STEPHEN HARPER OPENS DOOR TO PRISON PRIVATIZATION

On April 27, 2006, the Ontario government announced the end of a
bizarre venture. Canada's first large privately run prison, a
1,200-inmate maximum-security superjail in the cottage country north
of Toronto, was a failure and would be taken over by the province.

The Penetanguishene-based Central North Correctional Centre was a
striking attempt at getting in on the controversial private-prison
craze that has swept the United States, where for-profit businesses
now run approximately 150 prisons housing about 150,000 inmates.
Ontario's five-year experiment with the concept, launched with much
fanfare in 2001 by Robert Sampson-at the time the law-and-order Tory
correctional services minister-ended amid revelations of flawed
security, inadequate prisoner health care, and higher reoffending
rates once the privately housed inmates were let back out into the world.

Today, Sampson has secured a gig with the Stephen Harper
Conservatives leading a federal panel reviewing Canada's prison
system. Its mandate includes finding "opportunities for savings
including through physical plant realignment and infrastructure renewal".

Does the choice of Sampson mean the feds want to privatize Canadian
prisons? Stockwell Day, the federal public safety minister, says no.
"The question of privatization is not on the table," he told
journalists after Sampson's appointment last April. But some critics
aren't so sure. "We have to be very vigilant to see where this review
is going and how broad it gets in terms of an agenda around
privatization," NDP MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East) told a reporter.

Len Bush, national representative of 15,000 provincial prison guards
in the National Union of Public and Government Employees, is also
skeptical about Day's denial. "He's not actually come out and said,
'No, I won't privatize.' We would welcome him saying so. It looks to
us that this is their direction, even though they're not in a
situation where they feel they can say it publicly," he said on the
phone from his Ottawa office.

Sampson submitted his report to the government on October 31, but it
remains under wraps. In late October, though, news leaked from the
Sampson panel suggesting that it was preparing to scrap statutory
release, the virtually automatic discharge of prisoners under
conditions similar to parole after they've served two-thirds of their
sentences. Instead, "you'd have to show why you deserve to be
released [at the two-thirds point]," a Canadian Press story quoted an
unnamed source "familiar with the panel's report" as saying. "It'll
put more people in [prison], so they're going to need more resources."

This has stoked the privatization fears: that the Harper government's
law-and-order agenda could unleash a crisis of overcrowding in
prisons, and guess what the magical solution will be? Private
prisons. There is just one catch: crime experts say all
this-dramatically increased prisoner numbers, possible privatization
of prisons, and get-tough measures, including increased and mandatory
sentences-will probably make Canadian communities less safe, not more.

At first glance, the plan may seem reasonable to some: make
wrongdoers show they've changed. What could be wrong with that? It
would force some to shape up, right? Wrong. Such a change would
create instant havoc in already overcrowded provincial and federal
prison systems by adding up to 30 or 40 percent more inmates
virtually overnight, according to Neil Boyd, an SFU criminology
professor who spoke to the Georgia Straight from his Bowen Island home.

The change in the statutory release rule could suddenly add another
2,200 prisoners to the federal corrections system, which currently
houses 12,000 inmates-an increase of almost 20 percent, Anthony Doob,
a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, estimated on
the phone from his office. "The math is pretty straightforward. You
could create a crisis almost overnight by changing parole practices."

Combined with other tough crime measures being proposed by the Harper
government, a sudden tsunami of inmates would also swamp provincial
prison systems, since many of those affected are those with sentences
under two years. In B.C., provincial jails are already overcrowded
and boiling with violence since the province closed nine facilities
in 2001, said Dean Purdy, chair of the corrections and
sheriff's-services component of the B.C. Government and Service
Employees' Union, representing 2,000 provincial corrections officers
and sheriffs. At the Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Centre,
where Purdy works as a supervisor, there have been 39 assaults on
guards since 2001, compared to five in the prior 15 years, he said.
"I can't imagine what it will be like to run the jails with a higher count."

"It [the increase in inmates] will come as a rude surprise to the
provinces," said Craig Jones, executive director of the John Howard
Society of Canada, speaking on his cellphone from a conference in
Toronto. "The feds will crack down on crime, but the provinces will
be punished."

In October, Harper introduced his Tackling Violent Crime Act, Bill
C-2, into the House of Commons, complete with a shopping list of
ideas courtesy of the U.S. law-and-order lobby, including mandatory
minimum sentences for certain offences and harsher penalties for gun
crimes. Harper declared the bill a confidence motion and said he'd
accept no amendments to it, meaning the government will fall should
it be defeated by the opposition-unlikely, since the Liberals
desperately want to avoid an election.

