Mulberry isn't exactly in the middle of nowhere, just close. The Polk County hamlet is a few miles east of the Hillsborough line, a few miles south of Lakeland at the intersection of State Road 60 and S.R. 37. Its main economic engine was phosphate, and as that motor sputtered, so did Mulberry. Then a national company blew into town, vowing to hire 320 people at an average $30,000 each, plus full benefits, stock options and a retirement plan. A godsend?
Not quite. More likely a devilishly seductive trap.
The company is a Houston outfit called Cornell Corrections, one of the big three companies in the private prison industry. Cornell wants to plant a prison in Mulberry to house 1,500 men for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
"We've got a school a few hundred feet (from the proposed prison site) in one direction, and another school nearby. We're afraid for our safety," said Criswell Brown, a retiree who gathered about 300 signatures on a petition to stop the prison.
"They say that prison will have an economic impact of $30-million," Brown said. "I don't believe that."
With good reason. One thing you can be sure of about the private prison industry is that just about everything its promoters claim turns out to be over-the-top exaggeration if not downright false.
To begin with, the industry popped onto the national scene in the mid-1980s claiming it had bright new ideas for revolutionizing the nation's overflowing prisons.
In reality, there was nothing new about private prisons. In the South after the Civil War, "private prisons" were used to re-enslave blacks. Minor offenses resulted in recently freed slaves being returned to chains and leased out to contractors to work the same fields in which they had toiled before the war.
If anything, the private prisons were worse than slavery, and the trade in shackled labor was almost totally abolished by the beginning of the 20th century. No one questioned for most of the last century that the "Big House" was a government-run hostelry, and that "screws," a.k.a. jailers, were public employees.
Then, as the United States emerged as the world's Great Gulag, spurred largely by the misbegotten drug war, the demand for new prisons became critical. Prison building took precedence in state budgets, including Florida's, over schools and social services. As education declined and states increasingly abandoned their poorest and weakest, crime soared — spurring the need for even more new prisons.
About 15 years ago, a Tennessee company, Corrections Corporations of America (CCA), pioneered nouveau private prisons. It was soon followed by a Florida company, Wackenhut Corrections of Palm Beach Gardens.
Today, the business has grown to five private prisons in Florida and about 150 nationwide, plus dozens of privately run jails for counties. Altogether, about 10 percent of America's 2-million prisoners are guests at private facilities.
It wasn't long after CCA launched its programs before the horror stories began:
… In Brazoria County, Texas, in 1997, prisoners at a private lock-up were forced to crawl on their stomachs and zapped with stun guns. Guards let attack dogs bite inmates. Communications from the prison were cut off so the cons couldn't tell the outside world what was happening.
… Two years ago, CCA paid $1.65-million to settle a suit brought by Ohio inmates who claimed they were abused and denied adequate medical care. Strip searches of male prisoners in front of female employees were common. So were escapes.
… Wackenhut was hit by scandals in four states last year. A study after a 1999 riot at a company prison in New Mexico found the company at fault. This month, four Wackenhut New Mexico guards were hit with federal indictments for brutality and for covering up their abuse. Women inmates claimed they'd been raped in Texas. A Fort Lauderdale facility was also rife with sexual abuse. And, in a horror story that has become an industry legend, a Wackenhut youth prison in Jena, La., commonly used tactics such as placing boys with much larger youths — with guards knowing assaults (read: rapes) would take place. Jena's other standard means of "rehabilitation" included tear-gassing and beatings.
The list goes on and on and on. Sadism, rape, brutality — not to mention ill-trained, underpaid and unmotivated guards protecting the public — are standard operating procedure at the private jails.
Here's one more tale that belongs more in the Middle Ages than just a few years ago. A Sarasota company called Correctional Services began operating the Pahokee Youth Development Center in 1996. The youths were "developed" by guards forcing them to fight in bloody gladiator matches. The company, knowing the value of young people, commonly held youths beyond their release date — just to collect the daily fee from the state and drive up profits.
The history of private prisons is rich with tales of corruption. It's common for the companies to fatten campaign coffers, hire politicians and their relatives, and spend lavishly to court legislators.
Florida, not surprisingly, has the honor of being home to the poster child for private-prison smarminess. A University of Florida professor, Charles W. Wilson, promoted himself as being the nation's foremost expert on private prisons. He never wavered for touting their economic benefits. What he didn't disclose was that he had collected a $3-million consulting fee from CCA. In 1999, he was fined $20,000 by the Florida Ethics Commission — a record sum — and forced to resign from the university. He still pops up gushing about the private prisons in states that haven't yet discovered his moral rot.
Meanwhile, C. Mark Hodges, the head of the state's Correctional Privatization Commission, had charges filed against him last year with the ethics commission for pocketing $90,000 in consulting fees from the private prison industry. The Florida Police Benevolent Association (PBA), a union that represents state prison guards, also claims that Hodges is responsible for contracts that allowed $1.3-million in excess payments to the prison companies.
"The guy runs his private consulting business out of his state office utilizing state employees," says Ken Kopczypski, the PBA's point man in the union's fight against private jails.
The biggest of the industry's big lies has been that it is cost effective. Study after study have found that the private prisons cost about the same per-person per-day as state facilities. Florida mandated that the private prisons reduce costs by 7 percent. Yet, a 1998 legislative study of the state's first two private prisons showed one cost more than similar-size government jails, and the savings at the other was a slim 4 percent.
"There is no savings, despite the industry's attempts to confuse the issue by making it difficult to compare state and private institutions," Kopczypski says.
The economics of the industry are simple. Wackenhut, CCA and the other companies are paid about the same to house prisoners as the state allots to its own facilities. The difference is that the companies need to extract a hefty profit. That means they often pay McDonald's-level wages for guards (as we all know, you get what you pay for) and cut corners on programs.
"Our real concern is public safety and what goes on in the prisons," Kopczypski says. "The industry has given up trying to sell itself based on economics. It's now claiming that it provides innovation and excellent programs. But look at the record."
The record? At Bay Correctional Facility in the Panhandle, a legislative investigator found that although CCA was paid to provide seven instructors for inmates, there were only three on staff.
And, while Kopczypski was being interviewed by the Weekly Planet, he received a emergency call from Tulsa, Okla. A prison staff member had gone public to report that although the private jail received public funds for inmate counseling services, no treatment was provided. "That's just plain fraud," Kopczypski says.
So, back to Mulberry, where last weekend Criswell Brown's steering committee of 14 citizens was plotting strategy against a giant national prison company.
"This is not the type of industry our community needs," Brown says.
It's not the type of industry any community needs.
Editor John "You'll Never Take Me Alive, Coppers" Sugg can be reached at 813-248-8888, ext. 109, or at johnsugg@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2001.