The U.S. Department of Justice is ending its decade’s long relationship with private prisons. The decision only affects federal inmates, so it has no direct bearing on Alaska’s Department of Corrections. But it’s an affair worth studying because Gov. Bill Walker is considering contracting with the private sector to run Alaska’s Pioneer Homes and Juvenile Justice facilities.
Private prisons “do not save substantially on costs” wrote Sally Yates, Deputy Attorney General, in her memo announcing DOJ was “beginning the process of reducing — and ultimately ending” the use of privately operated prisons. She also stated their rehabilitative services and job training haven’t been as effective in reducing recidivism as government operated prisons.
But according to Sasha Volokh, “we don’t know much about comparative cost or quality, so there isn’t much basis for strong empirical statements about public or private prisons.” That’s what he learned studying prison system performance while an associate professor at Emory Law School in Atlanta.
Volokh’s findings, published in Emory Law Journal in 2014, weren’t new. Back in 1997 Congress passed the Revitalization Act in an effort to reform the criminal justice system. It called for a systemwide comparative analysis of quality and cost effectiveness between private and government run prisons. That effort found that the data was inadequate to determine if private prison operations saved taxpayer money or performed as well as state run systems.
Obviously no one in Congress was concerned about that lack of evidence supporting the benefits of privatization. That’s why after 18 years there’s still no proof.
And it doesn’t matter to some newspapers either.
“It costs more for the government to provide these types of services than it does the private sector,” the editorial staff at the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman wrote in 2011 without citing a single source.
Ironically they were defending the opening of the Gosse Creek Correctional Center, Alaska’s newest state system prison intended to house about 800 Alaskan inmates who were incarcerated at a private facility in Weld County, Colorado. Goose Creek might cost Alaskan taxpayers more, but to the Frontiersman it meant “the money spent on [inmate] rehabilitation and oversight remains in the state. Prison guards drawing state salaries will buy homes and cars, consumer goods and food. And the money will circulate throughout Alaska.”
To be fair, they also said effective rehabilitation was more important than the local economic benefits. And they argued that Alaska’s correctional system had proven it was more likely to provide it than private sector prisons.
On the other side, Weld County officials weren’t interested in cost effectiveness because Alaska was footing the bill. But they were concerned about losing 20 jobs and one of the community’s largest customers for water and sewer services.
It was the local economy that Rep. Mike Chennault, R-Nikiski, had in mind when he introduced legislation 15 years ago to build a private prison in his district. He claimed the facility would “create 250 steady jobs, and generate an estimated $600 million in state expenditures for construction and operations over 20 years.” He never mentioned he was looking to the private sector because for-profit prisons would be more cost efficient at performing the same work as a new prison in the state system.
In any case, the cost to operate a private prison is likely going up. According to Volokh “there’s a new trend in corrections to develop good performance measures and make payments contingent on those performance measures.” That’s what he wrote last week in the Washington Post in response to DOJ’s criticism about private prison quality. But no improvement is free, so those changes will be another opportunity for contractors to raise costs, which in turn will reduce or even erase any taxpayer savings they’ve been providing.
The bottom line is private businesses that are under contract to perform government tasks rarely care about whether the government is spending more or less money. Their goal is to efficiently maximize profits while reducing risks. One of the ways private prisons have done that is to insist on guaranteed occupancy rates as high as 90 percent in their long term contracts. They’ll gladly continue taking the same amount of our tax dollars even though it costs them less to run a half full prison.
Just like the lack of proof that privatization reduces the cost of government operations, that kind of opportunistic contracting isn’t unique to prison systems. It’s why Walker and our legislators should be wary of business proposals claiming they can provide the same level of service at the Pioneer Homes and Juvenile Justice facilities for less money than the state spends now.
• Rich Moniak is a Juneau resident and retired civil engineer with more than 25 years of experience working in the public sector.
