Kevin Corcoran for the Indianapolis Star has an article entitled Budget freeze spurs talk of private prison. The article states that Indiana’s new prisons chief, J. David Donahue is looking at building Indiana’s first private prison as a way of coping with the budget’s freeze on prison spending:
Indiana’s new prisons chief says he’s looking at building the state’s first private prison to help ride out a two-year budget freeze amid projections of a surge in inmates.
Department of Correction Commissioner J. David Donahue has dropped the previous Democratic administration’s plans for a new state-run 1,800-bed prison for men and a juvenile prison dormitory in Plainfield.
Along with related moves such as outsourcing nursing care and cooking, a private prison for Indiana’s growing adult prison population appears likely.
“I’ll be looking at an opportunity for a private facility to be sited, financed, built and operated by private companies,” said Donahue, a former vice president and chief operating officer for U.S. Corrections Corp., a private prison company. Any new prisons, he said, should not be paid for by taxpayers.
I really do not like the idea of having any corporation doing business in Indiana that has a profit motive related to the incarceration of Indiana citizens. It just creates perverse incentives. Their bottom line gets better as more Hoosiers are locked up. And if Mr. Donahue used to work for the private prison industry, it raises some serious red flags. Not that he has a lot to work with. The House of Representatives’ decision to flat-line prison spending without taking appropriate measures to reduce the need for prison spending is short-sighted and irresponsible.
According to Mr. Corcoran’s article:
The nation’s largest owner and operator of private prisons, Corrections Corp. of America, runs 64 facilities with about 70,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia, according to the company’s Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Last year, the company reported profits of $61 million.
Private prison companies such as Corrections Corp. and Prison Health Services Inc. have contributed a total of more than $50,000 to Democrats and Republicans in Indiana since 2000, with Daniels receiving about one-third of this money.
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