CCA Signs Lease of California City Prison

The prison in California City.
Photo courtesy the Tehachapi News.

Your $315 million, gentle readers, are hard at work. The Tehachapi News reports:

Plans to ameliorate the state’s prison overcrowding moved forward Oct. 15 when Corrections Corporation of America announced it struck a deal with California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to lease out its correctional center in California City to house state inmates.

The state will lease CCCC for a three-year term, with unlimited two-year renewal options, at a rate of $28.5 million annually, according to CCA’s press release.

The alliance was originally outlined in Senate Bill 105, which was signed by Gov. Jerry Brown Sept. 12, and which allocates $315 million for the “prison fix” through June 30, 2014.

Of the allocation, CDCR will spend $28.5 million per year on leasing the facility and another $93.5 million on operating costs, said CDCR spokeswoman Dana Simas. The sum amounts to nearly 40 percent of the $315 million budget.

“It is a good chunk,” Simas said of the spending.

She contrasted the operating cost with that of a similar state-run facility, which would be $108 million per year.

As an interesting twist, CCA employees who want to be guards are now testing to be peace officers (and, obviously, join the CCPOA.)

But wait! There’s more!

With the Jan. 27, 2014, deadline looming for reducing state-wide inmate populations to 137.5 percent of capacity, CDCR is in a crunch to relocate about 9,600 inmates. Simas said once the inmates are moved to CCCC, the state will still need to transfer about 4,000 more to meet the court-ordered capacity cap.

The state expects to transfer 2,381 low to medium Level 2 adult male inmates who are currently in California state prisons to CCCC. Per the prison’s website, the facility is of medium/maximum security caliber and has 2,304 beds. Simas said the state plans to double-cell the inmates, which CCA was not previously doing with its federal inmates.

As an aside: I don’t usually read the Tehachapi News, but maybe I should. Great piece of reporting by Emily Brunett. All the information you need, none of the information you don’t need, all the numbers check out, and all angles objectively covered.

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Props to Josh Page for the link.

TODAY! Assembly Select Committee on Justice Reinvestment Hearing Live!

Humonetarianism and cost-centered criminal justice policies in action: In half an hour, the Assembly Select Committee on Justice Reinvestment will hold a hearing, which you can watch live by clicking here at 10am.

A few words of background: This committee was mentioned a week ago at the hearings about solitary confinement, and it will be examining Gov. Brown’s bill to invest $315 billion of my money and yours in private prisons to alleviate overcrowding. Anyone paying taxes in California should pay close attention to these proceedings.

Bail: Freedom, Capitalized

This video, produced by the ACLU and Beyond Bars, was posted in a story that appeared this week on The Nation, titled, Should It Cost Less to Get Out of Jail If You’re Rich?  It is an introduction to the bail bonds industry, its budgetary backing, and the way it affects people of different economic backgrounds.

Bail research is fascinating. In the late 1980s, Michele Sviridoff found out that judges gave a “discount” to defendants making bail in cash. G.P. Monks found that the police was ineffective in assuring that people showed up for trial. But research from 2011 shows the extent to which the bond industry has been privatized. Mary Phillips, doing research in New York, finds that bail bondsmen’s share of the industry has significantly grown, and that their actions magnify the alredy-existing socioeconomic gaps.  Brian Johnson and Ruth Stevens find that states place very few regulations on the bonds industry and on licensing to become a bail bondsman. According to this Justice Policy Institute report, the bail industry is not cheaper than the alternatives, and it is incredibly prone to overcharging and corruption. It is also backed by powerful profiteers. Shadd Maruna and colleagues even predict that people will be able to leave prison on parole after posting “post-conviction bail.“

Conversations about prison privatization often ignore bail bonds, which are one of the first stops on the criminal justice train. It is worthwhile to take a look at costs, incentives, and class disparities even in these early stages of the criminal process.

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Props to Amir Paz-Fuchs for The Nation link.

Community Mobilizing Against San Francisco Jail Expansion

Next Tuesday, San Francisco County Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi will be addressing the Board of Supervisors with a request for $80 million to fund construction of a new San Francisco jail. Construction costs are estimated to be at least $300 million–$700 with debt service–altogether.

Mirkarimi, who faces reelection in 2015 after a controversial arrest and reinstatement, argues that the new jail will be necessary when the seismically vulnerable Hall of Justice, which houses 828 arrestees, will be demolished. But opponents believe that existing facilities are underused, and that not all detainees awaiting trial need to be behind bars. Even law enforcement officials question the need for new construction.

If you are concerned about spending public money to build more jail space, call your supervisor and email to express your concerns.

