PRISON PLANET

Crime pays for US prison firms

Financiers, real estate agents and car salesmen might be suffering from America's economic malaise, but bulging jails have triggered a profit boom for corrections companies.

The United States leads the world in the number of people it incarcerates and government figures show the country's prison population grew by 3 per cent to a record 2.3 million inmates in 2006.

Harsher sentencing policies have put more criminals behind bars and prison management firms such as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and The GEO Group are racing to build new jails or expand existing facilities to house more convicted felons.

GEO Group
Privatized correctional and detention management, home detention, residential treatment and mental health facilities.

The GEO Group Australia manages four correctional facilities - at Fulham in Victoria, Junee in New South Wales and Wacol in Queensland. The company also manages a custody centre in Melbourne and is the primary healthcare provider to nine public prisons in Victoria through Pacific Shores Healthcare.


Corrections Corp of America:
Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) designs, builds and manages prisons, jails and detention facilities and provides inmate residential and prisoner transportation services in partnership with government.

20-year history of a corporation that, contrary to its celebratory public relations campaign, has been fraught with malfeasance, mismanagement, and abuse.
The report's findings include CCA's:

• failure to provide adequate medical care to prisoners;
• failure to control violence in its prisons;
• substandard conditions that have resulted in prisoner protests and uprisings;
• criminal activity on the part of some CCA employees, including the sale of illegal drugs to prisoners; and
• escapes, which in the case of at least two facilities include inadvertent releases of prisoners who were supposed to remain in custody.

Other areas of CCA's legacy covered in the report include the firm's:

• financial instability;
• self-defeating labor practices;
• attempts to influence public policy;
• use of campaign contributions and soft money; and
• use of questionable research by biased academics.

Corrections Corporation Of America: A Critical Look At Its First Twenty Years