Story in Wall St Journal, 1
Mississippi
http://interactive.wsj.com/fr/emailthis/retrieve.cgi?id=SB999723110160198854.djm
Mississippi's Prison-Building Spree Creates
Glut of Lockups and Struggle for Convicts
By BRYAN GRULEY
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
JACKSON, Miss. -- With a lobbyist at his side, Wayne Calabrese sat
down to a friendly dinner here with two Mississippi state senators in late
March. The restaurant's player piano plinked nearby while Mr. Calabrese,
president and chief operating officer of Wackenhut Corrections Corp.,
described his company's extraordinary problem.
Two hundred miles north, at a Wackenhut-run
prison in Holly Springs, Miss., 130 steel bunks
stood bare and unused in two cavernous cell blocks.
Wackenhut had closed the units because it no longer
had inmates to fill them. Every day, the empty space
was costing the company money it had expected to
be paid by the state. Mr. Calabrese recalls telling
the senators Wackenhut couldn't afford so many
empty beds, and he hoped they could help.
Even after Mississippi built 15 prisons in seven
years, nobody thought the day would come when
there weren't enough felons to fill every cell. But that
day came this year, when the state found itself with 2,000 more prison beds
than prisoners.
The companies and counties that provide those beds responded with a bold
request: Pay us for cells Mississippi doesn't need. So persuasive were prison
operators that state lawmakers at one point wrote legislation that, according
to corrections commissioner Robert Johnson, set aside millions of dollars for
empty prison beds -- or "ghost inmates."
The prisons won this favor even as lawmakers were cutting state budgets for
classroom supplies, community colleges, mental-health services and other
programs. "We've got this all wrong," Mississippi Attorney General Mike
Moore says. "We're the poorest state in the union, and we're investing
money in failures."
After two decades of stuffing ever more prisons
with ever more prisoners, many states are
looking to reverse that grim trend. What
unfolded in Mississippi after Mr. Calabrese's evening with the senators
shows how hard that could be.
Prison expansion here -- as in many states -- spawned a new set of vested
interests with stakes in keeping prisons full and in building more. In
Mississippi, those interests include private prison companies and their
lobbyists, legislators with prisons in their districts, counties that operate their
own prisons and sheriffs who covet convicts for local jails. The result has
been a financial and political bazaar, with convicts in stripes as the prize.
The number of people behind bars in the U.S. has nearly quadrupled in the
past 20 years -- to about two million -- and prison overcrowding persists in
many states. But as crime has declined, some