California Prison Overcrowding: State of the State, October 2013

And now, this is how things stood: the cat was sitting on one branch, the bird on another… not too close to the cat… and the wolf walked around and around the tree looking at them with greedy eyes.

                                                                           –Sergei Prokofiev, Peter and the Wolf (1936)

Developments in the last few months raise grim questions about the wisdom of leaving California to its own devices in trying to solve its overcrowding problem. Since the initial three-judge panel order in Plata v. Schwarzenengger (2009), the state has fought tooth and nail against the order to reduce population, and the struggle against the court mandate continued even after the Supreme Court confirmed the order, 5-4, in Brown v. Plata (2011). Numerous state appeals and motions to change the order and delay the timeline for population reduction (some of them bordering on contempt of court) have been thwarted. The last of these is the Supreme Court’s rejection of the state’s appeal yesterday. The Chron reports:

The high court’s one-line dismissal – which said only that the court lacked jurisdiction to step in – leaves intact a three-judge federal panel’s directive to the state to slash its population of 120,000 inmates in 33 prisons.

. . . 

Brown has been fighting for years the prospect of releasing some prisoners early, saying he was worried it could increase crime. Advocates and attorneys for prisoners have pushed for reforms in sentencing that they say would safely shrink the prison system.

Through a spokeswoman, Brown referred Tuesday to a statement released by California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokeswoman Deborah Hoffman, which said officials were “disappointed the state’s case won’t be heard.”

But this rejection is far from being the big victory that inmate rights advocates are seeking. The original order in Plata was to reduce overcrowding in prison to 137.5% capacity, but it famously left it up to the state to find the means to do so. Moreover, Justice Kennedy’s celebrated opinion of the court in 2011 explicitly stated that one way of doing so could be via more prison construction. In 2011, activists and advocates felt comfortable in the knowledge that prison construction was impossible; the state was broke and public sentiment was that correctional expenditures were already excessive, to the point that former Governor Schwarzenegger suggested enacting a law that would prohibit correctional expenditures to exceed educational expenditures. It now, however, appears that “the money is there” to start privatizing California’s prisons en mass, via lucrative contracts with Correctional Corporation of America and the GEO Group.

California never had dealings with private prison providers on its own soil, though it did send 10,000 of its inmates to CCA institutions out of state and was a significant source of income for the company. This was not because of some principled objection to privatization; rather, it was because the California Correctional Peace Officer Association (CCPOA) actively resisted privatization out of concern for the guards’ employment. As Josh Page reveals in The Toughest Beat, CCPOA is so powerful in California that even a prison built in CA by CCA entirely on speculation was left empty. But these difficulties have been resolved: Governor Brown, historically a good friend and ally of the prison guards union, has promised them that they would be employed in these newly-constructed private prisons. This promise made old enemies – state prison guards and private prison providers – into allies, and sealed the deal toward a projected expenditure of $315 million of my money and yours on prison construction.

Obviously CCA is laughing all the way to the bank – a rare and enviable position for a corporation at the end of a recession and during a government shutdown. Here’s how this lucrative contract looks from Tennessee, home of CCA. The Nashville post reports:

The lease agreement between CCA and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation calls for the state — which is under a court order to reduce overcrowding in its jails — to pay Nashville-based CCA $28.5 million per year starting Dec. 1. If the two sides agree to two-year extensions after three years, the rent will begin to increase gradually. CCA also has committed to spending $10 million on improvements at its 2,304-bed California City Correctional Center; renovations beyond that will be paid for by California.

“We appreciate the opportunity to expand upon our longstanding relationship with the CDCR and the state of California,” said CCA CEO Damon Hininger. “Our ability to react quickly to our partners’ needs with innovative solutions that make the best use of taxpayer dollars exemplifies the flexibility that CCA is able to provide.”

In conjunction with its California contract news — which had been expected since August — Hininger and his team also said CCA’s fourth-quarter profits will be hurt by a number of factors, including the spending needed to reopen its California City complex. Among them: Lower inmate counts related to its contracts with the U.S. Marshals Service and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which are believed to be “due to the furlough of government employees and other consequences of the federal government shutdown.”

On top of that, CCA’s leadership has begun spending money to prepare vacant prisons in anticipation of more business from California late this year. The total impact of those factors on Q4 numbers isn’t yet clear, the company said. Analysts are expecting the company to earn 49 cents per share during the fourth quarter.

Investors chose to put more emphasis on the new California cash that will start arriving in December. As of about 1:35 p.m., shares of CCA (Ticker: CXW) were up about 1.5 percent to $35.81, putting them back in positive territory for the year.

