WHO PROFITS FROM IMPRISONMENT?

Not Taxpayers and Not Poor Neighborhoods.

When Corrections Corporation of America built its 1,100-bed private
prison in Tutwiler in the late 1990s, the message from the Legislature
and the state Department of Corrections was: Go to it, but don't
expect Mississippi to help keep it filled with inmates.

Mississippi already had more prison cells online or in the process of
being built than it could justify.

CCA's business model was supposed to be different, anyway. It was
going to house federal or out-of-state inmates - and it already had
its first customer, Wisconsin, lined up.

The business model, though, has proven to be a flop - one of a series
of bad business decisions that CCA made during a frenzy of expansion
that pushed it to the brink of bankruptcy.

Wisconsin pulled its inmates out a year after the prison's opening
because of the hardship the distance put on the families of those who
were incarcerated.

Alabama temporarily gave the Tallahatchie County facility new life
last summer, when it sent 1,400 inmates its way to get out from under
the pressure of a federal court order. Last week, though, Alabama
signaled that it would be bringing its prisoners back home because it
can't afford to pay anyone else to house them.

Now there's pressure for Mississippi to prop up the Tutwiler prison
and save its 250 jobs - even though incoming Gov. Haley Barbour has
made a prior commitment to reopen the Delta Correctional Facility in
Greenwood, another private prison which CCA managed but did not own.

Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps has said last week that, if the
state ends up moving inmates to either of these private prisons, the
first to get them would be Greenwood. That news is generally greeted
with smiles in a community that saw more than 200 jobs depart when the
prison was shuttered.

Epps said he is sensitive to the job loss but won't let it be an
overriding concern. He pledges that he won't strike any deal with the
two private prisons that doesn't save his agency money. He is
struggling with a $67 million funding shortfall this year, and looking
at a deficit of similar proportions in the fiscal year that begins
July 1.

The decision, though, might not be totally in Epps' hands. A holdover
from the Musgrove administration, Epps has a new boss, and that boss
is on record with a campaign promise to take the Greenwood prison out
of mothballs. There also are bound to be lawmakers - not to mention
the lobbyists for CCA - jockeying to save the jobs in impoverished
Tallahatchie County, where unemployment rates are chronically in the
double digits.

Lawmakers aren't always concerned with what's financially prudent in
making corrections policy. Just a few years ago, it built an 11th
regional jail, promising to put at least 200 state inmates there, even
as the Greenwood prison was running short of capacity.

When communities and states start looking at warehousing people as a
growth industry, it's asking for problems. It creates the momentum for
making bad public policy.

CCA, which marked its 20th anniversary last year, expanded wildly in
the last decade and took on massive debt on the assumption that the
incarceration rates would continue to trend upward. The federal
government and the states in the mid-1990s had embraced tougher
sentencing guidelines, sending more offenders behind bars and keeping
them there for longer stretches of time. In Mississippi, corrections
became the fastest growing item in the state budget.

When the national recession hit, however, the states started to
realize they couldn't afford this "lock 'em up and throw away the key"
mentality. They also have rediscovered that most prisons are not much
better than criminal-training centers. Send a first-time, non-violent
offender to prison, and chances are greater that he will come out a
hardened criminal than a changed man.

The states - forced by their budget constraints more than any
humanitarian impulses - have relaxed some of their harsher sentencing
guidelines and embraced cheaper alternatives, such as house arrest.
Mississippi, with the second highest rate of incarceration in the
country, is slowly starting to follow the trend.

That's bad news for the private prison industry, which has a profit
motive in convincing lawmakers and other public policymakers to keep a
steady flow of inmates coming.

Epps maintains that while he doesn't have to have the extra 1,800 or
so prison beds that Greenwood and Tutwiler can offer, he could utilize
the space to shut down some older camps at the sprawling state
Penitentiary at Parchman.

Downsizing Parchman, though, would also supposedly involve a layoff of
prison workers there, offsetting whatever jobs the private prisons
would create.

The only way to grow jobs in the prison business is to cultivate more
inmates. Not only is such a strategy expensive to taxpayers, but it
has a devastating ripple effect on those neighborhoods - usually poor
and minority -where an increasing percentage of their adult male
population is spending time behind bars.