tagalong reporter).

MTC is eager to present this place as a model of rehabilitation, and itself as an entrepreneurial outfit that will do a better and cheaper job of incarcerating wrongdoers than the state. The company focuses on training, and employs a far less punitive approach to incarceration than some state agencies. It rejects inmates who are unlikely to respond to rehab.

The last stop on Gansheimer's tour is a cramped dormitory for 230 prisoners. Some inmates peer out at us from behind heavy glass windows. Others lounge around in a kitchen/TV area next to the room with the bunk beds. I ask one man, scrubbing a counter, how he feels about this place.

As he's telling me this, I notice out of the corner of my eye that Gansheimer, the Penetanguishene delegation and their security escorts have left the building. The man continues earnestly, adding that he's in for "straight time" until 2006, which means he's not here for shoplifting. I don't interrupt, but, standing there unaccompanied, deep inside this medium-security prison, I find myself hoping that MTC does a very thorough job when it selects only easy cases to fill these rows of beds.

The raging debate over privatizing Prisons in the United States is bound to accompany MTC across the border. For 17 years now, state governments have been privatizing prison operations for a range of reasons: Cost is one, of course, but political proponents also see privatization as a way to inject ideas, innovation and capital into a moribund system that was bursting at the seams. And across the U.S., economically challenged communities have been bidding for prisons, which, for these towns, have taken the place of factories in a postindustrial economy.

Just as Ontario-whose government is committed to privatizing large swaths of the public sector-launches its long-awaited private-prison plan, many U.S. jurisdictions are backing away from the approach, stung by negative publicity and concerns that contracting out isn't the panacea the prison industry had promised. "If run properly, the public system works," says Dave Levac, the corrections critic for the Ontario Liberal Party. "This isn't about best practices. This is about an ideology that needs to be fed."

In the coffee shops and living rooms of Penetanguishene, the subject of private incarceration comes up frequently, and elicits strong feelings. "I don't really like it because it should be run by the government," says an older man taking in the waterfront view, who won't give his name. "It's Canada, not the U.S., is the way I feel."

"You know where that jail shoulda been built?" says her partner. "Way out in the bush. Outta sight, outta mind."

Not likely. After MTC opened its local recruiting office last June, more than 3,000 people applied for the 308 jobs that will be created in the facility. For Penetanguishene Mayor Anita Dubeau, that "economic spin" is very attractive indeed. Her community, now numbering 8,500, has successively been based on the military, forestry and manufacturing. But many of the manufacturing jobs had trickled away by the mid-1990s; one of the town's two auto-parts plants closed down. The Oak Ridges facility is now the largest local employer. While the town has worked hard to cultivate the tourism industry, Dubeau knows that those prison jobs, plus some supply contracts and a bit of new home construction, will go a long way toward stabilizing the area's economy, not to mention the town's finances. MTC, she's been assured, "wants to do as much business locally as possible, provided the price is right."

The building itself, designed by the prominent Toronto firm Zeidler Roberts, is a geometrical maze of cinder-block corridors, electronic sliding doors and self-contained octagonal "pods," each designed to serve virtually all the needs of inmates, from bathing to training to what passes for recreation. There will be two inmates to a cell, and up to 32 in each pod. The CNCC was designed as a maximum-security prison, although the vast majority of inmates will be there for provincial offences, serving relatively short sentences of up to two years less a day. Instead of the traditional guard towers and razor-wire fences, there are layers upon layers of internal security features, including motion sensors that can pick up assaults against corrections officers (COs) and a system of elevated, glassed-in control stations, where MTC employees can monitor their charges both visually and electronically. Indeed, the whole place was built to minimize staff costs by limiting inmate movement and taking full advantage of 360-degree sightlines afforded by the pod design. "It's a management philosophy," MTC's Murphy explains. "Inmates feel safer in this type of environment."

In the late 1980s, California corrections officials asked MTC to bid on running a small prison facility. The arrangement went so well that the state asked MTC to double the capacity. Over the next decade, MTC (which is privately held and is still run and controlled by the Marquardt family) won contracts to run minimum- to medium-security prisons in Utah, Arizona and Texas. "Agencies liked our company because of our education and training background," says Murphy.

MTC was in the right place at the right time. While the U.S. has long had the highest adult incarceration rate in the developed world, the legacy of Reagan-era policies-such as "three-strikes" sentencing and the "War on Drugs"-ballooned the prison population to dangerous levels. Between 1975 to 1984, its growth rate soared to 84%. As of 1999, the prison population was almost 1.3 million. (The Canadian equivalent is just 31,000, reflecting this country's lower incarceration rate; in the U.S., 2.3% of the public is either in prisons, in jails or on parole.)

