By SHELDON KRAUSE
Capital News Service
LANSING – President Joe Biden’s recent move to eliminate federal private prison contracts is just a first step toward improving the criminal justice system, some Michigan experts say.
The order, “Reforming Our Incarceration System to Eliminate the Use of Privately Operated Criminal Detention Facilities,” instructs the Justice Department to no longer renew federal contracts with private prison companies.
Michigan has one federal private prison – North Lake Correctional Institution, in Baldwin.
North Lake is run under contract by the GEO Group, a Florida-based company that operates 58 private facilities nationwide. It houses around 1,600 inmates.
The company reported in 2019 that it expected to generate approximately $37 million annually from North Lake.
GEO Group issued a statement calling Biden’s order “a solution in search of a problem” but declined an interview. The company signed a 10-year contract with the federal government in May 2019, meaning its operations in North Lake would cease in 2029, barring further policy changes.
In the U.S., correctional facilities are owned by the federal, state or local governments or privately owned by companies. Only 12 facilities nationwide, those affected by Biden’s order, are both privately owned and hold federal offenders.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, federal private prisons held 27,569 inmates as of 2017. They accounted for 1.85% of the nearly 1.5 million people incarcerated nationally.
The Prison Policy Initiative, a Massachusetts-based think tank, noted that as of 2017, 66% of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees were in private facilities of some kind.
Of the 12 facilities affected by Biden’s order, the GEO Group owns and operates nine.
The company said its federal facilities hold almost exclusively noncitizen criminals serving time for federal offenses and awaiting deportation.
Private prisons often cost slightly less per inmate to operate, usually by staffing fewer employees per inmate.
According to researchers with “Federal Probation,” a corrections research journal, public prisons house an average of 5.6 inmates for each correctional officer, while private facilities report 6.7 inmates per officer.
Criminal justice professor Jacquelynn Doyon-Martin of Grand Valley State University explained the historical rationale for private prisons. “The whole goal when we started this back in the ‘80s was to save money.
“If we could find a corporation to run this, at least from the 1980s neoliberal perspective, we’re killing two birds with one stone. We’re saving money and we’re reducing government control and allowing corporations to come in,” Doyon-Martin said.
Critics of private prisons and some criminal justice experts argue that companies in the business of incarceration can’t ethically work towards rehabilitation if their ultimate goal is profiting on their investments.
Abdul El-Sayed, a former Democratic candidate for governor and scholar-in-residence at Wayne State University’s Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said private prisons are inherently corrupt.
“The challenge with trying to provide public services privately is always that there’s someone in the middle who’s trying to make money off of it,” he said. “And when you do that, that sets up an incentive problem, whereby services will necessarily get cut as a function of the profit motive of the corporation who’s trying to provide the service.”
El-Sayed continued, “If the government is taking responsibility for the well-being of incarcerated people, then entrusting that responsibility to a corporation that has an incentive to make money off of its contract, it’s a real problem.”
While private prisons may generally cost less to operate per inmate, these savings often come at the cost of factors that some experts contend are indispensable.
Doyon-Martin said, “We’re cutting staffing in our privatized facilities. You’ve got this staff-to- inmate ratio that almost gets dangerous, arguably. They’re going to push that ratio as much as they can in a privatized facility to maximize profit. That leads to one of my biggest concerns, which would be safety – safety of the inmates and safety of the correctional staff.”
Criminal justice professor Wendi Johnson of Oakland University stressed the disconnect between private prisons’ social responsibility and their financial obligations.
Johnson said, “That does create these fundamental differences in terms of what the key objectives are and creates potential conflict of interests with those for-profit prisons. If their bottom line is really to turn a profit, they have a fiduciary duty to do that for their shareholders.
“If push comes to shove, and one has to take precedence over the other, because they do have that fiduciary duty to their shareholders, that’s ultimately what has to take precedence,” she added.
Jim Truxton, the village of Baldwin president, was traveling and unavailable to comment but spoke with WOOD TV8 about the economic impacts of the prison.
According to Truxton, the prison is crucial to the economy of Lake County, which ranks second- highest among Michigan counties in poverty rates and 10th-highest in unemployment rates.
Truxton said the GEO Group’s involvement in Lake County brings in over $1million of local taxes and employs over 300 people.
While many opponents of private prisons said they are happy with Biden’s order, some said it is only one step in the right direction in the fight against private incarceration.
Johnson said that while she understands why anti-privatization proponents might say Biden’s order doesn’t go far enough, she suggested looking to recent history.
In January 2016, President Obama signed an executive order banning solitary confinement for juveniles in federal facilities. This order affected around 10,000 minors directly at the time.
“Because he did that, we have seen this trend among state and local governments to kind of follow suit,” Johnson said. “There has been a decrease in the use of solitary confinement with juveniles.”
El-Sayed called the order a “great start,” but also had a list of changes he’d like to see this administration make to the criminal justice system.
“Beyond simply just ending private prisons themselves, we need to end contracted services with private prison companies, whether it’s food or health care or other services. Those things should be provided by the government, not some corporation that is seeking to make a profit off of the incarceration of people,” he said.
El-Sayed added, “We’ve got a self-reinforcing system of mass incarceration that has been coupled with the corporatism that we see across the economy to lead to a situation where you have companies that make a lot of money off of the incarceration of people — and that’s just wrong.”