Dark History - 34: Private Prisons: Where Prisoners Become Profit

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

At this very moment, there are a bunch of business owners and investors in the United States who profit off people being arrested and imprisoned. It doesn’t seem right and definitely doesn’t feel legal, yet here we are. Welcome to the shocking history of Private Prisons. Today, we talk about the all-American story about how capitalism kept slavery alive long after it was abolished. Plus we discuss how state and federal governments still use these horrible facilities today.  Episode Advertisers Include: Ship Station, ZipRecruiter, Liquid IV, and SimpliSafe. Learn more during the podcast about special offers!

Hi friends, how are you doing? Great! I hope you're having a great day today. My name is Bailey Sarian and I'd like to welcome you to the library of dark history. Sanashay, oh wait, wrong show. This is a safe space. Sanashay, Sanashay, I have to finish it. Sanashay.

Okay, this is a safe space. If you don't watch more than a mystery makeup, that's probably... What are you doing? First of all, um, second of all, theme song. Wrong show? Different day. This is a safe space for all the curious cats out there who think, hey, is his history as really as boring as it seemed in school? Oh, nay nay. This is where we can learn together about all the dark, mysterious, dramatic stories or teachers never told us about. But we can't really blame them.

It's like the system, the education system, didn't teach us. Thank you. Okay, so for today's story, it's very heavy per usual. And well, to start it off, have you ever been arrested? Okay, great. It's kind of scary.

People talk about prison being a place for rehabilitation, but I mean, is it? No. The current system is set up for anything but being rehabilitated. And have you ever thought to yourself like why? Why? Because other countries, they kind of focus on treatment. And here we're more focused on locking people up and throwing away the key. And why are we like that?

Because there's a reason. There's always a freaking reason. Okay. So, first of all, a lot of us don't even know the difference between jail and prison and how it gets even more complicated when you throw a wrench in the gears like the existence of private prisons. Yes, like what the hell is a private prison? Private prison is that like private school? Is it exclusive? Is it for like rich people? Is it chic or something? Honestly, if we're being very honest and transparent here, slavery really was the first form of a private prison.

And this is a very important side note, just a very important note in general. This topic is very complicated. Okay, like I'm going to try and just give you the short, streamlined version because private prisons, as we know them today, came about for tons of different reasons. So you should definitely do some more digging on your own on this topic, if it interests you. And yeah, so we're just like scratching the surface. Although private prisons started in the 1800s in New York, they didn't become popular until the 1800s in New Orleans. Yeah, New Orleans, something fishy, but what's going on?

There. Thank you. Let me open up my dark history book to the private prison chapter. And we're gonna try to scratch that little topic. It's not little. Spoiler. Hmm, that's not it. I'm surprised the book has made it this far. We rarely reference it or anything, but it's still, it's come a long way. We appreciate you book full of knowledge and sentences. Anyways, okay, so let's get into today's story.

You ready? Buckle in, because it's a journey. So our story, once again, takes place in the 1800s. 1830s, if we're being exact, and it's the 1830s in New Orleans, to be even more exact. So welcome to New Orleans, Louisiana. Gumbo, Benyees, and Marty Grah. At the time, New Orleans was Louisiana, Gumbo, Beniez, and Marty Grah. At the time, New Orleans was a huge trade hub with their biggest export being cotton.

Now, for our story, it's also very important to know that Louisiana was one of the only states in the United States where every enslaved person could go to jail instead of being sent directly back to the plantation if they escaped. Got it. And if an enslaved person was sent to jail, the plantation owner would be compensated $300 by the state for their loss. Quote unquote, loss. So yeah, plantation owners, the people enslaving and torturing other humans would literally get

paid by the state. So over time, the jails started filling up and they were running out of space. To fix this the Louisiana decided to build one of the nation's very first prisons in 1835 and let me point out there is a difference between jails and prisons. Jails are only meant to hold people for less than a year, or just until someone gets to their trial or bail. But prison is where you go for years. So jails at this time were usually just holding cells with metal bars, but prisons were a lot closer to what we think of today. The high fences lined with barbed wire, armed guards keeping watch, and multiple cells inside the prison, instead of like

