When a private prison company came to small-town Wyoming (audio)

The private prison industry is often held up as an example of the worst ills of mass incarceration. Reports of unsafe conditions, underpaid employees, and other cost-cutting measures have dogged private corrections for decades. 

And yet the industry itself makes up only about 2% of the $182 billion that goes into incarceration in the U.S. every year. So why do these companies get so much flak? And what would closing down private prisons really mean for justice reform in the country?

In this episode, our reporters take you to Evanston, Wyoming, an old oil town near the Utah border. The county’s plan to build a private immigration detention center tells the story of the money that flows in and out of our prison system – and the moral dilemma it creates. 

Note: This is Episode 4 of Season 2. To listen to the other episodes and sign up for the newsletter, please visit the “Perception Gaps: Locked Up” main page. 

This audio story was designed to be heard. We strongly encourage you to experience it with your ears, but we understand that is not an option for everybody. You can find the audio player above. For those who are unable to listen, we have provided a transcript of the story below.

AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

[Audio clips of broadcasts about private prisons] 

[News Channel 5: “One of the largest private prison companies in the country is receiving backlash from community groups…”][CCTV English: “...are paying huge sums of money to private prison companies or for-profit prisons ...”][CBS News:“...more inmates means more money and private prisons are looking to make a profit…”][News Channel 5: “...they want the leader of the private prison industry to stop making money off of inmates.”]

Samantha Laine Perfas: The private prison is a powerful symbol of mass incarceration in America. Since emerging in the 1980s, they’ve increasingly become a target of criticism for justice reform advocates, politicians, and the public. 

Pete Bass: “...my biggest problem is private prisons. They’re going to cut their budgets, get rid of help, crowd more people in, and that’s how they make their money…”Brenda Richins: “...the private detention part, that’s something that should be the responsibility of our government. They shouldn’t be part of the economy…”

Sam: And yet: private prisons make up a much smaller chunk of the American prison system than most people think. And just shutting them down may not do very much to fix the problems in our justice system. 

That’s… a perception gap. 

[Theme music]

I’m Samantha Laine Perfas, and this is “Perception Gaps: Locked Up,” by The Christian Science Monitor.

[Theme music]

Welcome back to Season 2! If you’ve just joined us, this is our fourth episode of the season, which has been all about perceptions of the U.S. criminal justice system. So if you haven’t yet, we encourage you to go back and listen to our previous episodes. You can find everything at csmonitor.com/perceptiongaps (or wherever you get your podcasts). 

[Music]

Sam: Let’s start with a definition. When we talk about private prisons, what we’re referring to, generally, are prisons, jails, and detention centers run by for-profit companies that contract with the government. They were originally created to respond to a need – public prisons and jails were overcrowded, and so the private sector stepped in to provide the government more capacity. 

Since then, they’ve grown enormously. But: 

Bernadette Rabuy: Private corrections really is a small portion of the criminal justice system. There is a lot of money in mass incarceration. There’s a lot of people benefiting from mass incarceration. But that’s not just happening in private prisons. 

Sam: That’s Bernadette Rabuy, a senior policy analyst at the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit research and advocacy organization that studies mass incarceration. In 2017, Bernadette co-authored a report about the money that flows in and out of the justice system. 

The report found that, of the $182 billion dollars that goes into incarceration in the U.S. every year, only about 2% goes to private prison companies. And just under 9% of people behind bars are housed in privately managed prisons, jails, and detention centers. So, from a big-picture perspective, closing them down wouldn’t really do much to end mass incarceration.

And yet for-profit prisons still face a lot of scrutiny, especially from the left. 

