Many states are broke and their state governments are beginning to get desperate to bring at least a little relief to their budgetary problems. Each state has its reasons for finding themselves in the crises they are in and lots of them are there because of their own foolishness and misappropriation of state funds as well as never thinking of the possibility that the tap may slow its flow if not run dry. In other words these highly paid officials never thought they would be caught with record high unemployment or a severe recession. So they never put in any measures to prepare for a slow down. They were content to attend cocktail party fund raisers, pat themselves on the back and revel in self importance.
Now the payment for the fat cat ignorance and inattention to business is coming due, and a lot of them are getting really, really desperate as they flounder around trying to find ways out of the fiscal mess. Arizona is an example of really bad management and really ignorant officials. Recently they tried to sell their capital building and then rent it back from the buyer. It was a convoluted and really unworkable real estate scheme and it seems to have failed.
Now Arizona is going to seek bids from private companies for nine of the states ten prison complexes including those that house death row prisoners. From the New York Times:
FLORENCE, Ariz. — One of the newest residents on Arizona’s death row, a convicted serial killer named Dale Hausner, poked his head up from his television to look at several visitors strolling by, each of whom wore face masks and vests to protect against the sharp homemade objects that often are propelled from the cells of the condemned.
It is a dangerous place to patrol, and Arizona spends $4.7 million each year to house inmates like Mr. Hausner in a super-maximum-security prison. But in a first in the criminal justice world, the state’s death row inmates could become the responsibility of a private company.
State officials will soon seek bids from private companies for 9 of the state’s 10 prison complexes that house roughly 40,000 inmates, including the 127 here on death row. It is the first effort by a state to put its entire prison system under private control.
The privatization effort, both in its breadth and its financial goals, demonstrates what states around the country — broke, desperate and often overburdened with prisoners and their associated costs — are willing to do to balance the books. Arizona officials hope the effort will put a $100 million dent in the state’s roughly $2 billion budget shortfall.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said State Representative Andy Biggs, a Republican who supports private prisons. “If we were not in this economic environment, I don’t think we’d be talking about this with the same sense of urgency.”
If the state can’t afford to run the system without profit, how in the world is a for profit corporation going to do it? What will have to be cut in order to get the profit they desire? What about paroles, etc. and their follow-up? And finally, is this even remotely legal?
Somehow my mind keeps going to Halliburton, KBR and Blackwater. For them it seems lives always come down to liability, yet they are rarely held accountable.
“I would not want to be the warden of death row,” said Todd Thomas, the warden of a prison in Eloy, Ariz., run by the Corrections Corporation of America. The company, the country’s largest private prison operator, has six prisons in Arizona with inmates from other states.
“That’s not to say we couldn’t,” Mr. Thomas said. “But the liability is too great. I don’t think any private entity would ever want to do that.”
Is this the start of cheap prison labor, like China? Will judges, prosecutors and police start getting paid for the number of people they help incarcerate, thereby making the prisons more profitable?
Arizona, meet Pandora’s Box.
