Playing Russian roulette with Community / Public Safeguards

 

Recent information revealed by the news media regarding the Arizona Department of Corrections attempt to reshape the Private Prison contracts should not come as a shock or surprise to our politicians, citizens as well as our families living in our communities. This action was made possible because of disproportional power structures within our state. It was also created by a combination of the weak and fragmented community and political leadership within our state legislative body and business professionals. Surely, we must take the time to recognize this dangerous trend.

This concept was accomplished because of policymakers out-thinking the lawmakers or perhaps collusion between the two to make it a successful plan. The governor of our state did not resist such dramatic political changes and in fact, through her silence, embraced the takeover with personal satisfaction and potential future earnings as a silent partner.

The conclusion in this matter has led policy makers to be the winners and lawmakers the losers. Short term and long term goals will be profit for the policymakers and burdensome expensive fiscal spending and contractual obligations for those lawmakers [and unfortunately the taxpayers] who sat idle while this change occurred.

One must surely realize some disturbing changes are underway in the manner the Arizona Department of Corrections conducts its daily business. Rather than strict oversight and compliance-controlling methods to ensure transparency and accountability, it plays a loose and fancy free attitude to allow the private contractors much lead way into their practices, their expenditures and human resource management. Through contractual agreement, they have assured them a good profit for building new prisons for the state that can or may change ownership twenty years from now if the contract is completed.

The Corrections Department has managed to established relationships with local and state political authorities to accomplish this feat. Legitimately in power to embrace such changes, they were instrumental in forging a legal and legitimate prison economy within our state making this a prime target for more private prisons to be built by eager contractors willing to play by these easy rules. These corporations are enthusiastic to supplement their meager wages elsewhere and delivering more promises to Arizona in order to increase their profits and partner up with such a willing state of affairs.

At the moment, the ADOC does not face any immediate threats on their territorial gains in the prison business. Mostly benign opposition rarely makes the headlines as their involvement in this corrupt but yet legitimate partnership has been brought to question more than a dozen times or so by community leaders and organizations.

This new approach is not without any hazards or peril. There are collateral damages that may impact the eventual revision or re-thinking of this concept but it won’t happen until it is too late to reverse the current trend.

 Statistically speaking, the private prison industry will eventually dry up leaving those eager to partner up without any economic support or basis for income as they will pack up like carpetbaggers and move out of their locality and find another prime spot eager to accept their promises of wealth and betterment.

Statistically speaking, there will be operational flaws and disasters related to the soundness of each prison complex under their ownership as well as those neglected state prisons that suffer in preventive maintenance severely. Communities must endure disturbances, escapes, and property damage demanding the local authorities be backed up by state or federally- owned resources.

There is no doubt that this new approach will curtail the “business as usual” for state employees as there are plans to reduce public employees on the payroll and replace them with this private enterprise. It is suspect integrated policies mandated by the governor to draw up a plan to collate these human resources, diminish their earning capacity, and pool them into a large group of workers paid minimum wages at the best without retirement or other basic benefits now in place for the public workers.

There will be economic hardship due to abandonment. There will be financial doom as their investments will flourish only short term and fail in the long run. There will be obvious negative implications for those employed and eventually laid off causing domestic instability and unemployment.

What Can We Do?

How can we respond to these developments? Unfortunately, the power in place to effectively change the direction primarily lies not in our hands or our control. Therefore, we must plan for change and assert our political authority or influence wherever we can.

However, at the same time we must:

1. Prepare for the fact that private prisons will fail and leave the deal to the taxpayers at some point in the future.
1. We must recognize our contractual obligations and ensure compliance to the letter of the agreement and force compliance through legal efforts if necessary.
2. We must continue to encourage our political leaders, regardless of their party affiliations and emphasize our need to prioritize the task of restructuring the prison complexes when the time comes for abandonment and surrender by the private enterprises that can elude their contractual obligations easily through the stroke of the pen.
3. We should continue to intensify our resistance programs and consolidate to bring more power to the voices of opposition.
1. These initiatives are important as we identify those financial supporting resources and make them understand this is detrimental to the economy of our state and communities.
4. More importantly, we must draw them towards us and encourage them to provide an infusion of new ideas to restructure our prison system and our economic base according to those best practice principles in the business world and return this base back to common sense approaches and proven criminal justice practices.

This opinion serves as an early warning signal that our leadership is failing us and guiding us down the path of destruction related to our sovereignty on government responsibilities, our control over prisons and the public safety of our communities.  

Power is based on organized force. At the present time, the power is with those organized structures within our state government taking us towards this risky business approach.

We must begin to: disclose, educate,  recruit, develop and identify new resources and meet these organized power structures head on mainly because of their sheer unpredictability related to successes [and failures] and focus on documenting the dangerous behaviors already exhibited but kept under control by the power establishment today.