Criminologists and prison guards say the actual result of the Harper
crime package will probably be not safer communities but, rather,
private prisons in which the bottom line is king, not inmate rehabilitation.

With five to 10 years needed to build a new prison from conception to
construction, coupled with Harper's ideological predisposition to
outsourcing government programs, Jones said it's not a big leap to
privatized prisons coming to Canada in a big way. "Our anxiety is
they're going to grow the prison population so quickly, they will be
left with few options."

Creating a crisis to push through a controversial change is straight
out of the playbook of Mike Harris's Conservative government in
Ontario when it privatized the Penetanguishene prison, NUPGE's Bush
said. "The strategy of the Harris government was to create a crisis
and bring privatization forward to deal with the crisis," he said.
"You take an overcrowded situation, add more people, and you create a
crisis. We were hoping the experience elsewhere would have taught them."

The U.S. experience with privatized prisons is full of cautionary
tales. After federal and state authorities brought in tougher
law-and-order crime laws (among them the infamous "three strikes"
statutes)-like the mandatory minimum sentences now being proposed by
Harper-in the 1980s and '90s, the American prison population
quadrupled, from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million today. (Another 4.8
million Americans are out on parole or probation, meaning a total of
one in 32 adult Americans is under the control of the justice system
in one fashion or another.)

It's a myth, however, that the explosion in inmate numbers was about
getting violent, hardened criminals off the street. Instead, the
crackdown disproportionately targeted marginalized people and
small-time drug offenders. In 2003, racial or ethnic minorities made
up 68 percent of the U.S. prison population, according to U.S.
Justice Department data.

So who were these new offenders driving the U.S. prison boom? Turns
out a huge number of them were POWs-prisoners of the war on drugs.
Between 1990 and 2000, the portion of inmates jailed for a drug
offence shot up by 59 percent while those in for violent crimes
actually fell from 17 to 10 percent, according to Justice Department
numbers. By 2004, drug offenders made up 54 percent of sentenced
federal prisoners, up from just 25 percent in 1980. Of all drug
arrests, about two in five were related to marijuana. Moreover, nine
in 10 marijuana busts involve possession only, not sale or manufacturing.

Early on, the big question became what to do with all these new
guests of the correctional system. The crime crackdown led to a boom
in the number of U.S. federal and state prisons, from 592 in 1974 to
1,023 in 2000. In one Texas county, 33 percent of the population is
behind bars, according to a 2004 study by the Washington, D.C.-based
Urban Institute.

Authorities turned to private companies to build and run many
prisons. The largest operator by far is the Nashville,
Tennessee-based Corrections Corp. of America, with 65 facilities
under management, including 40 it owns outright, that house 72,000
inmates. Business at CCA is booming. Since 2000, its shares have shot
up from $4 to almost $29.

But an independent study of CCA in 2003 found the company had failed
to: provide adequate medical care to inmates, control violence in its
facilities, and prevent a rash of escapes. Civil-rights violations
have also been raised in hundreds of lawsuits against CCA by
prisoners and their families, including several that revolved around
inmate deaths. The study, cowritten by the U.K.-based Prison
Privatisation Report International and the U.S. community group Good
Jobs First, also said CCA tried to keep down costs by paying staff
poorly, which resulted in high turnover and mistreatment of prisoners.

Substandard conditions also had resulted in prisoner protests and
uprisings, while several CCA guards had been convicted of drug
trafficking inside the facilities.

A low point for the company came in the late 1990s, when it agreed to
a payment of $2.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by
prisoners at its Youngstown, Ohio, prison who said the facility was
unsafe after a rash of stabbings. "It's been a nightmare,"
Youngstown's mayor, George McKelvey-who helped lure CCA to his
city-said in an October 1998 Washington Post story. "[CCA's]
credibility is zero."

CCA officials didn't return calls for this story.

The plague of scandals at CCA and other private prison operators
prompted Business Week to publish a story in 2000 titled "Private
Prisons Don't Work" that said "the industry's heyday may already be history."

"It's horror story after horror story in the U.S.," Lyle Stewart,
spokesman for the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers,
representing 6,000 federal prison guards, said from his office in
Montreal. "It's frigging terrible."

