Pubdate: Thu, 22 Nov 2007
Source: Georgia Straight, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2007 The Georgia Straight
Contact:  http://www.straight.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1084
Author: Alex Roslin
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Stephen+Harper

STEPHEN HARPER OPENS DOOR TO PRISON PRIVATIZATION

On April 27, 2006, the Ontario government announced the end of a 
bizarre venture. Canada's first large privately run prison, a 
1,200-inmate maximum-security superjail in the cottage country north 
of Toronto, was a failure and would be taken over by the province.

The Penetanguishene-based Central North Correctional Centre was a 
striking attempt at getting in on the controversial private-prison 
craze that has swept the United States, where for-profit businesses 
now run approximately 150 prisons housing about 150,000 inmates. 
Ontario's five-year experiment with the concept, launched with much 
fanfare in 2001 by Robert Sampson-at the time the law-and-order Tory 
correctional services minister-ended amid revelations of flawed 
security, inadequate prisoner health care, and higher reoffending 
rates once the privately housed inmates were let back out into the world.

Today, Sampson has secured a gig with the Stephen Harper 
Conservatives leading a federal panel reviewing Canada's prison 
system. Its mandate includes finding "opportunities for savings 
including through physical plant realignment and infrastructure renewal".

Does the choice of Sampson mean the feds want to privatize Canadian 
prisons? Stockwell Day, the federal public safety minister, says no. 
"The question of privatization is not on the table," he told 
journalists after Sampson's appointment last April. But some critics 
aren't so sure. "We have to be very vigilant to see where this review 
is going and how broad it gets in terms of an agenda around 
privatization," NDP MP Libby Davies (Vancouver East) told a reporter.

Len Bush, national representative of 15,000 provincial prison guards 
in the National Union of Public and Government Employees, is also 
skeptical about Day's denial. "He's not actually come out and said, 
'No, I won't privatize.' We would welcome him saying so. It looks to 
us that this is their direction, even though they're not in a 
situation where they feel they can say it publicly," he said on the 
phone from his Ottawa office.

Sampson submitted his report to the government on October 31, but it 
remains under wraps. In late October, though, news leaked from the 
Sampson panel suggesting that it was preparing to scrap statutory 
release, the virtually automatic discharge of prisoners under 
conditions similar to parole after they've served two-thirds of their 
sentences. Instead, "you'd have to show why you deserve to be 
released [at the two-thirds point]," a Canadian Press story quoted an 
unnamed source "familiar with the panel's report" as saying. "It'll 
put more people in [prison], so they're going to need more resources."

This has stoked the privatization fears: that the Harper government's 
law-and-order agenda could unleash a crisis of overcrowding in 
prisons, and guess what the magical solution will be? Private 
prisons. There is just one catch: crime experts say all 
this-dramatically increased prisoner numbers, possible privatization 
of prisons, and get-tough measures, including increased and mandatory 
sentences-will probably make Canadian communities less safe, not more.

At first glance, the plan may seem reasonable to some: make 
wrongdoers show they've changed. What could be wrong with that? It 
would force some to shape up, right? Wrong. Such a change would 
create instant havoc in already overcrowded provincial and federal 
prison systems by adding up to 30 or 40 percent more inmates 
virtually overnight, according to Neil Boyd, an SFU criminology 
professor who spoke to the Georgia Straight from his Bowen Island home.

The change in the statutory release rule could suddenly add another 
2,200 prisoners to the federal corrections system, which currently 
houses 12,000 inmates-an increase of almost 20 percent, Anthony Doob, 
a criminology professor at the University of Toronto, estimated on 
the phone from his office. "The math is pretty straightforward. You 
could create a crisis almost overnight by changing parole practices."

Combined with other tough crime measures being proposed by the Harper 
government, a sudden tsunami of inmates would also swamp provincial 
prison systems, since many of those affected are those with sentences 
under two years. In B.C., provincial jails are already overcrowded 
and boiling with violence since the province closed nine facilities 
in 2001, said Dean Purdy, chair of the corrections and 
sheriff's-services component of the B.C. Government and Service 
Employees' Union, representing 2,000 provincial corrections officers 
and sheriffs. At the Vancouver Island Regional Correctional Centre, 
where Purdy works as a supervisor, there have been 39 assaults on 
guards since 2001, compared to five in the prior 15 years, he said. 
"I can't imagine what it will be like to run the jails with a higher count."

"It [the increase in inmates] will come as a rude surprise to the 
provinces," said Craig Jones, executive director of the John Howard 
Society of Canada, speaking on his cellphone from a conference in 
Toronto. "The feds will crack down on crime, but the provinces will 
be punished."