just one or two at the sheriff's station. Before we get much deeper into our story, this would be a good time to point out that the people benefiting from prisons were the same people who benefited from slavery. So when I get to the point where I'm talking about people exploiting the prison system for financial gain, it comes from the same greed and racism that created slavery. And also because of that, there are two very different punishment systems in the United States. White people were sent to prison to repent for their crimes. Black people were sent to prison simply for existing. And in Louisiana, in the 1800s, there were a lot of chances to just punish black people for

existing. Now the New Orleans prison wasn't the first of its kind, but it was definitely the most influential. It was completely run by the state of Louisiana and the conditions here were about what you would expect from a prison in the early 1800s. Prisoners would wake up at 4 a.m. from a prison in the early 1800s. Prisoners would wake up at 4 a.m. Marching a single file line to the factory floor and work in complete silence from sunrise to sunset. That's right, they weren't allowed to speak to each other,

the guards or even the visitors. Oh yeah, the visitors. These weren't normal prison visitors, like friends or family. The prison was set up almost like a zoo. For a 20, well, not almost like like a zoo it was like a zoo for 25 cent fee anyone could come watch the prisoners work the cotton looms in the factory holy shit I know what the hell we could just end it there I think that is shocking enough and across the street was a store. There's a store across the street

where people could go buy items that the prisoners made at a discount. So like a gift shop, yeah, before gift shops were a thing, at a prison, great. And the quote, unquote, zoo wasn't even the worst thing the prison did. For a fee, the prison would stow and slave people away

for traveling plantation owners. Like, they were luggage or some shit. And while these enslaved people were literally being stored, the guards would also discipline them for just 12 and a half cents. Plantation owners could have enslaved people whipped by guards. Holy shit. Yeah, for no reason, other than they wanted them to. So yes, um, hi, this place, where these places were very messed up, but they kept filling up. And then in 1837, the US economy hit the skits.

Most historians agree it was because none other than Andrew Bath salts Jackson didn't want to establish a central bank for the United States. And since the cost of trade was increasing every day, it created a great depression type event called the Panic of 1837, where thousands of workers lost their jobs, farms, and their money. Now there was one industry that got hit pretty hard because of the panic of 1837 and that was cotton. And since Louisiana was the cotton capital of the world, they got hit the worst. And with the lack of cash, the state struggled to fund public services like prisons.

So what was Louisiana to do? Well, they allowed private investors to buy their very own prisons. The short answer to why Louisiana decided to sell their prisons to private investors? Money! And racism. You see, Louisiana's prisons were filling up as more and more enslaved people were getting locked up for escaping the plantation. Plus, it was getting more and more expensive to run the prisons, and they weren't bringing in the same amount of money because of the cotton crash. And this was becoming a giant headache for the government to run. Then the Louisiana government was approached by a wealthy investor with an exciting new

idea. What if the government unloaded the responsibility and cost of running the prison onto the investor? The investor would pay the government a small of running the prison onto the investor. The investor would pay the government a small percentage of the profits from the prison labor and pocket the rest. Now in exchange for taking on responsibilities like staffing, supplies, and maintenance, the new owner had full control over the prisoners. And this meant they could do whatever they wanted with them. They looked at this inmate population and were like, hey, what if we rented them out for

like a little fee every day, just to another way to make some more cash? And so they did exactly that. This was called convict leasing, and it was extremely popular. Think about it like this. Let's say you own a big ol' prison that has 1,000 inmates. Knowing you have this workforce, you tell your friend who owns a cotton farm that you're willing to lease him a bunch of inmates to work his fields. Cheap labor for the farmer and easy money for you. And since prisoners weren't treated

like actual human beings, there was no punishment if a least prisoner died or maybe they were injured on the job. The prison owners didn't care what happened as long as they turned a profit. If that sounds a lot like slavery, that's because it kind of had the same goal. Convict leasing was an intentional strategy to keep black Americans down. So if Convict leasing was this popular when slavery was still going on, imagine what happened when slavery went away. Well, on December 6, 1865, the 13th Amendment, outlawing slavery, was ratified, and the way

prisons ran completely changed. But first, let's pause for an ad break. Now I'm hoping that we're all familiar with the 13th Amendment, ended slavery, but the 13th Amendment didn't actually fully abolish it. It actually just kind of complicated things, because the first part says slavery in the United States is illegal. Yay! But then it also says slavery is illegal, quote, except as a punishment for crime, end quote.

