sat down at the shining waxed dining table, only sullied by the JRU report. She wouldn’t think about anything else right now. Thinking about the emptiness of her life would surely drive her to the olives and she had to begin her response to this proposal. She looked at the inscription once again and smiled ruefully. When she first began working in the Department of Corrections it seemed to her that wardens had enormous power. Perhaps she’d been wrong or had exaggerated what she’d seen, but the position’s power had certainly eroded since then. A warden’s powers today were so limited, while her accountability was so vast, that Gwen often felt as trussed as a turkey before being shoved into the oven. And now this move to privatize prisons was sure to usurp whatever power she had remaining.
Privatization was a bastard trend that had been born – mothered – by Wall Street out of the incredible need for more prisons and taxpayers yelping at the costs of incarceration. If an aging population voted against school-board bond issues and preferred not to spend its tax dollars on educating their own grandchildren, Gwen knew all too well how they felt about spending public funds on strangers in the ‘criminal population’. And yet, that population continued to grow. The only solution most agencies saw was building more places to incarcerate offenders. The ineffectual ‘war on drugs’, mandatory sentences, and a judiciary frightened that they might be perceived as ‘soft on crime’ had all contributed to a huge increase in prisoners in general, and an even larger increase in female prison statistics.
In fact, Gwen knew that women were the fastest growing sector of the prison population. Since 1980, the female inmate population nationwide had increased by more than five hundred percent. And this was not because women were involved in more violent crimes. It was because, nationwide, people were being imprisoned much more frequently for nonviolent crimes. In 1979, women convicted of nonviolent crimes were sent to prison roughly forty-nine percent of the time. By 1999, they were being sent to prison for nonviolent crimes nearly eighty percent of the time.
So privatization seemed a neat and simple answer to all these problems. Big business claimed it was ready to step in, take the risk, bear the expense, and turn prisons into moneymaking operations. Gwen of course knew that there were two major private prison corporations in the U.S. One of them, Wackenhut Corrections, owned fifty-two prisons ‘employing’ more than twenty-six thousand prisoners. The other, CCA – Corrections Corporation of America – had control over almost three times as many prisoners in eightyone prisons. At the last conference for prison wardens that Gwen had attended, there had been a heated discussion over the privatization of prisons. Someone pointed out how large corporations had the incentive and the political clout to encourage the creation of a larger and larger prison population – a larger and larger cheap labor pool. This meant increased sentences and the increasing incarceration of men and women (usually from communities of color). Gwen wondered if this would turn into a new form of slavery.
She shook her head, turned another page of the proposal, and wondered what JRU International stood for. Justice Regulatory Underwriters? Jesus Really Understands? Jails ‘R’ Us? Jammed Rats Unlimited? Why not be honest and call it PFP: Prisons for Profit? She turned another page of the proposal before her and began to take notes in her small, neat handwriting.
There was no way this plan was going to work! Gwen looked down at the dozen pages of notations she’d already compiled. Most were written in capital letters and underlined several times. They looked like mad ravings, and weren’t far from it. She’d have to somehow turn these blistering observations into cool bureaucratic reportage. She shook her head at the daunting task. What was the state thinking of?
She knew, of course, that her burgeoning budget presented nothing but trouble to them. Gwen knew that while her costs of maintaining one prisoner – including her bed, board, security, and the very limited health and education services that Jennings offered – was increasing to more than fifty-five dollars a day, private prisons claimed they could maintain prisoners at only forty-three dollars a day. She knew she couldn’t compete with that.
But how was JRU going to deliver what they were promising? How were they possibly going to reduce medical staff? As it was, she had reluctantly cut the staff dramatically. When she looked at the ‘Facilities Management Report’ she was actually shocked. They proposed turning the visiting room into a space for a profit-making telemarketing operation. Where would the women visit with their families? They were also proposing to expand the prison itself and enclose the U of the courtyard, to provide additional housing. That meant darkening all the units facing the courtyard. Where would the women exercise? Where would Springtime plant flowers?
She had to be missing something in this ridiculous proposal. After all, though they weren’t pleasant, the JRU staff didn’t seem to be insane or particularly cruel. Yet the more Gwen studied the details, the more horrifying the plan seemed. It appeared that they expected to house and feed more than two hundred and thirty new inmates, who would be transferred from other facilities, facilities they would later close or would subsume into the JRU empire. Surely there must be a typo, Gwen thought as she looked at the numbers. Then she realized that the current, badly designed cells (which had four bunks but held only two prisoners) were actually going to be used to house four. The additional cells, those built in the courtyard space, would hold the balance.
Gwen did some quick calculations. It was unbelievable! Had those JRU jaspers ever read about Telgrin’s experiment with rats? Decent, normal rats from good nests turned vicious – even cannibalistic – when they were overcrowded in their cages. Did they know Amnesty International’s position on U.S. prison conditions? Were they so inexperienced that they didn’t realize that the four bunk spaces were an error, far too small a space even for two? Clearly, JRU saw the inmates not as human beings or even rats but as a captive labor force. And based on their projection, a profitable force at that. How did they hope to transform this angry and sullen population of criminal inmates into chipper and cheerful telemarketers?
Gwen dropped her pen and began pacing around the dining table. This was never going to work. All of her years of experience, not just at Jennings and not just as a warden, but in social work, halfway houses, and other correctional facilities, told Gwen Harding that the plan was bound to fail. And what would happen then? Would there be protests? An uprising? And if there was violence – and with this plan there was bound to be plenty – would the inmates be blamed? Or would it be her head on the chopping block? If it all went up in flames – figuratively or literally – could JRU just abandon the project, leaving the state to clean it up?
She knew very little about businesses and how they operated. She had spent her life working in the public sector. So had her father, who had been a cop, and her mother, who had been a teacher. In fact, aside from an uncle (who had run a dry goods store that failed), she couldn’t think of anyone in her extended family who had any real business experience. The corporate world, with its financial realities and its politics, was a complete mystery to her. The one thing that she was sure of was that the executives who had toured her facility had been arrogant and much more prone to talk than to listen. But she’d noticed, of course, how little they wanted to hear from her. It was clear that they already felt she was an advocate of the ‘prisoners’. When these people took over – if they did take over – how long would she even get to retain her job?
This situation was awful. Gwen felt the call of the olives in her refrigerator. She had to convince the Department of Corrections that this proposal should – must – be turned down. But Gwen had no idea how she was going to convince them that the JRU proposal was not only unrealistic, but also a recipe for failure – or for something much, much worse. She looked at the tea mug, now cold on the table, with its inscription: BECAUSE I’M THE WARDEN, THAT’S WHY. What a joke! No one at the State Department of Corrections listened to what a warden said. Especially a female warden.
She would have to sit down and put together a brilliant counterargument, complete with her own charts and graphs and projections that would not only explain why this
