Maine Privatization Mistake

 Sad to see another town fall for the salespitch of prison industry. All that prisons will bring to their community are low paying jobs, brutal overtime shifts and a few cheap hotels for visiting family members. No new shops want to open next to a prison. No actual lucrative business would want to set up shop anywhere near a prison so instead of projected growth in the area, the town will begin to exist solely around incarceration for profit. How demoralizing for a community to know that they earn their meager living by caging other human beings...

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The town of Milo has for two years tried to convince the nation’s largest private prison company to build a correctional facility at its industrial park. Corrections Corporation of America was sufficiently interested in 2008 that it sent an engineering firm to inspect the site, but momentum waned following a lack of enthusiasm for the project at the state level. But Governor-elect Paul LePage earlier this month visited Milo to follow up on his campaign pledge to meet with town and CCA officials to try to make the deal happen. 

The opening of a privately run prison in the Piscataquis County town would mark Maine’s first foray into the incarceration of its inmates for profit, a practice currently prohibited by state law. Making that leap with Tennessee-based CCA would bind Maine to a company with not only vast experience with such public-private partnerships and record revenues last year, but also a history of lawsuits and allegations of poor treatment of its inmates. Meanwhile, the company’s interest in Milo is tentative at best. Even if policy at the state level changes to allow for-profit prisons in Maine, CCA hasn’t committed to building here. 

The hoped-for prison in Milo, a town of fewer than 3,000 in the county currently saddled with Maine’s highest unemployment rate of more than 12%, could create up to 300 jobs. But even if CCA commits to the project, research into the economic impacts of private corrections facilities in rural areas “suggests that prisons may not generate the nature and scale of benefits municipalities anticipate or may even slow growth in some localities,” according to an April report by the Congressional Research Service. 

“We’ve got nothing else in the hopper here,” says Milo Town Manager Jim Gahagan. “It really could make a difference in our area.” 

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