[Audio clip from MSNBC, Bernie Sanders: “... We need to make sure that we end private

Bernadette: It’s disturbing to a lot of people that we have such a thing. That there are companies where their sole business is to make money off of locking people up.  Jessica Mendoza: Boy, the wind is… whew.Henry Gass: So the wind is just ripping over. Part of the one thousand acres, we believe, that’s part of the proposed site. Jess: It’s quite pretty.Henry: Yeah, there are some mountains in the distance.Mark Anderson: They approached the county because the county had – has – a thousand acres just on the outskirts of Evanston here. Mark Anderson, I am county commissioner here in Uinta County, Wyoming. Mark: The number one question I was asked before I got elected, you know, ‘What is your position on the detention center?’ That was the number one question I was asked.Mark: The construction of it will bring revenue with the workers that will build it. The project is estimated to be a $160 million project. Mark: – and then long term, after it’s up and operational, they’re estimating that there will be 260 full-time positions that will offer new employment, diverse employment, to our community. We have to be able to diversify and not just pray and hope that the oil and gas industry is just going to take back off, ‘cause it doesn’t look like it’s going to. Kortney Booth: I’m just completely against it. I don’t want this in my town. I don’t want to raise my kids in a town that would do this.Kortney: I talked to a lot of business owners who are afraid to speak out. They’re against it but they’re afraid to lose customers. Lupita Palma: And I feel like a lot of the Hispanic community is against it, but they’re also scared to voice their opinion and go against it as well. Lupita: It’s not a place I want to live in. I know that the prison is there but it looks just sucked out of life. It looks gray and sad. Jess: Hello?[Sound of door swinging]Brenda Richins: Hello there.Jess/Henry: Hi.Brenda: How are you guys?Jess/Henry: Doing well. How are you?  Brenda: Good. What can I do for ya?[Sounds of the store] Jess: You do all your printing here too?Brenda: Yeah!Jess: That’s amazing.Brenda: It’s really safe. I rode my bike all over the place. My kids rode their bikes all over the place, played in the yard.Brenda: I don’t know if anybody would be super jazzed to have a detention center in their town. But yeah, the thing that really puts it over for me is the private detention part. It’s a part that I can’t really get past. Jess: Could you talk about that a little bit? Brenda: I think that we’re always going to have people who do stuff that’s not OK. We’re probably always going to need to incarcerate or detain people. But I think that that’s something that should be the responsibility of our government, and that it shouldn’t be a contributor to our economy. Like I don’t think that we would be motivated correctly if we were trying to make money off of detaining humans. Pete Bass: They’re talking about building an ICE detention facility here. [They’ll say,] ‘I see you’re wearing a Donald Trump t-shirt, so you’re probably all for it, aren’t you?’ And I was like, ‘No, actually, I’m not.’So my name’s Pete Bass. I have this coffee shop called For Pete’s Sake, where we’re sitting. I’m also a pastor at Calvary Chapel, Evanston, Wyoming.Pete: I guess probably the – my biggest problem is private prisons. You’re a for-profit prison, they’re going to cut their budgets, get rid of help, crowd more people in. And that’s how they make their money. And I’m not against corporations, believe me. I believe if a guy can build up a great big corporation and sell cars and make zillions of dollars, more power to you. But these corporations that live off of this kind of thing, they don’t care about those people from Mexico, or the Honduras, or Russia, or wherever they’re from. They don’t care about them. They’re there to make a profit.Laure-Brooke Eisen: Ever since these corporations were founded in the mid-80s, our country has wrestled with the proper role of the private sector when it comes to corrections. By the end of 1980, the nation held what was then a record of 329,000 people behind bars. Many prisons across the country were unhygienic, inhumane. They were suffering from overcrowding. And more than half the states, 28 states and the District of Columbia, were under court orders to reduce overcrowding.So what happened was that state policymakers faced a choice: They either had to reduce their prison populations or build additional expensive facilities.Lauren-Brooke: By the mid-90s, one of the biggest private corporations at the time, Corrections Corporation of America – they recently rebranded and are now known as CoreCivic – they issued an annual report to their shareholders in 1994, where they wrote: ‘There are powerful market forces driving our industry and its potential has barely been touched.’ And that acknowledgement of the profit opportunity that was surrounding corrections at the time illustrates how corporations were viewing their ability to make money off of corrections. Alexandra Wilkes: So I think one of the big misconceptions about the industry is that somehow the contractor-operated facilities are the ones that are driving mass incarceration, and the math just does not bear that out. My name is Alexandra Wilkes and I serve as spokeswoman for the Day 1 Alliance. Alexandra: With a taxpayer funded facility, the taxpayers are responsible for the upkeep of that facility. They’re responsible for the employees of that facility. And what you don’t want is a situation where taxpayers are left holding the bag for operating huge facilities and huge payrolls and pensions for immigration levels that don’t meet that need. And I think that one of the key reasons you need the industry is to provide flexibility. Jess: We also need to ask about conditions inside privately run detention centers. What steps do private companies take to ensure that the people in their custody are treated humanely?Alexandra: Any of those standards, whether it is the size of the cell, the permissions with regards to family visits – those are all set by the government. There’s this idea out there that somehow if it’s a contractor it means that the contractor is cutting corners. That’s not the case at all. If the contractor were cutting corners they wouldn’t be meeting their obligations under their government contract, which would cause a serious dispute. And there is constant compliance monitoring of that contract. One of the facilities I visited has a daycare center. The relevant state agency that manages daycare facilities just in general, is on-site, doing inspections as they would any other day care center in the state of Texas. The relevant state agency for overseeing health inspections is looking at the cafeterias. So everywhere you look there is some person that is responsible for compliance. Alexandra: We have no say in the disposition of who comes into these centers. You know, our organizations are not Border Patrol, they are not ICE. You know, these individuals are brought into our care. And I should note from the outset that the industry actually has made it a point to never lobby on the duration or status of anyone’s immigration. So we don’t get involved in setting immigration policy. Our companies have nothing to do with that. You know, again, we are not one of the drivers of mass incarceration. There is no perverse profit incentive for us to keep people in our care. Sam: At the highest level, where would you say most of the money is coming from, and where for the most part does it go?Bernadette: The money is usually coming from the government. So that’s for the costs of prosecution or public defenders. But we also have a lot of money that’s coming from families. So that would include bail. Also, the cost of commissary: snacks, or for example right now, different hygiene products – soap, or shampoo, anything like that that they feel they need beyond what’ s provided to them by the government. Bernadette: They’re able to do that because family members don’t have a choice. If they want to see or communicate with their loved ones, they’re forced into these high rates.Sam: So where does all that money go? Bernadette: Public employees are a huge portion of the cost of the criminal justice system. Policing is also another huge cost. And also healthcare. That isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be advocating for the end of private prisons. But if we look at the spending, a lot of other people are making money off of people being locked up, that are not private prisons. Sam: If we somehow did put an end to private prisons, how much of an impact do you think that would have?Bernadette: I think it would have very little effect. It would be a powerful move, to stand up and say we aren’t OK with companies surviving on mass incarceration and profiting that way. But at the end of the day it’s such a small portion of the criminal justice system that we’re not going to get very far. Lauren-Brooke: For decades, some legal scholars and policymakers have really contended that there are certain state functions that cannot be delegated. And one of those is punishment. So opponents of the industry worry that the profit motive is very deeply at odds with the goal of corrections.Lauren-Brooke: – governments don’t need to reduce the flow of incarcerated people if they have capacity issues, if they have old failing infrastructure, buildings not adequate to house the number of people they need to house. The private prison industry has really become a safety valve for governments. If the industry had not come along in the mid-80s and said, ‘We can do this more cheaply than you can, we can do this better than you can,’ maybe we would have had different discussions out of necessity than we had at the time. Holly Stone: Yeah, I’m all for it. Now I don’t know if anybody else is going to be all for it, but I know I am. Holly: We have nothing. This is it, these little teeny things, and we’re all suffering, we’ve all been slow. If we don’t do something here soon, I’ll move. ‘Cause there’s just nothing for me here, you know what I mean? We’re getting smaller and smaller and smaller and unless you’re going to work in Salt Lake or Park City there’s just nothing here.   