The Kingman Case: Private Prison Politics

August 13, 2010
Globe-Miami Times

The Private Prison sales pitch finds a receptive audience among small, economically challenged communities who want to find jobs and a way of paying the light bill at City Hall. Or, perhaps more to the point in the case of Globe – a way of getting a new sewer line for the NW Corridor.

Yet, it turns out the sales pitch is does not give the whole story.

The Information Highway goes both ways

Consider the information provided by the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-profit, non-partisan organization which researches and documents prison policy. They report that in spreading the gospel of privatization, our friends at Corrections Corp of America (James Parkey) and its competitors (Emerald Companies, Management & Training Corp (Kingman),Cornell and others)”… have used a small body of professional literature that purports to approve the superiority of for-profit corrections. What they fail to mention is that much of this literature has been written by analysts who are either being funded by the industry or have an ideological predisposition in favor of privatization.”

What were murderers doing in Kingman?

In the effort to package their message to local communities who are more open to warehousing the “not so violent” residents are often told by the pitch men, “Prisoners housed in private facilities are far less likely to be convicted of serious or violent offenses, or to have high medical and mental health needs,than prisoners housed in public facilities used to generate cost comparisons.”

In actuality, PPI reports, Public prisoners were seven times as likely to be serving time for violent offenses, three times as likely to be serving time for serious offenses and twice as likely to have high medical needs than those housed in private facilities.


You need look no further for proof of this than our own example here in Arizona recently, when 3 murderers escaped last week, from the 1400 bed facility in Kingman which was approved in 2004 by voters as a minimum to medium security prison to house DUI and Substance Abuse Cases!

According to Management & Training Corporation – the needs of the DOC “expanded.”

Next week, we will look at the issue of funding and how that plays out in the debate over Private Prisons. You know that saying, “Freedom isn’t Free”? Well, Neither are Private Prisons.