As long-range solutions, Snyder would expand prisoner “re-entry” programs and re-institute parole, which is early release for good behavior. It was eliminated in the 1970s in favor of fixed sentences. Probation is a kind of “trial” period in freedom, usually after a convict does hard time.
The NAACP Portland Branch and the Maine Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers also are opposed to shipping prisoners out of state. The groups say it would prevent families from seeing prisoners, and “The best way to prevent re-offense after release is through strengthened ties to the community,” as several organizations wrote the Appropriations Committee in a letter.
These critics also are opposed in principle to private, for-profit prisons.
“When you combine the profit motive and the desire to cut costs with a captive client base,” bad outcomes occur, says David Fahti of the MCLU’s parent, the American Civil Liberties Union, in Washington, DC.
The many religious critics of what they call the “prison industrial complex” feel the same way. Catholic bishops in the South have written, “When prisoners become units from which profit is derived, there is a tendency to see them as commodities.” They add in a document: “We question whether private prisons have the incentive to assist people not to return to prison.” The bishops are “deeply troubled that the private prison industry has actively supported institutions that lobby for harsher sentencing laws which increase the prison population.”
Cutting costs means “cutting staff, payroll, benefits, supplies, security, and rehabilitation programming,” according to a United Methodist Church document.
Frank Smith, of the Private Corrections Institute, another industry critic, says escapes, guard turnover, assaults, prisoner recidivism (return to crime), and corruption are high in for-profit prisons. He says the Corrections Corporation of America’s North Fork Correctional Facility, in Sayre, Oklahoma — where the Maine prisoners would be sent — saw Wisconsin pull its prisoners home because of high inmate phone charges, leaving the prison empty for years.
Mary Ellen Pecci, a Bath restaurateur whose son Jason Pecci has been a Colorado prisoner at North Fork since January, says it has been “locked down two or three times” since he arrived because it doesn’t have good ways of handling problem inmates. By contrast, the Maine State Prison has had one lockdown in five years.
Although most legislators don’t see a problem, outside-the-State-House critics are dismayed by CCA’s lobbying of the Legislature to get Maine’s business.
“I fear that this lobbying will tempt us to cross the line from concern for justice to the crass calculation of dollars and cents,” says Snyder, of the Maine Council of Churches.
Corrections estimates it would cost $3 million to board Maine prisoners in Oklahoma for a year and $4 million at the county jails.
“We are now seeing a lobbying effort that treats prisoners as property,” says Lynne Williams, chair of the Maine chapter of the liberal National Lawyers Guild, in an e-mail.
The corporate view
CCA is known for its political involvement. It indirectly contributed $6000 to Baldacci’s re-election campaign via the Democratic Governors Association and $17,500 to Republican Chandler Woodcock’s campaign, indirectly, via the Republican Governors Association. It is the largest player in the for-profit prison industry. It made a profit of $105 million in 2006 on 72,000 prisoners in 64 prisons in 19 states (about $1500 a prisoner; the company would therefore reasonably be predicted to earn $187,500 a year in profit on the Maine prisoners, if Baldacci’s plan goes forward).