So that means slavery isn't totally illegal. Someone just needs to commit a crime before they can be enslaved. Maybe you see where this is going. The 13th Amendment didn't establish the incentive to criminalize black people, but being black has always been criminalized in the United States. It was just the latest formation of what already existed, and that point can be driven home by the fact that at the same time, the 13th Amendment came into existence, a bunch

of laws started popping up across the country called black codes. Black codes were a set of laws that focused exclusively on ways to criminalize the actions of newly freed black Americans. That's not me saying that either. The language was literally written into the laws. For example, they often included the words, quote, all freed men, end quote, indicating who the target was. One law in Mississippi criminalized black people from hanging out in large groups.

In Florida, the formerly enslaved would be punished with the public whipping if they walked into an all-white church. And in Louisiana, all freed men needed to have a job working for a white person, or they could go to jail. So the fact that the 13th Amendment State slavery can exist as punishment for a crime is a big freaking deal. So once the Black Codes were enacted, Jail started filling up even faster. And when the Jails filled up, inmates got sent to prison.

But while some people saw the exploding prison population as a problem, a lot of them, a lot of people, a lot of wealthy people, saw them as dollar signs. Since plantation owners now had to actually pay their workers instead of enslaving them, operating costs increased rapidly. I know, paying for labor, what a freaking concept. So many plantations and factories went out of business because they no longer had access to enslaved people. And one man saw a way to take advantage of all of this. One man in every story, there's always one man. Tell me tell you about this man.

He was a former Confederate officer. He went by the name Samuel Lawrence James, okay. And he was born on June 23rd, 1834 in Salem, New Jersey. But he moved to Louisiana at some point, and Samuel L. James had become quite rich as a plantation owner before the Civil War. And now that the war was over, he was sitting on a huge mountain of cash that he wanted to protect. He knew the police with the help of the black codes were targeting the formerly enslaved

with petty crimes like J. Walking and loitering. And since Jails were filling up fast because of this, Sam had the idea to use his fortune to purchase his own prison. Hmm. But Sam wasn't like any of those other prison owners, oh no, he was an innovator. Sam bought a ton of land, invested in heavy machinery,

and built a full-blown factory right inside his prison. The factory was an immediate success because Sam was able to make cotton products for cheap, I'm talking real cheap. And because he was able to do this, demand for products increased even more. And I'm sure maybe you can guess who is working the machinery for no money. Well, it's the prisoners. In some ways, the new system worked even better than slavery because it industrialized it, and at this time industrialization was all the rage. Suddenly,

people like Sam were making bank off of all the goods his prisoners made. So Sam controlled Louisiana's entire convict labor for us and supplied the state and all of its private businesses with labor. And this made him quite a rich man. He bought himself a lot of plantations, but his favorite was a nine-bedroom mansion on a huge estate known as the Angola Plantation. This mansion was surrounded by billowing oak trees and open fields, and at the center of the estate was a lovingly cared for garden.

I know it kind of sounds like a scene right out of a southern romance novel, right? Unfortunately, it was all tended to by the inmates from Sam's prison. That's right, Sam rented out his whole inmates to himself. His family used the inmates as personal laborers in their homes and on their property, housing them in a shack behind the estate. family used the inmates as personal laborers in their homes and on their property, housing them in a shack behind the estate. Now this sounds horrible because, um, yeah, hi, it was. And you might be surprised to find out the state of Louisiana actually thought so too.

You see, in 1875, Louisiana legislator actually banned Convict labor from being used outside prison walls. And they sent a letter directly to Samuel James, telling him to give up his Convict labor from being used outside prison walls. And they sent a letter directly to Samuel James telling him to give up his Convict leasing program. So Sam stopped keeping prisoners at his home, right? No. He decides to convert his entire and gola plantation into a full-blown prison camp. This guy is a fucking idiot and it's privately owned just like his other prisons. And this prison- why doesn't he just do the labor himself? I don't know, it's just like an idea I just had right now.