Thus the private-prison industry was born. Investors and entrepreneurs were attracted by what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of new tenants. In 1992, there were just 21,000 inmates in private prisons; today, that figure stands at 143,000 (or about a 10th of the total adult prison population), although the steep growth of the 1990s has ebbed sharply in the last two years. Nonetheless, these prisoners generate estimated revenues for the prison industry of more than $2.3 billion (U.S.) a year.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut Corrections, the first- and second-largest players in the industry, are fierce rivals that have both been dogged by accusations of shoddy practices and political string-pulling. MTC is the fourth-largest firm, with an 8.4% market share of all private prison beds around the world. (The Ontario contract is a bit of a coup for MTC, given that Wackenhut has been the most active of U.S. firms in lobbying for Canadian contracts.)

In some jurisdictions, such as Florida, corrections agencies tried to block privatization, forcing legislators to circumnavigate the bureaucracy by establishing an independent commission responsible for contracting out prisons. Other opponents, such as unions representing police and corrections officers, worry about safety and security being compromised by the pressure to maximize returns. Anecdotes abound about private firms skimping-buying low-quality food, for example. In one notorious case, Esmor Correctional Services Inc. (now Correctional Services Corp.) won a contract to run an Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) holding centre for illegal immigrants in New Jersey by underbidding its main opponent, Wackenhut, by more than $20 million (U.S). Esmor's winning bid was premised on extremely low CO salaries. An INS inquiry later found that, from the beginning, the facility was plagued by high turnover, and the dearth of experienced COs led to rioting. Less than a year after opening, the INS cancelled the deal.

The staffing-level question has created other headaches. Private prisons have more than their fair share of assaults on COs (one study found the rate to be 50% higher than in public facilities) and escapes, according to some researchers.

But if one peels back the ideological arguments pro and con, there's more to this fight than meets the eye. The defenders of public prisons, both in Canada and the U.S., are backing a penal system that seems powerless to control rampant drug smuggling, escapes and unacceptably high recidivism rates. While union leaders emphasize the public interest, their bottom-line concern is, of course, that privatization diminishes their own membership rosters. What's more, absenteeism, abuse of sick-day benefits and other morale-related problems have undermined the reputation of public prisons and unionized COs.

On the other side of the debate, there's a good deal of data to suggest that promised double-digit savings haven't materialized. In many cases, private firms low-ball their initial bids and then ask for increases mid-contract. In 1996, the U.S. federal auditing agency, the General Accounting Office, concluded that there was no definitive evidence to indicate that private prisons are less expensive than public ones. A recent study by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections found that the state's average operating costs were lower than those being logged by every single private firm contracting with the department.

The evidence of savings-some 10%-20%-from privatization is "overwhelming," insists Thomas, who is also now a CCA director. "No one's stupid enough to award a contract where they don't expect to get a better deal."

That truth was borne out in Utah recently, where cost considerations led the state to not renew a three-year contract with a private firm. An $8-million (U.S.) budget cut ordered by the governor then prompted the Department of Corrections to shut the facility altogether. Corrections spokesman Jack Ford says the total cost of operating the Promontory medium-security prison was higher with a private firm than with the state. That's because the contract didn't take into account medical and transportation expenses, or the sizable police bill when prisoners escaped while out on work detail-something that happened an average of 15 to 20 times a year, Ford says. The contractor in that case was MTC, which is headquartered in Centerville, Utah; employs a former senior Utah corrections official; and takes care to contribute generously to the campaigns of state politicians. MTC lost the contract less than one month after winning the Ontario job.

In many jurisdictions, the task of cost comparison is appropriately delegated to auditors general, whose staff work at arm's length from the corrections institutions and their contractors. Elsewhere, the job falls to a somewhat incestuous service industry made up of consultants and former corrections officials.

MTC's Arizona facility, Marana, is an example. Not long after Marana opened in 1994, the state's Corrections Department issued a stinging evaluation, which indicated, among other things, that staff turnover at the medium-security facility was alarmingly high. But when the department had another look, in 1997, it tendered the evaluation to Thomas. He concluded that per-diem costs at that facility were 13.8% lower than the state average. This spring, Arizona's Corrections Department reported that MTC was the most expensive prison contractor, with per-diem costs only 5% lower than the state average-a far cry from Thomas's figure.

Overall, however, Arizona's auditor general has declared that privatization was a financial success. Privatization "forced us to install cost accountability into our system," says former Arizona corrections official Carl Nink, a onetime guard who rose through the ranks and went on to run the privatization project. Nink oversaw the process that awarded the Marana contract to MTC. Today, he works for MTC as a marketing manager.