If you’re still capable of keeping your breakfast down, you didn’t read carefully enough.

Governor Brown essentially put the ball in the hands of the federal courts, by saying – if you don’t give us some time to cope with the expected releases, we’ll have to recur to privatization and high-expense construction. This option was produced, as if out of a magician’s hat, in the height of the California Criminal Justice Realignment, which presumably redistributes overcrowding and internalizes its expenses by making counties, who are responsible for charging and sentencing, think about incarceration alternatives and manage their own convict population. One has to wonder what good this experiment is if, suddenly, we’re building private prisons in three counties and contributing $28.5 million per annum, to the foreseeable future and beyond, to CCA’s bottom line.

We will continue following up on developments and reporting as we have for the last five years.

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Props to David Takacs and to Jim Parker.

BREAKING NEWS: Ban The Box Signed Into Law

Thank you all for your civic energy a few weeks ago, making phone calls and Facebook noise on behalf of Assembly Bill 218 (Ban the Box). Governor Brown has just signed the bill into law.

The bill prohibits a state or local agency from asking an applicant to disclose information regarding a criminal conviction until the agency has determined the applicant meets the minimum employment qualifications for the position, giving formerly incarcerated or convicted folks a fighting chance in getting their lives back on track as law-abiding, taxpaying citizens.

Gov. Brown Signs Bill Promoting Health Access to Inmates

Assembly Bill 720, authored by Assemblymember Skinner, was signed by Governor Brown today. This bill allows the board of supervisors in each county to designate an entity to assist certain jail inmates to apply for a health insurance affordability program, and will prohibit county jail inmates who are currently enrolled in the Medi-Cal from being terminated from the program due to their detention, unless required by federal law or they become otherwise ineligible.

Ashker v. Brown: Guest Post by Hali Ford

A long line of high school students filed into the courthouse at 2 o’clock.  One attorney told me she had never seen such a turn out for oral arguments.  Judge Wilken interrupted the attorneys’ appearances to welcome the high school students.  She highlighted the importance of their attendance at a case involving such serious issues.
A group of Pelican Bay inmates seeks class certification to bring two claims against Governor Brown and CDCR.  Under current CDCR protocol, tattoos, reading materials, associations with other prisoners, and other factors earn inmates “points” towards being “validated” as a gang member.  Validated inmates are placed in solitary confinement, or, “the SHU” (secure housing unit), indefinitely.  The inmates claim this “indefinite SHU time for constitutionally infirm reasons” violates due process.  The inmates also seek to certify a “subset” of the class: inmates who have been in the SHU for longer than 10 years.  This subset brings an 8th Amendment challenge, arguing that 10+ years in solitary confinement poses an “unacceptable risk to prisoners.”   
Judge Wilken took issue primarily with the inmates’ method for defining the 8th Amendment class.   A key question cannot be answered except through discovery: how many, if any, inmates have been in SHU for longer than 10 years for reasons other than gang validation?   The inmates’ counsel stated that he suspects, but must determine through discovery, that no inmates have been in the SHU beyond 10 years for any other reason.  Judge Wilken expressed concern about certifying the class without knowing the characteristics of its members with certainty.   To bring a class action, the inmate group must satisfy the conditions of commonality and typicality.  She also explained that the 8th Amendment test to determine whether punishment is cruel and unusual compares the severity of punishment against the gravity of the offense.  The 8th Amendment balancing calculus would differ for the inmate who has been in the SHU for longer than 10 years because he murdered another inmate, for example, and the inmate in the SHU 10+ years for gang validation, and gang validation only.
Judge Wilken preferred to visualize the due process and 8th Amendment groups as a Venn diagram instead of an umbrella group and subset: all of the members of the due process group challenging gang validation in one circle, in the other circle, all of the 8th Amendment group members challenging 10+ years in the SHU, and in the overlap, those who have been in the SHU for more than 10 years for gang validation only.  The inmates believe all of the 8th Amendment group members also fit within the due process class.  That fact will be determined in discovery.
Neither party objected to defining the potential due process class as “all inmates serving indeterminate sentences at Pelican Bay SHU pursuant to Title 15 as of x date, on the basis of gang validation only.”  For the 8th Amendment challenge, Judge Wilken suggested the parties amend the complaint once they have determined the number, if any, of inmates in SHU for 10+ years for reasons other than gang validation.

Discovery will involve interviewing more than 100 inmates.  The discovery deadline is set for late March, summary judgment June 19, and bench trial nov 3-21 bench trial.  Neither party expressed enthusiasm when Judge Wilken discussed settlement.