Private prison industry grows despite critics

Some fear for-profit corrections companies fuel growth, ignore safety 

By Scott Cohn

The biggest prison in the state of Idaho is also the toughest.

The Idaho Correctional Center—the ICC — was so violent that employees and inmates had a name for the place: Gladiator School.
“That was because of the assaults,” said Todd Goertzen, a former corrections counselor at the prison. “That's why they called it Gladiator School, because of that reason. If you're going to ICC, it's going to be fight or die, basically.”
This is the story of a dangerous business: the billions of dollars that flow into the American prison industry and the companies that profit from it.
No nation on the planet holds more of its people behind bars: 2.3 million prisoners—as many as China and Russia combined. The nation's prisons employ nearly 800,000 workers, more than the auto manufacturing industry.
Small towns are trying to get in on the boom, along with architects, health care providers and technology companies. They’re all after their piece of the billions behind bars.

For nearly half a century, America has waged a war on crime. But to lock up all those criminals, you need prisons. After decades of tough laws and stiff sentences, America’s prisons are bursting at the seams.
“We are on a prison binge: We're addicted to incarceration in this country,” said Martin Horn, who has made a career in the prison industry. ”As a nation, we lack imagination about how to respond to crime.”

Horn ran the corrections departments in Pennsylvania and New York City, and today he’s a  lecturer at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. He says America’s prison boom has gotten out of hand.
“If the only tool in your belt is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail,” he said. “If the only tool in our tool belt of crime responses is imprisonment, then every solution to crime looks like imprisonment.”

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