And this prison camp was a much cheaper racket to maintain making him even more money. The government looked the other way because by this point Sam was making the Louisiana government so much money. Some historians say that he had become untouchable. Oh gross. Now wherever there is a huge profit, competition follows. Convicts start being leased by imitators across state lines into Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama. At its peak in the 1890s, the prison for profit system had 27,000 convicts all over the South. But then two things happened. First, Samuel James died in 1894.

Bye. Second, by the late 1890s, convict leasing fell out of favor because inmates began to riot in response to being least. Fixing the prison became expensive, making it very hard for private prisons to maintain profitability, but private prisons themselves were never outlawed. They continued to exist in the background. But after a few decades, the legacy of Samuel James would rear its ugly head, and the private prison system would claw its way back. Let's pause for an ad break.

Hold on. Hi, hello. Welcome to the 1960s. The counterculture movement is raging. Flowers and people's hair. Weed is everywhere. And the government is drucking college kids with LSD. You know, just normal 1960s stuff.

At this time, there was also a huge shift with policing and prisons because of the civil rights movement. That's largely because, as I mentioned earlier, prisons aren't really about reform or paying your debt to society, so prisons, in a way, are not so much about crime control as they are a form of controlling society. And the powers that be really wanted to control things when there was lots of unrest during the civil rights movement, the result, increase the rest and increase prison populations. So government ran prison populations are increasing again and the entire time this is happening, the private prison system was just kind of chilling in the background. It wasn't the money maker it used to be, but it was ready for its moment back in the spotlight.

It just needs to find someone to get it there. And that's someone was Tarell Don Hudo, junior. But we're just gonna call him Don. Now Don was born on June 8th, 1935 in a place called Sinton, Texas. He was a son of a farmer who died when Dawn was only nine and Dawn joined the army right out of high school and served for a few years before he left and then in 1967 he became the warden at the Ramsey Prison Camp in Texas. Now the Ramsey Prison Camp wasn't a private prison, and Dawn actually wouldn't get into the private prison game for a couple decades. But everything that happens next sets a stage for when he does. Dawn was known as a smooth-talking diplomat, but also had

a reputation for being tough as nails. This guy wanted to disrupt the system, shake shit up, and make a name for himself. So, he ran the Ramsey Prison Camp a little differently. Normally, a warden is part social worker, part CEO. But Don made a name for himself as a great CEO, and not so much a social worker. He wasn't there to reform anyone. He was there to make money. At this point, Convfect Leasing was still illegal, so Don needed to figure out some other ways to make his camp more profitable. His big claim to fame in the Warden game was the revolutionary idea of cutting costs and prisons by totally eliminating the needs for prison guards. Sounds pretty progressive. Until you hear how he did it. Don didn't just get rid of the guards.

He armed some of the inmates to keep watch over to the other inmates. He dressed prisoners in a button-up shirt and jeans with a baseball cap, handed them a gun, and told them to make sure none of the other prisoners got out of line. And it turns out Don was a big fan of rebranding because he renamed these prison prison turned guards trustees. But this wasn't a new idea. You see plantation owners used tactics like this way back when. And Don was just following in the footsteps of Samuel L. Even if he didn't know it. Don saved the prison mad cash by eliminating hundreds of thousands of dollars and expenses, just by getting rid of all those salaries. Suddenly, his prison was turning a serious profit. All around the country, governments wanted in on the cost-cutting measures Don was bringing to the table. Don's reputation for using Confect Labor to maintain order made its way to the Arkansas governor who asked Don to run his state's entire prison system.

Cheese, Louise. So what does... Of course, okay look, of course Don takes the position. It's a major upgrade for him. He's all stoked. And what does he do when he gets the Arkansas? I want to call it our Kansas every time. Anyways, he gets there. and he follows the playbook he wrote in Texas. Phase out prison guards, replace them with trustees, and boom, you're going to cut cost. And as you can expect, when you start cutting costs and start cutting corners, things most likely start going wrong. So newspapers, they would start reporting a lot of different stories of inmate abuse that was happening at Don's prison, his prisons in Arkansas.

But the worst stories were about something called the One Day Wonder Program has nothing to do with bread. Where young first-time offenders could be sentenced to prison for a day to learn what life would be like if they didn't straighten out. And it's probably no surprise that many of these young men were black, like a 17-year-old by the name of Willie Stewart. In 1971, Willie was convicted of burglary after stealing a candy bar. A candy bar.

