by Sid Holt
Collinsworth jumps up and down. “Dude, I’ma find me one of them damn cards! Hell yeah. And I will not report it.”
Officially, inmates are only allowed to keep money in special prison-operated accounts that can be used at the canteen. In these accounts, prisoners with jobs receive their wages, which may be as little as two cents an hour for a dishwasher and as much as twenty cents for a sewing-machine operator at Winn’s garment factory. Their families can also deposit money in the accounts.
The prepaid cash cards Willis is referring to are called Green Dots, and they are the currency of the illicit prison economy. Connections on the outside buy them online, then pass on the account numbers in encoded messages through the mail or during visits. Inmates with contraband cell phones can do all these transactions themselves, buying the cards and handing out strips of paper as payments for drugs or phones or whatever else.
Miss Stirling divulges that an inmate gave her the digits of a money card as a Christmas gift. “I’m like, damn! I need a new MK watch. I need a new purse. I need some new jeans.”
“There was this one dude in Dogwood,” she continues. “He came up to the bars and showed me a stack of hundred-dollar bills folded up, and it was like this—” She makes like she’s holding a wad of cash four inches thick. “And I was like, ‘I’m not go’ say anything.’ ”
“Dude! I’ma shake him the fuck down!” Collinsworth says. “I don’t care if he’s cool.”
“He had a phone,” Miss Stirling says, “and he’s like, ‘I don’t have the time of day to hide it. I just keep it in the open. I really don’t give a fuck.’ ”
Mr. Tucker tells us to follow him. We shake down tiers all morning. By the time we finish at eleven, everyone is exhausted. “I’m not mad we had to do shakedowns. I’m just mad we didn’t find anything,” Collinsworth says. Christian pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket and reads off a string of numbers in a show-offy way. “A Green Dot,” he says. Christian hands the slip of paper to one of the cadets, a middle-aged white woman. “You can have this one,” he says. “I have plenty already.” She smiles coyly.
“We are going to win this unit back”
“Welcome to the hellhole,” a female CO greeted me the first time I visited the segregation unit. A few days later I’m back at Cypress with Collinsworth and Reynolds to shadow some guards. The metal door clicks open and we enter to a cacophony of shouting and pounding on metal. An alarm is sounding and the air smells strongly of smoke.
On one wall is a mural of a prison nestled among dark mountains and shrouded in storm clouds, lightning striking the guard towers and an enormous, screeching bald eagle descending with a giant pair of handcuffs in its talons. Toward the end of a long hall of cells, an officer in a black SWAT-style uniform stands ready with a pepper-ball gun. Another man in black is pulling burnt parts of a mattress out of a cell. Cypress can hold up to 200 inmates; most of the eight-by-eight-foot cells have two prisoners in them. The cells look like tombs; men lie in their bunks, wrapped in blankets, staring at the walls. Many are lit only by the light from the hallway. In one, an inmate is washing his clothes in his toilet.
“How are you doing?” says a smiling white man dressed business casual. He grips my hand. “Thank you for being here.” Assistant Warden Parker is new to CCA, but he was once the associate warden of a federal prison. “I know it seems crazy back here now, but you’ll learn the ropes,” he assures me. “We are going to win this unit back. It’s not going to happen in an hour. It’s gonna take time, but it will happen.” Apparently the segregation unit has been in a state of upheaval for a while, so corporate headquarters has sent in SORT officers from out of state to bring it back under control. SORT teams are trained to suppress riots, rescue hostages, extract inmates from their cells, and neutralize violent prisoners. They deploy an array of “less lethal” weapons like plastic buckshot, electrified shields, and chili-pepper-filled projectiles that burst on contact.
I get a whiff of feces that quickly becomes overpowering. On one of the tiers, a brown liquid oozes out of a bottle on the floor. Food, wads of paper, and garbage are all over the ground. I spot a Coke can, charred black, with a piece of cloth sticking out of it like a fuse. “I use my political voice!” an inmate shouts. “I stand up for my rights. Hahaha! Ain’t nowhere like this camp. Shit, y’all’s disorganized as fuck up in here.”
