For-profit prison industry, an example of how profit motive leads to perverse business incentives.
While privatizing certain state/local government functions can be beneficial, the for-profit prison industry has become a prime example of how the profit motive leads to perverse business incentives. Administrators are pressured to hire fewer, less-experienced guards, cut food/health care, inflate costs, and ignore physical and sexual abuse among prisoners.
Now, Virginia is contracting out a facility for indefinitely sentenced sex offenders. Guaranteed occupancy for those cells?
From The Huffington Post
Private Prison Company May Take Over Virginia Sex Offender Center
Virginia is in the final stages of reviewing proposals that would privatize a mental health treatment facility for sex offenderswho can be held indefinitely under state law, according to state officials and a private prison company seeking a contract to operate the institution.
The GEO Group, the nation’s second-largest private prison operator, and Liberty Healthcare Corp., which manages mental health institutions, are vying to manage the 300-bed state facility, known as the Virginia Center for Behavioral Rehabilitation. Both companies bring checkered histories in their experiences managing a similar facility in Florida, according to reports in that state.
The proposed contract in Virginia would give a private company authority over convicted sex offenders enrolled in a controversial program known as “civil commitment,” through which the state designates some inmates sexually violent predators. That label gives the state the right to hold those inmates indefinitely while administering mental health treatment.
Twenty states and the District of Columbia employ the process, which the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld as constitutional in three separate cases. But critics contend that ceding control of the process to a profit-making corporation poses an enormous conflict of interest: The company would have a financial incentive to hold onto sex offenders for as long as possible while skimping on required mental health services.
“These people could be held forever,” said Tracy Velazquez, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, a non-profit group that is critical of the rise of private involvement in the nation’s penal system. “There’s a disincentive for the companies to provide treatment, because the inmates continue to be customers. There is no end of sentence.”
A spokesman for the GEO Group said the company would administer the facility in the public interest.
“Under public-private partnerships, private operators provide high-quality management services of correctional, detention, and residential treatment facilities under strict and constant oversight and monitoring from state officials,” said Pablo Paez, a GEO spokesman, in an emailed statement. “These services have absolutely no bearing on sentencing policies or decisions which are exclusively made by policymakers.”
In a recent conference call with investors, a GEO Group executive, Jorge Dominicis, said he expects Virginia to decide on his company’s contract proposal by July.
Liberty Healthcare, a privately owned company based in suburban Philadelphia, did not respond to requests for comment.
The Virginia Department of Behavioral Health and Developmental Services, which oversees the sex offender facility, declined to comment on the deliberations, but confirmed that a formal review of the privatization proposal is in the later stages.
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