Just a candy bar. And he was put into this one-day wonder program. During one day in prison, Willie was ordered to Candy bar. And he was put into this one day wonder program. During one day in prison, Willie was ordered to pick cotton, forced to do 31 minutes of push-ups, punched repeatedly in the face, chased by a car, had his head dunked underwater over and over, and he was even shot at by guards over Candy bar. After all of this Willie, who let me remind you,

was only 17, he had a heart attack and died. All because of a candy bar. Geez, the boys. This wasn't an isolated incident either. At least 150 boys went through the same torture, Willie endured, and this was inflicted upon people who were only in the prison for a day. Imagine what it was like for the actual inmates. I mean, life inside the Arkansas prison system was just awful. One inmate said he was stripped naked and left in a complete

dark windowless room for 28 days because he refused to work in the field. They blasted the air conditioning and wouldn't give him a blanket. And on top of that, they only fed him bread and little meat bars called grew. The man lost 30 pounds in 28 days. Other inmates reported only getting bread and syrup for breakfast before being forced to pick cotton all day.

And if they didn't pick enough, they weren't even given dinner or clean clothes. And said they were forced to stand against a wall, day in and day out. And every time the media reached out to Don about inmate abuse, he said he never heard any complaints. Whether that's true or not, we don't know, because zero records were kept at any of Don's prisons. Why would he keep records of his abuse?

And the state of Arkansas was just taking Don's word for it because he was making them so much money. So you're probably wondering how much money were they making? Well, in his first year in Arkansas, Don's operation brought in almost $1.7 million in revenue. That's about $11 million in today's dollars. In one year. In fact, Don turned a profit the entire time he was in an Arkansas. This is probably why any complaints they received got brushed directly under the rug. Much like Samuel L. James, Don Hudo was untouchable.

So the parallels between Samuel James and Don Hudo's careersouchable. So the parallels between Samuel James and Don Hudo's careers are kind of obvious. Both of them got their starts and traditional prisons before cutting costs to make a profit. Both of them dabbled in leasing convicts in their own ways. If Don Hudo's story ended here, the similarities might just be a weird coincidence. but the similarities don't end there. Because Don's career was heading where Samuel L. started a century before, private prisons. The 1970s were a period of cultural transition for the United States, and then right in the

middle of it all, Nixon announced drugs are public enemy number one. Maybe you remember, we talked about that, in another episode, okay great. So prison started filling up even more because of drug arrests, and this meant again, huge costs for both the state and federal governments. Now politicians hate dealing with packed prisons

because it usually means taxes have to be raised, so the government had a huge problem on its hands. So now I'm going to introduce you to two new people. One of them is named Thomas Beasley, and there's a doctor, Mr. Doctor Krants. His first name was legally doctor. That was his first name, his name was doctor. He wasn't a doctor, His name was legally Doctor. That's actually smart

Because everyone would have to call you Doctor Okay, I see that move. Tom had recently been the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party So he had him like a bunch of political connections and Doctor was in real estate So he was rich and knew how to get tons of land was in real estate. So he was rich and knew how to get tons of land. Tom and Doc were at a party smooth and booze in when another dude at the party approached them and put a bug in their ear. He's like, hey, let me tell you something. Opening a private prison would be, you know, a heck of a venture for a young man to solve the prison problem and I don't know, make a lot of money at the same time. So Tom and Doc are like, oh my god, wow, that sounds like a great idea.

The only problem? They didn't know squattily shit about prisons. But they did know of a guy who knew tons about profiting from prisons. That's right, they were thinking of this man, Don Hudo. You remember him, because we talked about him two minutes ago. Thank you. So they knew him. I mean, small world, right? Yeah.