“That’s why we are here,” a SORT member says. “We are going to change all that.”
“Y’all can’t change shit,” the prisoner yells back. “They ain’t got shit for us here. We ain’t got no jobs. No rec time. We just sit in our cells all day. What you think gonna happen when a man got nuttin’ to do? That’s why we throw shit out on the tier. What else are we going to do? You know how we get these officers to respect us? We throw piss on ’em. That’s the only way. Either that or throw them to the floor. Then they respect us.”
I ask one of the regular white-shirted COs what an average day in seg looks like. “To be honest with you, normally we just sit here at this table all day long,” he tells me. They are supposed to walk up and down the eight tiers every thirty minutes to check on the inmates, but he says they never do that. (CCA says it had no knowledge of guards at Winn skipping security checks before I inquired about it.)
Collinsworth is walking around with a big smile on his face. He’s learning how to take inmates out of their cells for disciplinary court, which is inside Cypress. He’s supposed to cuff them through the slot in the bars, then tell the CO at the end of the tier to open the gate remotely. “Fuck nah, I ain’t coming out of this cell!” an inmate shouts at him. “You go’ have to get SORT to bring me up out of here. That’s how we do early in the morning. I’ll fuck y’all up.” The prisoner climbs up on the bars and pounds on the metal above the cell door. The sound explodes down the cement hallway.
Collinsworth and the CO he is shadowing move another inmate from his cell. The inmate tries to walk ahead as the CO holds him. “If that motherfucker starts pulling away from me like that again, I’m gonna make him eat concrete,” the CO says to Collinsworth.
“I kind of hope he does mess around again,” Collinsworth says, beaming. “That would be fun!”
I take a few inmates out of their cells, too, walking each one a hundred feet or so to disciplinary court with my hand around one of his elbows. One pulls against my grip. “Why you pulling on me, man?” he shouts, spinning around to stand face-to-face with me. A SORT officer rushes over and grabs him. My heart races.
One of the white-shirted officers takes me aside. “Hey, don’t let these guys push you around,” he says. “If he is pulling away from you, you tell him, ‘Stop resisting.’ If he doesn’t, you stop. If he keeps going, we are authorized to knee him in the back of the leg and drop him to the concrete.”
Inmates shout at me as I walk back down the tier. “He has a little twist in his walk. I like them holes in your ears, CO. Come in here with me. Give me that booty!”
At lunchtime, Collinsworth, Reynolds, and I go back to the training room. “I love it here,” Collinsworth says dreamily. “It’s like a community.”
Chapter 2: Prison Experiments
People say a lot of negative things about CCA,” the head of training, Miss Blanchard, tells us. “That we’ll hire anybody. That we are scraping the bottom of the barrel. Which is not really true, but if you come here and you breathing and you got a valid driver’s license and you willing to work, then we’re willing to hire you.” She warns us repeatedly, however, that to become corrections officers, we’ll need to pass a test at the end of our four weeks of training. We will need to know the name of the CEO, the names of the company’s founders, and their reason for establishing the first private prison more than thirty years ago. (Correct answer: “to alleviate the overcrowding in the world market.”)
To prepare us, Miss Blanchard shows a video in which CCA founders T. Don Hutto and Thomas Beasley playfully tell their company’s origin story. In 1983, they recount, they won “
the first contract ever to design, build, finance, and operate a secure correctional facility in the world.” The Immigration and Naturalization Service gave them just ninety days to do it. Hutto recalls how the pair quickly converted a Houston motel into a detention center: “We opened the facility on Super Bowl Sunday the end of that January. So about ten o’clock that night we start receiving inmates. I actually took their pictures and fingerprinted them. Several other people walked them to their ‘rooms,’ if you will, and we got our first day’s pay for eighty-seven undocumented aliens.” Both men chuckle.