Australian academic Richard Harding warns that the phenomenon of "capture"-meaning that public officials fall under the thrall of their private partners and lose the ability to objectively assess their performance-is a major threat to the viability of such initiatives. He advocates various accountability mechanisms-everything from corporate background checks and full public disclosure of all contracts to the retention of a viable public system-as means of keeping the private operators from digging themselves in so deep they end up dictating criminal justice policies to serve their own interests.

MTC officials, not surprisingly, make no apologies for their close ties to state governments, and in fact see their large roster of former public corrections officials as a strategic asset. Rich Gansheimer, the warden in Conneaut, was a top performer in the Ohio Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. In fact, says MTC's Mike Murphy, Ohio corrections staff deliberately put forward the names of their best people when they awarded the contract to MTC. The same thing happened in Ontario: Two leading ministry wardens were on the shortlist; 22-year veteran Douglas Thomson was the successful candidate. MTC's human-resources gain is the public system's loss.

During lunch, after the tour for the Penetanguishene officials, Gansheimer and Murphy talk up the company's approach to community relations. It's an all-important consideration in Conneaut, a small town hit by the closure of its major employer, an auto-parts manufacturer.

In its first year in Conneaut, notes Gansheimer, MTC staff raised $17,000 (U.S.) for the local United Way. He routinely donates money from the prison's marketing budget to local events, such as the high-school prom. Not long ago, MTC maintenance staff helped fix the lock system at the town jail, for free. More than that, MTC makes a concerted effort to do its buying locally. And of course, there are all those jobs inside the walls. All told, Conneaut estimates that $13 million of the prison's $17-million (U.S.) budget stays in the area.

The Penetanguishene group seem receptive to Gansheimer's pitch. As he finishes his sandwich, Penetanguishene Deputy Mayor Randy Robbins tells Gansheimer and Murphy that he has no objection to MTC per se; it's clear to him this company is a good corporate citizen. Robbins's beef is with the province, which, in his view, has hedged, backtracked and stonewalled on privatization during the run-up to this month's opening. Recalling one of several frustrating meetings with Ontario corrections officials, Robbins says, "I had a headache for three days afterwards."

In 1996, the Harris Tories embarked on a wholesale campaign to refurbish Ontario's prisons, many of which were rotting and overcrowded. Corrections officials selected Penetanguishene and Lindsay, near Peterborough, to be the sites for identical, ultramodern superjails. Both facilities would house only medium-security offenders, but the province also wanted them to both accommodate 200 "remand" inmates-those awaiting court dates, sometimes for far more serious crimes.

Ellis-Don, the London, Ont.-based contracting giant, won the $84.5-million construction contract, much of which ended up with local subcontractors and gravel firms (costs were ultimately $92 million). As the work proceeded, the province was also quietly looking into privatizing the operations of one of these new prisons. In 1997, corrections officials asked an Ottawa consulting firm, Partnering & Procurement Inc., to draw up a "request for proposals" that would lay out what the province sought from potential bidders. That firm, in turn, retained the University of Florida's Charles Thomas as an adviser on the project; at the time, Thomas had recently been working for the Nova Scotia government on a prison-privatization initiative that has since been abandoned. Thomas describes the evolution of Ontario's privatization plan as "a very long and arduous process"-drawn out because the Tories, despite their enthusiasm for privatization, weren't sure what they wanted.

In November, 1999, Corrections Minister Rob Sampson announced that the Penetanguishene facility had been selected for privatization. The identical Lindsay facility would be run by the ministry. Some Penetanguishene residents felt they'd been duped by the province into believing that Lindsay was the one to be privatized. "As soon as the [June, 1999] election was over, they flip-flopped," charges Penetanguishene shopkeeper Sharon Dion, who spearheads a group called Citizens Against Private Prisons (CAPP). "We are a small town but we're not stupid people," she says. "We're the experiment, and we didn't ask for that." Sampson flatly denies that politics played a part in the decision. "It went to Penetanguishene because it was the first institution to be completed. We wanted to get on with it. It's as simple as that."

Much of the local anxiety about privatization stems from the province's mixed signals about how it plans to monitor MTC. The issue of contract compliance is pivotal in prison privatization schemes. Public corrections agencies, answerable to taxpayers, must be able to determine that private operators train their COs properly, don't cut corners on security, and report all incidents, including those that reflect badly on the contractor, such as assaults on inmates and drug smuggling involving prison staff.