Well, Don loved the idea of teaming up with Tom and Doc. He was a prison expert, and he knew how to cut lots of corners to save lots of cash for the states he worked for. So why not take a cut for himself? Well, in 1983, Tom, Doc Don created the Corrections Corporation of America, also known as CCA. And in doing so, they would create the private prison system as we know it today. The idea behind CCA was to go big, okay? Privateization was an easy sell in the United States

because the free market was considered to be more efficient than big government. So for CCA, making private prisons in the United States was like selling cars or real estate or maybe even selling hamburgers. Now the idea here is like, hey, we don't have to own just one prison. They could be a whole large corporation

that owned and managed many prisons. And anybody could hire them to build a prison-like facility, but Dawn had been in the prison game for two decades now and he knew that privatizing prisons wasn't enough to maintain profits. So he wanted to add one more special ingredient, immigration. President Ronald Reagan had recently announced

a new detention policy meant to detire undocumented people from my greeting. Now, he used news reports about unrest among Cuban and Haitian immigrants to characterize them as quote, hardened criminals, end quote. And this became an excuse for weaponizing the Southern border. If that doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense, you're right. It doesn't, but it somehow worked. And aided by the war on drugs and the US border with Mexico becoming a battleground,

Don Hudo and his merry band of chucklefucks were ready to take prisoners and just make it rain money. So almost immediately after forming, Tom, Doc, and Don, they got $500,000 from the federal Bureau of Prisons, and also the Immigration and Neutralization Service, which today it's known as ICE. They got this money to run a facility in Texas, but there was a catch. They had only 90 days to complete their new private prison. So they convinced the owner of a motel in Houston to lease his property to them. Then they

surrounded the motel with a 12-foot barbed wire fence and called it a day. They're like that works. Great. This motel prison was so sloppily put together and rushed that Don himself was photographing and fingerprinting inmates as they showed up. So why am I telling you about this weird ass motel? Because this was the very first privately owned immigration center, a true expansion of the private prison nightmare. The federal government didn't even care that the prison was just a motel. Yeah, they sure did not. On the first day alone, almost 100 detainees were booked, and the government was like, impressed by this.

So now, Tom Dock and Don have everyone's attention. CCA starts getting investments from all different directions, and people want them to build prison after prison after prison. But let's pause for an ad break. So the same year CCA opens its first center. Dawn is chosen as the president of the American Correctional Association. The American Correctional Association accretits prisons in other forms of correctional facilities. And if a prison isn't accredited, it can't operate. Point, blank, period. Making Don the President of the American Correctional Association

is a gross conflict of interest. It's like a teacher telling you to grade your own work. You're gonna give yourself an F? No! You'd be dumb. Why would you do that? You don't want to sabotage your own success. Anyway, CCA continued to evolve over the years, and at its peak would operate 22 federal facilities with over 25,000 prisoners.

Every single facility was run as inexpensively as possible. The exact same way Dawn had always run his facilities. And every time somebody would bring up all the bad shit happening under their watch, CCA would immediately pivot to escape accountability. This was big money, and there wasn't a chance in hell CCA was going to give it up. So when one bad practice ended, I mean another one would pop up in his place. Like there was something called the voluntary work program, exclamation point. The voluntary work program was big in CCA's immigrant detention centers. Detainees performed a wide variety of jobs from washing dishes, to cutting hair, to playing

receptionists for the private facility manager. I mean, they were paid poorly in these jobs, but there's a huge problem here. In another cost-cutting method, prisoners had to purchase everyday necessities like soap and toilet paper. Yeah, they weren't given these. Nope. And the voluntary work program was their only way to make money to buy these necessities. So can we even call it a voluntary project if it's the only way they can get what they

need? No. I don't think they- I don't think we can. Mm-hmm. Wendy Taney would later recall working 18 hour days in a hot kitchen with no air conditioning in the middle of summer. After his shift, he tried buying more than one roll of toilet paper from the CCA store and was told to quote, use his fingers.

End quote. But by forcing TTAs to work in this program, CCA has made it unnecessary to hire more employees in these facilities, lower cost, equal, more profits. So in the 90s, private prisons started to get more attention. Attention they didn't really want. Prison reform organizations like the Sentencing Project had been exposing the awful conditions in private prisons for years and their efforts really started to have an impact. I mean people saw the connection

between private prisons and slavery and now they couldn't ignore it. So private prisons started to be a harder sell. Then in oh remember when 9-11 happened? Yeah. Okay so 9-11 happened And locking up immigrants became much easier to do. Dr. Krance, who is not a doctor, even founded the Homeland Security Corporation with his son that same year while still being a part of CCA. Don and his chuckle buddies almost seamlessly shifted gears in order to keep their private prison corporation in business. So as state and federal governments dumped more and more cash into CCA, they would come up with even more ways to cut corners and save money.