There is much about the history of CCA the video does not teach. The idea of privatizing prisons originated in the early 1980s with Beasley and fellow businessman Doctor Robert Crants. The two had no experience in corrections, so they recruited Hutto, who had been the head of Virginia’s and Arkansas’s prisons. In a 1978 ruling, the Supreme Court had found that a succession of Arkansas prison administrations, including Hutto’s, “tried to operate their prisons at a profit.” Guards on horseback herded the inmates, who sometimes did not have shoes, to the fields. The year after Hutto joined CCA, he became the head of the American Correctional Association, the largest prison association in the world.
To Beasley, the former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party, the business of private prisons was simple: “You just sell it like you were selling cars, or real estate, or hamburgers,” he told Inc. magazine in 1988. Beasley and Crants ran the business a lot like a hotel chain, charging the government a daily rate for each inmate. Early investors included Sodexho-Marriott and the venture capitalist Jack Massey, who helped build Kentucky Fried Chicken, Wendy’s, and the Hospital Corporation of America.
The 1980s were a good time to get into the incarceration business. The prison population was skyrocketing, the drug war was heating up, the length of sentences was increasing, and states were starting to mandate that prisoners serve at least 85 percent of their terms. Between 1980 and 1990, state spending on prisons quadrupled, but it wasn’t enough. Prisons in many states were filled beyond capacity. When a federal court declared in 1985 that Tennessee’s overcrowded prisons violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, CCA made an audacious proposal to take over the state’s entire prison system. The bid was unsuccessful, but it planted an idea in the minds of politicians across the country: They could outsource prison management and save money in the process. Privatization also gave states a way to quickly expand their prison systems without taking on new debt. In the perfect marriage of fiscal and tough-on-crime conservatism, the companies would fund and construct new lockups while the courts would keep them full.
When CCA shares appeared on the NASDAQ stock exchange in 1986, the company was operating two juvenile-detention centers and two immigrant-detention centers. Today, it runs more than sixty facilities, from state prisons and jails to federal immigration-detention centers. All together, CCA houses at least 66,000 inmates at any given time. Its main competitor, the GEO Group, holds more than 70,000 inmates in the United States. Currently, private prisons oversee about 8 percent of the country’s total prison population.
Whatever taxpayer money CCA receives has to cover the cost of housing, feeding, and rehabilitating inmates. While I work at Winn, CCA receives about thirty-four dollars per inmate per day. In comparison, the average daily cost per inmate at the state’s publicly run prisons is about fifty-two dollars. Some states pay CCA as much as eighty per prisoner per day. In 2015, CCA reported $1.9 billion in revenue; it made more than $221 million in net income—more than $3,300 for each prisoner in its care. CCA and other prison companies have written “occupancy guarantees” into their contracts, requiring states to pay a fee if they cannot provide a certain number of inmates. Two-thirds of the private-prison contracts recently reviewed by the anti-privatization group In the Public Interest had these prisoner quotas. Under CCA’s contract, Winn was guaranteed to be 96 percent full.
The main argument in favor of private prisons—that they save taxpayers money—remains controversial. One study estimated that private prisons cost 15 percent less than public ones; another found that public prisons were 14 percent cheaper. After reviewing these competing claims, researchers concluded that the savings “appear minimal.” CCA directed me to a 2013 report—funded in part by the company and GEO—that claimed private prisons could save states as much as 59 percent over public prisons without sacrificing quality.
Private prisons’ cost savings are “modest,” according to one Justice Department study, and are achieved mostly through “moderate reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.” Wages and benefits account for 59 percent of CCA’s operating expenses. When I start at Winn, nonranking guards make $9 an hour, no matter how long they’ve worked there. The starting pay for guards at public state prisons comes out to $12.50 an hour. CCA told me that it “set[s] salaries based on the prevailing wages in local markets,” adding that “the wages we provided in Winn Parish were competitive for that area.”
