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| Too focused on bottom line? |
| By FS, Kansas |
| Published: 05/19/2007 |
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On 4/14, CCA's Steve Owens responded to "Dungeons for Dollars," written by Brian Dawe. Owens claims Dawe's opinion was "highly inaccurate," "poorly sourced," and "egregiously biased." Owens claims the for-profit prison industry has conveyed "benefits, best practices and innovations." If any claim was every egregiously biased, it is those contentions of Owens. Mr. Dawe reported for instance, that the industry pays as little as $8.25 an hour. In fact, a current CEC/CiviGenics administrator in Texas told me at the American Correctional Association Convention in January that they were paying [officers] as little as $7 an hour. I would recommend that Corrections.com readers look at stories on the CBS website for its "60 Minutes" segment Detention in America. Check the story on CCA's Elizabeth Detention Center for immigration prisoners in New Jersey in the May 5, 2008 New York Timesarticle, Few Details on Immigrants Who Died in Custody, as well as that paper's May 6 editorial, Death by Detention on the subject. If you haven't had enough, there's the four-part series that finished recently in the Washington Poston deaths in these immigration "dungeons" as Mr. Dawe accurately termed them. The recent PBS "Now" program, Prison for profit featured an interview with a whistleblower who worked at numerous CCA facilities and who accurately predicted the July 20, 2004 riot at their Crowley prison. It had on-camera dialogue with a control room operator who describes the Crowley electronic cell-monitoring system as "messed up" and admits that the qualifications for CCA [officers] and the training they receive are well below what state employees enjoy. On its website, PBS includes an interview with a GEO Group whistleblower as well in its piece, mmigrant Detainees: A New Profit Center?. Owens claimed that the Corrections Yearbook article that contained turnover rates in the for-profits was based on an inadequate sample of only 29 prisons. That number was a huge percentage of the existing prisons at the time the survey was accomplished. When pollsters are tracking voter sentiment, for instance, an accurate representation can be obtained by contacting just a few hundred to a thousand voters, out of hundreds of thousands of registered voters in a congressional district. If anything, the sampling by the Yearbook was exhaustive. Owens attacks Dawe as being "pro-union" as if that were a bad thing. American unions have given us living wages, "weekends," vacations, employer-provided health care and representation in cases of owner abuse. Mr. Owens' six figure salary and stock awards come at the expense of CCA's $8 an hour employees who receive marginal benefits. No wonder he's complaining. It's his ox that's being gored. CCA's response to these problems has been to avoid responding altogether or to malign the character of the bearers of bad tidings such as Mr. Jones, who blew the whistle on their laundering of reports as reported by TIME in its story, Scrutiny for a Bush Judicial Nominee, 3/13/08. The bottom line is that CCA only seems to care about the "bottom line." FS, Kansas |
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