BUILD IT AND THEY WILL COME . . . IN HANDCUFFS AND LEG IRONS

Last week, a broad-based coalition of religious and civil rights
organizations, student activists and labor groups from across the country
took to the streets of Nashville, Tenn., to protest one of the more
disturbing and degrading social trends of the last decade: America's
growing reliance on private prisons. The headquarters of Corrections
Corporation of America (CCA) is located in Nashville.

"The industry of warehousing people," said one of the protest's leaders,
Harmon Wray of the United Methodist Church, "has presented a temptation to
those who would profit from the punishment of human beings."

The 1990s were a boom time for the business of crime and punishment --
fueled by the incarceration of large numbers of nonviolent drug offenders.
We now spend close to $35 billion a year maintaining the 2 million
prisoners this country has living under lock and key. And riding the crest
of this corrections boom was a handful of corporations -- led by industry
giant CCA and its chief rival, Wackenhut Corrections -- that saw this
growth in the criminal population not as a national tragedy but as a chance
to make a quick buck. Or a few hundred million of them. Wall Street agreed,
and the stocks of these private prison companies soared.

So did their share of the inmate market. The private sector now handles
more than 120,000 beds, amounting to 6 percent of the U.S. prison
population -- an eightfold increase since 1990. Much of this growth was
driven by good old-fashioned entrepreneurship -- CCA would just build its
new prisons on spec and then market the fresh beds to states and local
municipalities unable to accommodate burgeoning inmate populations. Think
of it as a Field of Bad Dreams strategy: "Build it and they will come ...
in handcuffs and leg irons." Left unasked was the question of what it says
about a country when businesses and investors are gambling their money on
the expectation -- and hope? -- that there will be more and more Americans
running afoul of the law. It's the misery market.

But there are unmistakable signs that this market may also be heading for a
correction. Due to a combination of overbuilding, well-publicized abuses
and the renewed ability of no-longer-cash-strapped governments to erect
their own jails, private prisons across the country have been left with a
surfeit of empty beds and a rapidly shrinking bottom line. The stocks of
both CCA and Wackenhut have plummeted, with CCA barely avoiding going belly
up this spring after a $265 million loss.

At the same time, government officials across the country are finally
taking a closer look at the effectiveness of private prisons. And what they
are finding is not a pretty sight: reports of rampant physical and sexual
abuse of inmates; lax security leading to an unusually high number of
escapes; high-profile murders of inmates and guards, and, above all,
cost-cutting measures that border on indifference.

The profit motive has created incentives that are truly perverse. Private
prisons, after all, operate like hotels: the more beds they fill and the
longer their "guests" stay, the more money they make. As a result,
companies have shown a reluctance to reward inmates for good behavior so as
not to lose their source of revenue before they absolutely have to.

Given the abuses, growing numbers of states -- including California,
Louisiana, Georgia and Texas -- are reconsidering the money-saving wonders
of private correctional facilities. And North Carolina recently took over
management of two private facilities run by CCA, citing chronic
"understaffing and the inadequate provision of prison security and safety,
education, medical and mental-health care, substance abuse and work programs."

In a sign of further trouble, student activists, so often in the forefront
of movements for social justice, have begun protesting the connection
between private prisons and the food being served at their schools. It
turns out that Sodexho Marriott Services, the food-service provider for
more than 500 U.S. colleges, is a subsidiary of Sodexho Alliance -- a
big-time investor in CCA.

Currently active on more than 40 campuses, Not With Our Money is a national
campaign that seeks to stem the flow of the more than $1.2 billion in
annual revenue that students provide Sodexho Marriott by getting school
officials to give Marriott the boot. That's what happened at Washington's
Evergreen State College. "We know it's people our age who are getting
locked up in record numbers," said Malka Fenyvesi, a senior at the school.

When the bottom line dominates all other concerns, it's the rest of us who
pay the price. After all, would you really like to have to shop around and
negotiate for the cheapest policeman to guard your block? It's time for the
misery market to take a dive.

Huffington can be reached via e-mail at arianna@ariannaonline.com.