Based on data from Louisiana’s budget office, the cost per prisoner at Winn, adjusted for inflation, dropped nearly 20 percent between the late nineties and 2014. The pressure to squeeze the most out of every penny at Winn seems evident not only in our paychecks but in decisions that keep staffing and staff-intensive programming for inmates at the barest of levels. When I asked CCA about the frequent criticism I heard from both staff and inmates about its relentless focus on the bottom line, its spokesman dismissed the assertion as “a cookie-cutter complaint,” adding that it would be false “to claim that CCA prioritizes its own economic gain over the needs of its customers” or the safety of its inmates.
The Escape
Two weeks after I start training, Chase Cortez (his real name) decides he has had enough of Winn. It’s been nearly three years since he was locked up for theft, and he has only three months to go. But in the middle of a cool, sunny December day, he climbs onto the roof of Birch unit. He lies down and waits for the patrol vehicle to pass along the perimeter. He is in view of the guard towers, but they’ve been unmanned since at least 2010. Now, a single CO watches the video feeds from at least thirty cameras.
Cortez sees the patrol van pass, jumps down from the back side of the building, climbs the razor-wire perimeter fence, and then makes a run for the forest. He fumbles through the dense foliage until he spots a white pickup truck left by a hunter. Lucky for him, it is unlocked, with the key in the ignition.
In the control room, an alarm sounds, indicating that someone has touched the outer fence, a possible sign of a perimeter breach. The officer reaches over, switches the alarm off, and goes back to whatever she was doing. She notices nothing on the video screen, and she does not review the footage. Hours pass before the staff realizes someone is missing. Some guards tell me it was an inmate who finally brought the escape to their attention. Cortez is caught that evening after the sheriff chases him and he crashes the truck into a fence.
When I come in the next morning, the prison is on lockdown. Staff are worried CCA is going to lose its contract with Louisiana. “We were already in the red, and this just added to it,” the assistant training director tells me. “It’s a lot of tension right now.”
CCA said nothing publicly about the escape; I heard about it from guards who had investigated the incident or been briefed by the warden. (The company later told me it conducted a “full review” of the incident and fired a staff member “for lack of proper response to the alarm.” When I asked CCA about its decision to remove guards from Winn’s watchtowers, its spokesman replied that “newer technologies … are making guard towers largely obsolete.”)
Later that day, Reynolds and I bring food to Cypress, the segregation unit. It is dinnertime, but inmates haven’t had lunch yet. A naked man is shouting frantically for food, mercilessly slapping the plexiglass at the front of his cell. In the cell next to him, a small, wiry man is squatting on the floor in his underwear. His arms and face are scraped
with little cuts. A guard tells me to watch him.
It is Cortez. I offer him a packet of Kool-Aid in a foam cup. He says thank you, then asks if I will put water in it. There is no water in his cell.
• • •
When inmates are written up for breaking the rules, they are sent to inmate court, which is held in a room in the corner of Cypress unit. One day, our class files into the small room to watch the hearings. Miss Lawson, the assistant chief of security, is acting as the judge, sitting at a desk in front of a mural of the scales of justice. “Even though we treat every inmate like they are guilty until proven innocent, they are …?” She pauses for someone to fill in the answer.
“Innocent?” a cadet offers.
“That’s right. Innocent until proven guilty.”
This is not a court of law, although it issues punishments for felonies such as assault and attempted murder. An inmate who stabs another may end up facing new criminal charges. He may be transferred, yet prisoners and guards say inmates who stab others typically are not shipped to a higher-security prison. The consequences for less serious offenses are usually stints in seg or a loss of “good time,” sentence reduction for good behavior. According to the DOC, Winn inmates charged with serious rule violations are found guilty at least 96 percent of the time.
“Inmate counsel, has your defendant appeared before the court?” Miss Lawson asks a prisoner standing at the podium.
“No, ma’am, he has not,” he replies. The inmate counsel represents other inmates in the internal disciplinary process. Every year, he is taken to a state-run prison for intensive training. Miss Lawson later tells me that inmate counsel never really influences her decisions.
The absent inmate is accused of coming too close to the main entrance. “Would the counsel like to offer a defense?”
“No, ma’am.”
“How does he plead?”
“Not guilty.”