CCA decreased inmate's medical care. If the food went bad, it was still served. Someone called out sick. I mean, they would just be short staffed. And a new cost saving maneuver was technology-based surveillance, which meant just putting up more cameras. And decreasing the number of guards makes sense. They also reduced the training time of guards

because training programs cost money. How much money do these people need? Hm? Hm? And then bonuses started getting offered to department heads not for their good performance but for cutting costs. What could possibly go wrong? Well in 2010 an inmate in CCA's Idaho facility followed a lawsuit saying the prison was so violent and understaffed that it was a gladiator school. So we called it it. The lawsuit even referred to the guards as window dressing.

CCA denied this at first, but in 2013, a full report came out and associated press alleging that CCA was lying about their staff records by falsifying shift logs to conceal that the prison was understaffed. CCA admitted the report was true and lost their contract with the state of Idaho. I'm sure they didn't really care. Soon, reports started popping up about other CCA facilities that were experiencing the same level of violence,

leading to international news reports of neglect throughout their facilities. And you would think, with all this outrage and upset, that these places would be shut down. And we could say, oh, wow, look at that, that was shitty, but now we're better. But of course not. Nothing changed for the CCA. I mean, at first. Well-the-powerful corporations are hard to take down if you haven't learned. And the records at private prisons aren't subject to any kind of public access laws like

the Freedom of Information Act because the private bitch loopholes. CCA in particular fought really hard over the years to defeat legislation that would make private prisons subject to the same disclosure rules as public prisons, so it would take an insider to blow this wide open. As you saw with the sentencing project, activists and organizations had been trying to break the private prison system down for decades, but when a journalist named Shane Bauer

enters the scene in 2014, things really start to go mainstream. Shane was well known for reporting on life and prisons across the planet, and Shane had heard some whispers about what CCA was doing and was willing to do whatever it took to figure out the truth behind what happens at these private prisons. Someone had to do it. Shane would go undercover at one of a CCA's private prisons down in Louisiana.

Yeah, we're back, full circle, huh? Within two weeks of filling out a job application online, Shane got an interview. Now, he used his real name and personal information and even let them know he was a reporter who wrote about prisons for a living, so he wasn't like lying. So, CCA had access to a lot of red flags, but none of the interviewers paid any attention to the details of his resume. They didn't even ask about the time he was arrested for shoplifting when he was 19. So, right off the bat, Shane noticed something shady. Then in November of 2014, Shane got hired as a guard at a place called Win Correctional, which was a private prison that was owned by CCA.

And Shane learned the CCA way his very first day. What a rhyme. Every morning at 6 a.m., Shane would show up for the morning meeting with all the staff on duty. Some days there were as few as 24 guards for 1,500 inmates, which is much lower than the number of guards that CCA is contractually required to have. The first thing Shane noticed at one of these meetings was that the staff at Win Correctional was willing to do whatever it took to get inmates in line. One of his lead officers told Shane that if he ever wanted to hit an inmate, he should call for backup and tell the inmates to knock it off.

But only if there was a camera. Now, if there wasn't a camera, he was told to knock the fuck out of the inmate. And that's a quote. The way they were supposed to deal with inmates was so aggressive that being exposed to tear gas was part of Shane's training as a guard. While Shane worked at when, he said the guards used tear gas in similar chemical agents three times as often as other prisons in the world. The assistant warden told him, quote, I believe that pain increases the intelligence of the stupid. And if these inmates want to act stupid, then we're going to give them

some pain to increase their intelligence level. He also found out that the healthcare provided for prisoners was pretty much nonexistent. Shane met a prisoner who had lost his finger and legs after months of untreated infections. The prisoner would ask for any kind of medical care and made multiple requests to see a doctor, but towards the end his foot was completely black with infection. But every time he asked for help, the staff responded by accusing him of faking his pain, and they would give him, I don't know, a couple of aspirants. But the worst thing Shane noticed had to do with the guards being replaced by cameras

in important areas. Because there weren't that many guards around to prevent the inmates from being violent towards one another. Shane saw multiple stabbings, sometimes right in front of him. And legally, if a camera was watching, there was nothing he could do about it. In training, if Shane ever saw two inmates stabbing each other, he was told, quote, it's not worth it, we don't make enough money to put ourselves in that situation. If these fools want to cut each other up, happy cutting."

