Ohio 1st in US to sell prison to private company

JULIE CARR SMYTH

Asso­ci­ated Press

COLUMBUS — A lockup along the shores of Lake Erie has become the first state prison in the nation to be sold to a pri­vate company.

Lake Erie Cor­rec­tional Insti­tu­tion in north­east­ern Ohio’s Ashtab­ula County is the only one of five state pris­ons up for sale that will be sold, state offi­cials said Thurs­day. Cor­rec­tions Cor­po­ra­tion of Amer­ica will buy it for $72.7 mil­lion, more than the $50 mil­lion needed from the pri­va­ti­za­tion effort to bal­ance the state’s prison budget.

The four other pris­ons for sale didn’t gen­er­ate offers advan­ta­geous to tax­pay­ers, state offi­cials said.

CCA, the nation’s largest prison oper­a­tor, takes con­trol of the Lake Erie facil­ity in Con­neaut on Dec. 31, pend­ing the out­come of a law­suit chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­ity of the move.

Offer­ing the pris­ons for sale was an idea spear­headed by Repub­li­can Gov. John Kasich as he grap­pled with an $8 bil­lion bud­get hole ear­lier this year. He wasn’t the only gov­er­nor to pro­pose it: Repub­li­can Gov. Bobby Jin­dal of Louisiana intro­duced a sim­i­lar plan that was shot down by state law­mak­ers in June.

Man­age­ment Train­ing Corp. of Cen­ter­ville, Utah, suc­cess­fully landed rights to oper­ate North Cen­tral Cor­rec­tional Insti­tu­tion and the vacant Mar­ion Juve­nile Cor­rec­tional Facil­ity as a sin­gle prison camp, sav­ing 6 per­cent on state costs, the pris­ons depart­ment said.

North Coast Cor­rec­tional Treat­ment Facil­ity in Lorain County, cur­rently oper­ated along with Lake Erie by MTC, will be returned to state con­trol and merged with Grafton Cor­rec­tional Institution.

“I was taken aback,” said Ohio Civil Ser­vice Employ­ees Asso­ci­a­tion pres­i­dent Chris Mabe about the news. His union, rep­re­sent­ing prison guards and other cor­rec­tions employ­ees, had staged protests in Ashtab­ula, Mar­ion and Lorain coun­ties, where pris­ons were up for sale, over fears of lost jobs and jeop­ar­dized safety.

“As it stands right now today, it gives us hope,” he said, not­ing OCSEA has worked with state pris­ons offi­cials for a decade to see a merger of the two Grafton build­ings that would save state jobs. The state said it doesn’t antic­i­pate job losses on the newly con­fig­ured Mar­ion cam­pus, and state jobs may be added at the Grafton complex.

The pris­ons depart­ment is requir­ing pri­vate facil­i­ties to meet all state safety man­dates, and it’s step­ping up its over­sight func­tion, said Annette Chambers-Smith, deputy direc­tor of admin­is­tra­tion at the pris­ons department.

The com­bi­na­tion of oper­a­tional changes — part of Kasich’s pri­va­ti­za­tion push — is esti­mated to save the state a com­bined $13 mil­lion annu­ally, about twice as much as what was anticipated.

Nashville, Tenn.-based CCA will oper­ate the Lake Erie prison, which cost $41 mil­lion to build, at 8 per­cent less than the state did, gen­er­at­ing $3 mil­lion in sav­ings. The facil­ity plans to add 304 beds.

While not buy­ing the facil­ity, MTC plans to oper­ate the Mar­ion cam­pus at $3 mil­lion less than state esti­mated costs. The exist­ing prison and shut­tered juve­nile facil­ity, which will be reopened for adults, will include 398 new beds.

A third bid­der, GEO Group Inc., of Boca Raton, Fla., wasn’t selected. The com­pany has come under scrutiny in its home state, where fed­eral inves­ti­ga­tors are review­ing the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing devel­op­ment of the state’s largest pri­vate prison, Black­wa­ter River.

OCSEA’s Mabe said the union expects dete­ri­o­ra­tion in salary, ben­e­fits and work­ing con­di­tions for those prison staffers who move from the pub­lic to pri­vate sec­tor. He said staffing is the main way they cut costs.

“First and fore­most, and I’ve been on pri­va­ti­za­tion com­mit­tees for over a decade, and we as a union believe the incar­cer­a­tion of human beings should be left to gov­ern­ment and not up to a pri­vate cor­po­ra­tion for the sake of profit,” he said.

Ohio’s pris­ons are over capac­ity, hous­ing some 51,000 inmates in 31 pris­ons built to hold about 38,000. Esti­mates sug­gest the inmate pop­u­la­tion could rise to 54,000 in four years if noth­ing changes.

Pri­vate pris­ons are expected to be as crowded as pub­lic ones under the new plan, said Linda Janes, chief of staff for the Ohio Depart­ment of Reha­bil­i­ta­tion and Correction.

The state is in the process of try­ing to reduce its prison pop­u­la­tion by putting fewer non­vi­o­lent offend­ers behind bars and giv­ing judges more sen­tenc­ing options. Those changes are esti­mated to trim the state’s inmate pop­u­la­tion by 47,000 by 2015. About 12,000 inmates are serv­ing sen­tences of under a year.

Those changes fol­low a recent review by the Coun­cil of State Gov­ern­ments Jus­tice Cen­ter. The center’s report in July said the state cycles too many low-risk offend­ers serv­ing short sen­tences through the prison sys­tem, cost­ing Ohio $189 mil­lion in 2008 alone on inmates with an aver­age sen­tence of just nine months.

CCA houses 75,000 offend­ers and detainees in more than 60 facil­i­ties with more than 80,000 beds — more than half those under pri­vate oper­a­tion in the coun­try, accord­ing to its web­site. Forty-four of the facil­i­ties are owned by the com­pany. Its part­ner­ships include fed­eral cor­rec­tions agen­cies, nearly half the states and more than a dozen local gov­ern­ments. It employs 17,000 people.

Its Ohio lob­by­ist, Don Thibaut, served as Kasich’s chief of staff when he was in Con­gress. The com­pany retained Thibaut’s new lob­by­ing firm in mid-December. State pris­ons direc­tor Gary Mohr spent five years as a con­sul­tant to the firm.

Mohr recused him­self from the selec­tion process. He said Thurs­day he learned of the committee’s deci­sion after the deal had been signed late Wednes­day afternoon.

CCA already oper­ates one fed­eral prison in Ohio, the North­east Ohio Cor­rec­tional Cen­ter in Youngstown, but no state facilities.

Posted by AP News on Sep 1 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.