$100M US JAIL HAS EVERYTHING - EXCEPT PRISONERS

IT RISES like a mirage in California's barren Mojave desert, a white
stone vision of an ideal city - but for the intimidating rolls of
razor wire piled up along the perimeter fence. This is America's
newest and, at $100m (pounds 62m), most expensive prison - a 2,300-bed
medium-to-high-security facility by the country's largest private
prison operator.

There is one problem with this glittering cage, however. It has no
prisoners.

The California City Correctional Facility opened two months ago. With
the US's prison population soaring, the Corrections Corporation of
America (CCA) built the prison in the confident belief that the
justice system would take all the prison beds it could find.

But the state of California, egged on by its powerful prison guards'
union, has decided it doesn't like private prisons. So the
computerised video surveillance cameras are trained on emptiness, the
cell doors gape open, and Daniel Vasquez, the warden, is kicking his
heels.

"I hope policymakers will see this as a viable alternative," he says
"The state prisons are overcrowded. More than half the 58 counties of
California have jails that are overcrowded too. As time goes on we're
going to be difficult to ignore."

There is little doubt that the public system is teetering. The US has
1.8 million people, 445 per 100,000, locked up - a proportion
unprecedented in modern world history and one that is increasing.
California alone houses more than 170,000 offenders, making it the
guardian of the biggest single prison system in the world.

The dramatic growth in the prison population is almost entirely due to
government policy rather than the crime rate, which has decreased in
recent years. Individual states have become tougher, passing longer
sentences and imposing stricter parole conditions, while cutting back
programmes for mental illness, drug rehabilitation and other social
services. Petty delinquents and addicts are thus criminalised, because
there is nowhere else to send them.

By now, the criminal justice system has developed what the Atlantic
Monthly magazine described as a "prison-industrial complex", with
guards' unions and construction companies lobbying lawmakers to build
and fill new prisons. The state can barely keep up, however, resulting
in deteriorating conditions and scandals involving brutality or
neglect by prison guards and, frequently, violent death among inmates.

Private prisons have come into vogue along with the increase in
incarceration. There is money to be made not only from the host
state's prison population, but also from federal prisoners and from
other states too poor to house their own prisoners, which prefer to
"export" them instead.

Private prisons indubitably provide superior infrastructure, more
up-to-date security and the possibility of better living conditions.
But they have raised concerns, particularly because of their habit, at
least in the US, of taking whatever prisoners they can get, regardless
of the gravity of their crimes and the suitability of throwing them
all in together.

At a prison operated by CCA in Youngstown, Ohio, several inmates have
died at the hands of maximum-security prisoners who were not supposed
to be there. Last year six particularly tough offenders staged a
jailbreak just days after CCA had agreed to move its maximum-security
prisoners out.

There are doubts, too, about cost-effectiveness. Most private-sector
savings come through the use of non-unionised labour in remote
locations such as California City; a consequence of this is a high
turnover in staff and the risk of inadequate training.

For these reasons, California has resisted the national trend to
privatisation. "If you're going to privatise, you want the system to
be better, or cheaper, or both. We don't believe either point has been
demonstrated," said Bob Presley, secretary of California's Youth and
Adult Correctional Agency.

CCA and other companies accuse the state of bad faith, pointing to the
vast campaign contributions made by the main prison guards' union
($4.1m last year, against $280,000 distributed to politicians by CCA)
as the only relevant factor. In the company's view, however, no amount
of public-sector protectionism is going to hold California's resolve
for long, simply because the burden of administering the system is
growing too heavy.

CCA is building three unsolicited prisons in California in all. They
may be fighting for inmates now - receiving largely from county or
federal jurisdictions, if at all - but the company is betting that the
lure of that mirage in the desert will soon be irresistible.