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| Group says CCA falls short on promise |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 12/15/2003 |
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Private prison operator Corrections Corporation of America is plagued by substandard conditions in its prisons and financial instability that contradict recent attempts at image improvement, an interest group said last Tuesday. Charlotte, N.C.-based Grassroots Leadership, a liberal activist group, claims in an 81-page report that Nashville-based CCA has failed to deliver on its promise to remake the corrections industry. "Rather than taking the industry by storm, it still manages only about 3 percent of prison and jail beds in the United States, and its global aspirations had to be abandoned," the report says. A CCA spokesman discredited the report. "Quite honestly, the company doesn't feel this is a report that warrants a response," Steve Owen said. "This is a group with a specific agenda. They're adamantly opposed to our industry and corrections policy in general." The Grassroots Leadership report charges that CCA prisons are mismanaged and that the company depends on undertrained and underpaid workers to manage its facilities. The report also charges that CCA has used campaign contributions and involvement with a conservative lobbying group to push for tougher sentencing rules that create higher demand for prisons. "(We) believe that the time has come to put an end to the misguided experiment of prison privatization," Grassroots Leadership says in the report. Though it offers a lengthy list of reported escapes and other problems at CCA facilities, along with lawsuits filed against the company, the Grassroots study makes no comparison between the frequency of problems at CCA prisons and at other private prisons or public prisons in general. Owen said the Grassroots report is "propagandistic in nature" and said the company's growth - from management of 650 beds in 1983 to 59,000 currently - speaks for CCA's success. Among the incidents cited since 2000 are at least a dozen mistaken releases from a CCA-run jail in Tulsa, Okla., and the release earlier this year of a man indicted on child rape charges from a Tennessee workhouse. It also mentions escapes from CCA-run facilities in Florida, Louisiana and Texas and by prisoners being transported by a CCA subsidiary - all incidents from 2000 and 2001. The report also charges that since 2000, CCA-run prisons have failed to provide proper medical care, have not controlled prisoner violence and have been plagued by protests and prisoner uprisings over poor conditions. And Grassroots Leadership cites three cases from 2001 and 2002 - in Tennessee, Tulsa and the District of Columbia - where guards have been alleged to have sold drugs to prisoners. Grassroots cites a 1998 federal study that concluded that the claimed benefits of privatization had not been proven, and criticizes CCA as having used paid or ideologically biased analysis to support its case for privatization. The study says CCA is a private-sector member of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative policy group that supports tougher sentencing rules and has paid to sit on the group's criminal justice task force. Since nearly going bankrupt in 2000, CCA has restructured and fired a top executive who was one of the company's founders. After bottoming out at $2 a share in 2000, CCA's stock price is now over $27, up nearly 70 percent over one year ago. |
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