Val Cook: We need long term employment. I’m not going to say we need a detention center. We need long term employment. Val: It would be great to have a high-tech company come in and locate here. But in the meantime, there’s no tech companies that are coming to visit us and there is a company that wants to build a detention center. So, gotta take what you can get.Jonathan Lange:  We want conditions to be better for the immigrants that we’re dealing with. So recognizing that there is going to be no perfect, but can there be a better? That’s the touchpoint. Maria Escalante: As a business owner I’m split between them.Jess: Why do you say that?Maria: I’m not against it, I’m not for it. I see the benefits for it. But not towards the businesses. You know, like the detainees, the persons that are going to be in there, they get to be closer to their families. Otherwise they get sent to Colorado. Maria: So I’m torn, you know what I mean? Would it be good for the town? Probably not. Would it bring more jobs? I don’t believe so.Jess: Why not?Maria: There are jobs, nobody likes to work ‘em. Businesses like restaurants struggle all the time trying to find workers. So I don’t know. I just have so much. And I hear both sides, and it’s like. [sigh] There’s a lot of misunderstanding about it. Definitely. [Jess and Henry call Brenda]Jess: Brenda?Brenda: Hello?Jess: Hi!Henry: Hi![Chuckles]Jess: We know it’s very early over there so thank you for taking the time.Brenda: Yeah, no problem, no problem. Thanks for having me. Brenda: So I pretty much didn’t have any business from the middle of March until the beginning of May. And then things started to pick up a little bit. Not to normal speed, but back up. But the hardest hit people in Evanston are probably our little independent hairdressers, and those kinds of businesses. Our bars and restaurants. But I think our community has supported those businesses as much as possible. Mark: You know, it’s good that we haven’t seen that medical impact, but at the same time the financial impact was quite devastating to a lot of businesses. We took a pretty big hit with the oil and gas and coal industries on the downward trend. You know, when that has kind of happened last several years, we’ve depended on our good agriculture, with cattle markets and things, and with this COVID that’s taken a significant hit as well, as you know. Mark: You know, the CoreCivic operation wasn’t going to be the saving grace for our community, but it’s just a little piece of the puzzle to getting back to financial stability.Jonathan: One of the things that the possibility of a detention center brought to the fore is the intangible parts of community. Is it going to be pleasant? Is it going to be safe? And so I think that’s important for every community to think about. If we want to be a thriving community it’s not just about bringing in money. I don’t have any answers. I just have questions. But I think that whatever the I.C.E. does as it goes forward, I pray that they are looking particularly at the people they have to detain and how best to take care of them. Brenda: You can probably tell how I feel about this community. That’s a big source of conflict inside of me, though. Because I do wish that that kindness, or that compassion, or that humanity, or whatever it is that makes people in our community want my business to be successful and want to reach out and help their neighbor – I wish that was extended to everyone, and maybe not just directed at people that look or act just like the rest of us, or any of that stuff. I’m on the margins of how people think in Evanston and our community. But I love all the people. Like I interact with all the people. All the people are my customers. I just wish that, you know, they could take whatever that goodness in them that’s so supportive and that is so caring and just stretch it out a little bit to cover everybody.Sam: Historically, private prisons filled this kind of safety valve for the government. Do they still have that ability, given how hard the pandemic has affected our economy? And do you think this might change the relationship the private prison industry has with the government?Lauren-Brooke: The private prisons are probably going to make an argument that they can alleviate overcrowding, that they can play a role in social distancing. But I think the larger issue that we all need to focus on is ending mass incarceration. And for those who want to reduce our reliance on the private prison industry, the number one step we can take to achieve that goal is to significantly shrink the number of people who we house in our prisons and our jails.But you know, we and a lot of other advocates are hopeful that policymakers and the public will truly reimagine, rethink, how we approach punishment, incarceration, and rehabilitation in our country once this public health crisis has ended.