In high-accountability jurisdictions such as the U.K., government monitors are always on-site in private prisons, where they have unrestricted access to the premises and all paperwork, and are responsible for disciplining inmates who act up. Ohio fines contractors like MTC whenever staff counts fall below certain levels. Some states also require private operators to be accredited by the American Corrections Association (ACA), an industry body that scrutinizes all prisons.

More troublingly for Penetanguishene residents, the province has been inconsistent about whether it plans to have ministry staff on-site 24 hours a day, seven days a week. In May, the province promised round-the-clock monitoring. Corrections officials later informed residents that ministry monitors would only be "on-call" on a 24-7 basis. Sampson does little to clear up the misunderstanding. "Yeah, it's 24-7," he shrugs, "but that doesn't mean that when you go into the monitoring office, there will be a body sitting there. They have to be able to go to the bathroom or out for lunch." He insists that between a local liaison committee, the CAPP citizen's group, the media and the provincial auditor general, MTC's operations will be well scrutinized. "By the way," Sampson adds testily, "we don't have monitoring in the public system."

If the illogic of that statement illustrates anything, it is that the province's prison privatization is still very much in process. As of early September, regulations setting out performance standards for MTC had yet to be enacted by the legislature-even though the Penetanguishene prison is scheduled to open in October. And the overall political rationale has shifted: Early on, privatization was about efficiencies; today, says Sampson, the province's motive is not financial, but rather bettering the rehabilitation record of the prison system. "Ours is not a fiscal initiative, but a performance and results initiative."

Over the life of the contract, MTC's track record will be compared to Lindsay's in categories such as recidivism rates. "There is a recidivism target in the contract," Sampson says, although he can't specify what that target is. In fact, the contract contains nothing specific about decreasing recidivism. And while the original request for proposals refers generally to reduced recidivism as part of the evaluation of the contractor's performance, it cites no benchmarks. Sharon Dion isn't surprised by this kind of hedging. She says she's heard it all before. "As for Rob Sampson's recidivism rates, there are none. We don't know what to believe."

Nor is the cost-effectiveness issue any clearer. MTC-which was not the lowest bidder among the four firms that competed for the contract-plans to run the prison for $79 per day per inmate. Its salary ranges are very much in league with ministry levels. On the face of it, MTC's proposed operating budget looks to be far more competitive than the $140 per-diem rate that corrections officials cite as the provincial average. But the latter number is misleading, because it includes every Ontario prison, including the old and deteriorating ones. What's more, the distinctive layouts of both the Lindsay and the Penetanguishene prisons are expressly intended to sharply reduce staff and security costs. In other words, no one really knows what the operating budget ought to be, and that data gap will likely work to MTC's advantage should the firm discover, a few years into the contract, that it isn't making enough of a margin (it typically earns 5%-10% on its U.S. operations).

The Tories say the debate will be resolved simply by comparing the two identical facilities-one public, one private. "It's a perfect test case," says Sampson. But he readily admits that he's pretty much prejudged the outcome. Ontario is now working on plans to open another private adult prison and several privately run youth camps. There's a good chance the next contract prison will be owned as well as operated by the private sector. Nor will Sampson rule out the possibility that these facilities will open before the results are in from the Lindsay-vs.-Penetanguishene experiment.

Back in Conneaut, the Penetanguishene delegation has decamped to the town offices to listen to the city manager assess MTC's place in this community. "A day doesn't go by when you don't meet someone who works in that prison," he says. The statement resonates with Anita Dubeau and her colleagues, who know that the town could have done far worse. MTC isn't publicly traded and thus doesn't face the stock market's craving for cost-cutting and growth. And in Ohio, MTC has had to satisfy officials nervous about private prisons ever since 1998, when an accidental mingling of "close-security" prisoners with less-dangerous convicts at a CCA prison 100 kilometres south of Conneaut led to two murders and 17 stabbings. "We've been audited three times in the first year," says one MTC official of the Conneaut prison. "We have nothing to hide." The question up in Penetanguishene is whether Ontario is willing to look.

AP - September 29, 2001

Prisoner overpowers van guards, escapes

Armed prisoner still on the loose after early scuffle

The Hamilton Spectator
Saturday September 29, 2001

Barton Street inmates riot

October 4, 2001

Prison defeat leaves few options
Kenai voters speak:
politicians who supported idea backpedal.

By Tom Kizzia - Anchorage Daily News

The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

October 04, 2001
Worse than we thought Gruesome details out of Alexander

The New York Post

PRISON COS. GET HOT :
TERROR THREAT FUELING FIRMS' STOCKS

AP - Monday, October 8, 2001

Parents sue boot camp following son's suicide