In October, Harper introduced his Tackling Violent Crime Act, Bill 
C-2, into the House of Commons, complete with a shopping list of 
ideas courtesy of the U.S. law-and-order lobby, including mandatory 
minimum sentences for certain offences and harsher penalties for gun 
crimes. Harper declared the bill a confidence motion and said he'd 
accept no amendments to it, meaning the government will fall should 
it be defeated by the opposition-unlikely, since the Liberals 
desperately want to avoid an election.

Criminologists and prison guards say the actual result of the Harper 
crime package will probably be not safer communities but, rather, 
private prisons in which the bottom line is king, not inmate rehabilitation.

With five to 10 years needed to build a new prison from conception to 
construction, coupled with Harper's ideological predisposition to 
outsourcing government programs, Jones said it's not a big leap to 
privatized prisons coming to Canada in a big way. "Our anxiety is 
they're going to grow the prison population so quickly, they will be 
left with few options."

Creating a crisis to push through a controversial change is straight 
out of the playbook of Mike Harris's Conservative government in 
Ontario when it privatized the Penetanguishene prison, NUPGE's Bush 
said. "The strategy of the Harris government was to create a crisis 
and bring privatization forward to deal with the crisis," he said. 
"You take an overcrowded situation, add more people, and you create a 
crisis. We were hoping the experience elsewhere would have taught them."

The U.S. experience with privatized prisons is full of cautionary 
tales. After federal and state authorities brought in tougher 
law-and-order crime laws (among them the infamous "three strikes" 
statutes)-like the mandatory minimum sentences now being proposed by 
Harper-in the 1980s and '90s, the American prison population 
quadrupled, from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million today. (Another 4.8 
million Americans are out on parole or probation, meaning a total of 
one in 32 adult Americans is under the control of the justice system 
in one fashion or another.)

It's a myth, however, that the explosion in inmate numbers was about 
getting violent, hardened criminals off the street. Instead, the 
crackdown disproportionately targeted marginalized people and 
small-time drug offenders. In 2003, racial or ethnic minorities made 
up 68 percent of the U.S. prison population, according to U.S. 
Justice Department data.

So who were these new offenders driving the U.S. prison boom? Turns 
out a huge number of them were POWs-prisoners of the war on drugs. 
Between 1990 and 2000, the portion of inmates jailed for a drug 
offence shot up by 59 percent while those in for violent crimes 
actually fell from 17 to 10 percent, according to Justice Department 
numbers. By 2004, drug offenders made up 54 percent of sentenced 
federal prisoners, up from just 25 percent in 1980. Of all drug 
arrests, about two in five were related to marijuana. Moreover, nine 
in 10 marijuana busts involve possession only, not sale or manufacturing.

Early on, the big question became what to do with all these new 
guests of the correctional system. The crime crackdown led to a boom 
in the number of U.S. federal and state prisons, from 592 in 1974 to 
1,023 in 2000. In one Texas county, 33 percent of the population is 
behind bars, according to a 2004 study by the Washington, D.C.-based 
Urban Institute.

Authorities turned to private companies to build and run many 
prisons. The largest operator by far is the Nashville, 
Tennessee-based Corrections Corp. of America, with 65 facilities 
under management, including 40 it owns outright, that house 72,000 
inmates. Business at CCA is booming. Since 2000, its shares have shot 
up from $4 to almost $29.

But an independent study of CCA in 2003 found the company had failed 
to: provide adequate medical care to inmates, control violence in its 
facilities, and prevent a rash of escapes. Civil-rights violations 
have also been raised in hundreds of lawsuits against CCA by 
prisoners and their families, including several that revolved around 
inmate deaths. The study, cowritten by the U.K.-based Prison 
Privatisation Report International and the U.S. community group Good 
Jobs First, also said CCA tried to keep down costs by paying staff 
poorly, which resulted in high turnover and mistreatment of prisoners.

Substandard conditions also had resulted in prisoner protests and 
uprisings, while several CCA guards had been convicted of drug 
trafficking inside the facilities.

A low point for the company came in the late 1990s, when it agreed to 
a payment of $2.4 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by 
prisoners at its Youngstown, Ohio, prison who said the facility was 
unsafe after a rash of stabbings. "It's been a nightmare," 
Youngstown's mayor, George McKelvey-who helped lure CCA to his 
city-said in an October 1998 Washington Post story. "[CCA's] 
credibility is zero."

CCA officials didn't return calls for this story.

The plague of scandals at CCA and other private prison operators 
prompted Business Week to publish a story in 2000 titled "Private 
Prisons Don't Work" that said "the industry's heyday may already be history."

"It's horror story after horror story in the U.S.," Lyle Stewart, 
spokesman for the Union of Canadian Correctional Officers, 
representing 6,000 federal prison guards, said from his office in 
Montreal. "It's frigging terrible."

