CONSERVATIVES GEARING UP TO PUSH FOR PRIVATE PRISONS

Saturday morning would not be complete without listening to Scott Simon on
National Public Radio - even while on vacation. Last Saturday he dealt with
the prison industrial complex, and Wisconsin had a star role. Simon exposed
those behind the "tough on crime" policies that have filled our prisons.

Audiences are amazed when told that we are spending more on prisons than we
are on our university system while tuition caroms out of control. How did
it happen? Simon took us by the hand and revealed the quiet but effective
corporate effort to promote the "tough on crime" hysteria that helped
create our budgetary problem.

It turns out that legislators and governors have been receiving lots of
help, research, and campaign contributions from profit-oriented
corporations in defining how we should deal with those who break the law,
and, indeed, which laws to enact.

Once we believed that loss of freedom was not only a significant punishment
but also an opportunity to reform the prisoner. We called it
rehabilitation. And we believed that if prisoners behaved themselves, they
should be released early for good behavior. We had prisons where inmates
built furniture, made license plates, learned to read, farmed and were told
that they could regain their precious freedom if they demonstrated that
they were ready to return to society.

Prison was a means to an end, not an end in itself. And profit was not in
the equation.

A couple of decades ago, Wisconsin was a leader in innovative efforts to
effectively rehabilitate prisoners. But that was then and this is now.

Fox Lake Correctional Institution was an example of that progressive
thinking, with a secure perimeter but freedom within the institution.
Inmates ate together, went to shop training, talked, watched television,
and acted like normal citizens with the notable exception that they could
not go down the street for a burger and a beer or hug their kids.

The guards were unarmed and mingled with the prisoners. There was an
incentive for the guards to treat inmates as human beings, and for
prisoners to treat the guards in a similar fashion or find themselves on
the way to a more restrictive environment in Waupun or some other facility.
(Even the alternative maximum security prison in those days would not
approach the absolute nonsense of a supermax.)

I visited Fox Lake several years ago with an associate and we walked among
the inmates and there was little tension between unarmed guards and
inmates. I left with the feeling that we were on the right path to a
sensible approach to treatment of the nonviolent offender.

Today those concepts are out the window. The Legislature wants to punish
inmates, violent or nonviolent, take away television and books, isolate
them from their families, extend their sentences, add crimes, eliminate all
judgment by the judges in sentencing. And with the Legislature
micromanaging the sentencing decisions with "one size fits all," common
sense is eliminated.

It is the judge, following a presentence report from experts, who is in a
position to determine if he or she is facing a hardened criminal or a young
person who drove after his license was revoked or perhaps was arrested for
driving while black. Should he get probation or incarceration? Should the
alcoholic get treatment or prison?

But those decisions are now almost computerized. The question arises why we
have judges involved at all. Let Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, Scott
Walker and other "experts" make the decisions. Why permit pussyfooting
judges to make choices when demagogues, coached by the profiteers, can do
it better without ever seeing the person or his family?

What was fascinating about the Simon radio program were the public
confessions of Tommy Thompson and Scott Walker, the latter holding the
chairmanship of the Assembly committee with jurisdiction over our prisons.

They made his point. Thompson, speaking to a thousand people at a dinner
for a lobbying group, began with his familiar cheerleading roar: "Isn't it
great to be a conservative." It was not a question. The crowd of corporate
representatives who profit from prisons and prisoners loved it. Phone
companies, health care delivery and drug companies, those hawking the
latest laser weapon and, of course, Corrections Corporation of America, the
private prison company that takes most of Wisconsin's prisoners sent out of
state at an annual cost of $50 million. They love long sentences,
overcrowded prisons, and the Thompson decision to effectively end parole.
Each prisoner is a profit center for these corporations.

Thompson said he loved coming to these annual meetings because, and I'm not
making this up, "I always got new ideas, took them home to Wisconsin,
disguised them as my own and got them enacted." The lobbyists must have
been bursting with pride.

But never mind the usurpation; the ideas that the profiteers push is what
we should focus on: truth in sentencing, three strikes and you're out, and
privatization of our prisons.

Sound familiar? The more prisoners there are, the more phone calls they
make, the more food they devour, the more profit for those corporations
that have figured out the game.

As Professor Walter Dickey said on the program, those who stand to profit
from policy decisions should not participate in the decision-making. But
Scott Walker said that he was pleased to get research from the prison lobby
and was proud of "truth in sentencing," which they pushed.

The only thing missing in their research, of course, is truth. They
cleverly focus on time for crime rather than cost to taxpayers or effective
results.

Get ready for the next push - privatization of prisons. Private prisons
have zero incentive to educate or rehabilitate. No incentive to release
prisoners early, because they lose a customer with every decision to
parole. Guards? Non-union, of course, and fewer of them. Private prisons
don't educate, they warehouse.

The next time you read about our fiscal crisis, demand real truth in
sentencing. Ask who is behind the screen.