Shane quit his job at the prison after six months, and then in 2016, he wrote an expo zay on win correctional that caught the attention of the international press. Shane concluded that the entire argument behind private prisons was a bad one. When he got hired, he was given a report by his CCA managers that said private prisons could save states as much as 59% over public prisons without sacrificing quality. Which sounds great, right? Well, CCA funded this report themselves.

So a more independent study estimates that private prisons cost 15% less than public ones. Another said public prisons were 14% cheaper. So what the hell is the truth? I don't know. After reviewing these numbers, researchers say that the savings of private prisons appear minimal. So, I mean, what happened after the CCA report came out? Are we surprised? No, sad. I don't know. CCA didn't face any legal ramifications. Boy. But coincidentally, a few months after Shane's article was published, CCA changed their name to Core Civic.

So if you tried to Google something like Core Civic Controversy, their name wouldn't pop up. CCA's would. You know what I'm saying? That's so lame. Okay, so where do you think stand with private prisons today? Since 2009, prison populations in general have been falling, and this isn't good news for private prison companies. Coincidentally, Corsific started heavily lobbying Congress that same year.

Between 2009 and 2020, they spent almost $14 million on lobbying efforts. Now, come in, Gracie. But if you have to spend that much money convincing someone that what you do is good, then maybe I don't know. I don't know, maybe it isn't. Still, chorus civics revenue in 2020 was $1.9 billion. Imagine where we would be if all that money went to actually rehabilitating people instead of locking them up.

Now one of President Biden's first executive orders said federal prisons can no longer be privately run, which sounds great, right? Like great, we don't need these things. But private prison owners weren't going to let this run them out of business. Okay, no, they need their billions. Instead, they're expanding even more into immigrant detention centers and electronic monitoring. Over 136,000 immigrants are now being watched under ICE's intensive supervision appearance program, which is a record high. And wouldn't you know that program was developed by a subsidiary of the world's

largest private prison company? So even though Biden said no more, they found a way to reinvent themselves and keep the money coming in. A billionaire loves a rebrand. Prisons and private prisons in particular are a result of deep-seated racism and freaking greed in our nasty ass country. The only reason prisons exist is because of the criminalization of being black. And with every reinvention of the private prisons, they are just tweaking from that original format, slavery. And private prisons make so much money today and have so much influence in Washington, T.C. But why? There's evidence they don't even work. It's just another example of money over

everything, and it's exhausting, and we're tired of it. And we fucking hate it. One good thing, I guess, is that Don Hudo died in October of this year, 2021, I'm sorry, last year 2021. By federal prisons are not profitable enterprises in and of themselves, despite the many industries connected to the criminal justice system and immigration enforcement. By putting people in cages and putting a monetary value on that, companies like Core Civic are keeping slavery alive and well even today. Anyways, thank you guys so much for hanging out with me today. I'm so sorry to be such a Debbie Downer.

But hey, that's, that's why it's called Dark History. Yeah, it's a truth. Remember, don't be afraid to ask questions and get to the like the whole story and the history of where things come from, why it is the way it is. But I'd love to hear your guys' reactions to today's story, so make sure to use the hashtag Dark History over on social media so I can see what you're saying. Also join me over on my YouTube where you can watch these episodes on Thursday after the podcast airs, and also catch my murder mystery makeup which drops on Monday. Thank you so much for hanging out with me. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. You make a choices,

and I'll be talking to you next week. Bye! Dark History is an audio boom original. This podcast is executive produced by Bailey Sarian, Kim Jacobs, Junia McNally from Three Arts, Ed Simpson, and Claire Turner from Willhouse DNA, produced by Alexi Kiven and Leah Sutherland, research provided by Ramona Kivit and Jed Bookout. Writers, Jed Bookout, Michael Obers to Joyce Gavuzzo and Kim Yageed, a special thank you to our subject matter consultant, Brett Berkhardt, and Tryin Woods. And I'm your host, Bailey Sarian. Bailey Sarian.