In recent years, many American states have retreated from the 
incarceration-oriented approach, largely because corrections now eat 
up seven percent of state budgets, on average. In 2000, California 
voters passed a resolution eliminating mandatory minimum sentences 
for certain crimes and requiring treatment, not prison time, for 
nonviolent drug offenders. In November, even the hard-line Bush 
administration eased minimum sentencing guidelines for federal crack offences.

But while U.S. authorities step back from the ailing crime policies 
of the 1980s and 1990s, the John Howard Society's Jones sees the 
Harper government embracing the same troubled approach. "This 
government seems enthralled by the Bush administration," he said, 
noting that Harper's crime policies "seem to reflect a close study of 
the American model".

Jones said the Harper crime agenda is likely to fall heaviest on 
marginalized people, just as the measures did in the U.S. "Police go 
where the pickings are easiest. It will fall disproportionately on 
marginalized, mentally ill, and minority youth. You will not see more 
Conrad Blacks in jail," he said. "It's not about justice; it's about 
acting Old Testament."

 From Bowen Island, SFU's Boyd agreed. "Why would we want to 
dramatically increase the number of people in jail for cannabis? 
That's what it [mandatory sentencing] did in the U.S. Why would we 
want to look at them [the U.S.] when looking at crime?" he asked, 
noting that the U.S. has 2.5 times more murders per capita than Canada.

"There's just no support for the idea that punishment will get the 
social safety we want. We should be looking at success stories," Boyd 
said, pointing to European countries that have promoted crime 
prevention and improved social housing over incarceration.

In fact, that's exactly the approach that was favoured by a crime 
prevention council within Canada's Public Safety Ministry when it 
reviewed corrections policy back in 1996. The council's study, which 
is posted on the ministry's Web site, doesn't mince words in its 
criticism of U.S. mandatory minimum sentencing as a failed model that 
did little to reduce crime rates while merely increasing the prison population.

"Not only is the cost of automatic incarceration brought about by 
this policy inordinately high, but it does little to stem the ongoing 
tide of new offenders," noted the study, titled Money Well Spent: 
Investing in Preventing Crime. "Minimum mandatory sentencing 
requirements rely upon the false assumption that people who are 
contemplating a criminal act-youths in particular-go through a 
rational process of planning their act and weighing the consequences 
of being apprehended."

As for Harper's plan to tighten parole eligibility, U of T's Doob 
said the notion goes against everything that's known about the 
importance of transitioning prisoners into society through supervised 
programs like parole and halfway houses. "Probably the worst thing 
you could do is hold a guy his whole sentence and then give him a bus 
ticket with no job, no program, and no controls."

Jones is also flabbergasted. "The evidence is clear that 
incarceration is the last resort. Most people do not benefit from it 
and a number of people get worse. Prison is an expensive way to make 
bad people worse."

Jones also is alarmed about privatized prisons making a return. "The 
staff [in private prisons] has less training. They employ harsher 
measures because they're cheaper; the conditions deteriorate. The 
inmates eventually get out, so it passes on the costs of dealing with 
them to future governments and generations. The issue is they're 
going to be worse when they get out."

Doob agreed, saying the evidence on privatized prisons is clear: "The 
data that exists in various countries suggests there are real 
problems in the ways that private companies run these things." Any 
money saved in direct operational costs is offset by the added 
expense of monitoring prison companies for contract compliance, a 
greater rate of prisoner escapes, and a higher recidivism rate. "It 
would be an ideological decision [to privatize prisons], not a 
financial one," he said.

The BCGEU's Purdy said provincial corrections officials weren't 
impressed when they travelled to Ontario to investigate the 
Penetanguishene experiment a few years ago. "They came back and told 
us they weren't interested in privatizing any jails in B.C.," he said.

Whatever Harper has in mind for the prison system, one thing is for 
sure: There's little chance he'll unveil any plans for privatizing 
prisons before the next federal election. Unless Harper wins a 
majority, it seems suicidal for him to take a chance on such a 
controversial idea. He'd have his hands full with furious federal 
prison guards who "would fight it to the death if there was any sense 
at all" of privatization plans, vowed Stewart.

Already, other elements of Harper's crime agenda seem destined for a 
collision course with the provinces, which are likely to flip out 
when they're hit with massive numbers of new prisoners.

Harper apparently isn't even finding many allies within the 
Correctional Service of Canada, even though it is likely to enjoy a 
massive budget increase to accommodate the new inmates. Jones said 
senior corrections officials see Harper's regressive policies as 
reversing years of hard-won policy gains in areas like parole and 
crime prevention.

"When the tide turns so dramatically, they [corrections officials] 
see their work as being undone," he said. "It turns back the clock on 
40 years of progressive corrections policy." 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake