When Mississippi in the 1990s decided to start contracting out a chunk of its incarceration, there were obvious concerns.
One of them was that, while private prisons were supposed to save the state money, using them created a financial incentive to warehouse more offenders, since private prisons depend on a steady stream of inmates in order to make a profit. The result was private prison companies lobbying legislators to create harsher sentencing laws, which locked up more people for longer periods of time. Mississippi has spent years trying to unravel itself from a system that was financially unsupportable, not to mention harmful to the fabric of many poor and minority communities, since those communities provided the vast majority of inmates.
Another concern was whether private companies, once established, would live up to their promise of providing a safer and more humane environment than prisons operated by the state. Since private prisons could make more money by cutting staff and rehabilitative programs, Mississippi would have to be vigilant to keep the private prison operators to their contractual promises.
According to State Auditor Shad White, the state caught one operator who wasn’t living up to its agreement, and the result is a refund of $5.1 million that the state had overpaid them.
Management & Training Corp., based in Utah, returned the money last week after an investigation by state auditors found that the company was understaffing the three prisons it had been operating in the state. At one prison alone, which MTC no longer manages, the auditors discovered nearly 12,000 unfilled mandatory shifts between 2017 and 2020.
It was bad enough that MTC was taking payments from the state for services it was not providing. But this shortage of staff also means that these prisons were more dangerous than they should have been for the guards and others who worked in them and also for the inmates themselves. One of the surest ways to create chaos in a prison is to not have enough employees to manage those who are incarcerated. Into such a vacuum of supervision will step other inmates, frequently gang members, who enforce their own brutal code of discipline while running criminal enterprises within the prison walls.
White did a good job on the MTC case. Maybe it will send a message to other prison operators that they had better not cut corners in a way that could put lives in jeopardy.