In recent years, many American states have retreated from the
incarceration-oriented approach, largely because corrections now eat
up seven percent of state budgets, on average. In 2000, California
voters passed a resolution eliminating mandatory minimum sentences
for certain crimes and requiring treatment, not prison time, for
nonviolent drug offenders. In November, even the hard-line Bush
administration eased minimum sentencing guidelines for federal crack offences.

But while U.S. authorities step back from the ailing crime policies
of the 1980s and 1990s, the John Howard Society's Jones sees the
Harper government embracing the same troubled approach. "This
government seems enthralled by the Bush administration," he said,
noting that Harper's crime policies "seem to reflect a close study of
the American model".

Jones said the Harper crime agenda is likely to fall heaviest on
marginalized people, just as the measures did in the U.S. "Police go
where the pickings are easiest. It will fall disproportionately on
marginalized, mentally ill, and minority youth. You will not see more
Conrad Blacks in jail," he said. "It's not about justice; it's about
acting Old Testament."

From Bowen Island, SFU's Boyd agreed. "Why would we want to
dramatically increase the number of people in jail for cannabis?
That's what it [mandatory sentencing] did in the U.S. Why would we
want to look at them [the U.S.] when looking at crime?" he asked,
noting that the U.S. has 2.5 times more murders per capita than Canada.

"There's just no support for the idea that punishment will get the
social safety we want. We should be looking at success stories," Boyd
said, pointing to European countries that have promoted crime
prevention and improved social housing over incarceration.

In fact, that's exactly the approach that was favoured by a crime
prevention council within Canada's Public Safety Ministry when it
reviewed corrections policy back in 1996. The council's study, which
is posted on the ministry's Web site, doesn't mince words in its
criticism of U.S. mandatory minimum sentencing as a failed model that
did little to reduce crime rates while merely increasing the prison population.

"Not only is the cost of automatic incarceration brought about by
this policy inordinately high, but it does little to stem the ongoing
tide of new offenders," noted the study, titled Money Well Spent:
Investing in Preventing Crime. "Minimum mandatory sentencing
requirements rely upon the false assumption that people who are
contemplating a criminal act-youths in particular-go through a
rational process of planning their act and weighing the consequences
of being apprehended."

As for Harper's plan to tighten parole eligibility, U of T's Doob
said the notion goes against everything that's known about the
importance of transitioning prisoners into society through supervised
programs like parole and halfway houses. "Probably the worst thing
you could do is hold a guy his whole sentence and then give him a bus
ticket with no job, no program, and no controls."

Jones is also flabbergasted. "The evidence is clear that
incarceration is the last resort. Most people do not benefit from it
and a number of people get worse. Prison is an expensive way to make
bad people worse."

Jones also is alarmed about privatized prisons making a return. "The
staff [in private prisons] has less training. They employ harsher
measures because they're cheaper; the conditions deteriorate. The
inmates eventually get out, so it passes on the costs of dealing with
them to future governments and generations. The issue is they're
going to be worse when they get out."

Doob agreed, saying the evidence on privatized prisons is clear: "The
data that exists in various countries suggests there are real
problems in the ways that private companies run these things." Any
money saved in direct operational costs is offset by the added
expense of monitoring prison companies for contract compliance, a
greater rate of prisoner escapes, and a higher recidivism rate. "It
would be an ideological decision [to privatize prisons], not a
financial one," he said.

The BCGEU's Purdy said provincial corrections officials weren't
impressed when they travelled to Ontario to investigate the
Penetanguishene experiment a few years ago. "They came back and told
us they weren't interested in privatizing any jails in B.C.," he said.

Whatever Harper has in mind for the prison system, one thing is for
sure: There's little chance he'll unveil any plans for privatizing
prisons before the next federal election. Unless Harper wins a
majority, it seems suicidal for him to take a chance on such a
controversial idea. He'd have his hands full with furious federal
prison guards who "would fight it to the death if there was any sense
at all" of privatization plans, vowed Stewart.

Already, other elements of Harper's crime agenda seem destined for a
collision course with the provinces, which are likely to flip out
when they're hit with massive numbers of new prisoners.

Harper apparently isn't even finding many allies within the
Correctional Service of Canada, even though it is likely to enjoy a
massive budget increase to accommodate the new inmates. Jones said
senior corrections officials see Harper's regressive policies as
reversing years of hard-won policy gains in areas like parole and
crime prevention.

"When the tide turns so dramatically, they [corrections officials]
see their work as being undone," he said. "It turns back the clock on
40 years of progressive corrections policy."