Minnesota state Rep. Tim Miller lamented that he’d done everything he could to pitch the private prison idea in Minnesota. And he did it again Tuesday, with a costly caveat.
During a hearing at the Capitol, Miller stressed that his new bill to get state prisoners back into a facility in Appleton, Minn., would entail the state “leasing to own” or buying the prison — and staffing it with state employees.
“Last year the DOC referred to prison overcrowding in Minnesota as a crisis … There are not enough beds, nor are there in the future, and there is an existing asset in Minnesota that can address this problem,” said Miller, R-Prinsburg, whose district includes Appleton.
But critics of the bill homed in on the mandate: The state “shall enter into a contract” with the private owner of the prison, the bill says, as soon as the state determines they’d run out of a “current or projected” number of prison beds.
“(The prison commissioner) is put in a position where he has to buy. He has to buy a specific facility from a specific seller. That’s bad business,” said James Rubenstein, a retired lawyer who spoke against the bill.
Talk about the “costs” of the prison frequently shifted between the moral and the financial. And in some cases, both at once.
Though the owner of the prison, CoreCivic, sued to get the value of the prison down to $14 million when it came to calculating property taxes, they recently asked the state for $99 million for it — a number Miller said CoreCivic just “tossed out there” as a starting point in negotiations.
Others theorized that once a potential lease on the prison runs out, CoreCivic would just jack up the price under a new agreement.
“Beware the bait and switch,” said Rick Neyssen, a correctional officer and president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees local 599, which represents prison employees near the state’s St. Cloud facility.
A call to get comment from CoreCivic Tuesday was not immediately returned.
The private prison industry, whose stock plummeted during the tail end of the Obama administration after his attorney general issued a memo phasing out federal use of them, got a big rebound when new Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinded that memo.
The Appleton prison, known as the Prairie Correctional Facility, closed in 2010 under Gov. Tim Pawlenty after the state stopped sending prisoners there. City officials built the facility in the early 1990s, and sold it to Corrections Corp. of America, a private entity, in 2000. While it was open, CCA took prisoners from six states, as well as other countries.
Late last year, CCA rebranded itself as CoreCivic — a fact used by one testifier against the corporation, which runs dozens of prisons nationwide and was the first in the nation to run such a facility, in Tennessee.
“We exposed CCA so well that they had to change their name,” said Neyssen, going on to state that CCA had been documented serving “spoiled and wormy food,” triple-bunking inmates and forcing them to defecate in plastic bags.
“Doing business with CoreCivic is like doing business with the devil,” Neyssen added.
No representatives of CoreCivic testified during the hearing Tuesday. But plenty of people mentioned the company in the pejorative — saying their practices were the result of introducing a profit motive into the correctional industry.
Some of the harshest criticism came from Rep. Debra Hilstrom, DFL-Brooklyn Center, who introduced an amendment mandating that the state not do business with CCA.
“They are not good citizens. … We do not belong leasing this facility, we do not belong buying this facility, we don’t currently have a need for it, and we do not want to be in business with a company like CCA,” Hilstrom said, shortly before her amendment was soundly defeated.
This year’s debate on the Appleton prison was tamer than last year, when protesters shut down a similar committee hearing and called private prisons “a new form of slavery.”
Others questioned why money should go to help the economic interests of rural communities, instead of depressed inner-city neighborhoods. Invest the money in the later, and you wouldn’t need a prison in the first place, critics argued.
Currently, 260 state prisoners are being housed in local jails instead, down from a figure of 500 often spoken of during testimony at the Legislature last year.
But Rep. Brian Johnson, R-Cambridge, said it was his belief that those numbers fluctuated, and added it was equally unconscionable to leave prisoners in the county jail system — where they aren’t able to take advantages of state programming such as drug or mental health treatment.
“That’s a big disservice to them,” Johnson said.
That shortfall is expected to rise to 827 beds by 2024, according to Department of Corrections estimates.
But Corrections Commissioner Tom Roy said the state would rather explore other options to get that number down.
Those included adding beds or annexes to existing facilities, and a new bill that would allow parole violators guilty of nonviolent drug offenses the possibility of staying in the community if their parole violation was “technical” (rather than a re-offense).
Also, Roy touted the effects of drug sentencing reform passed last year — though those effects were already integrated into the 827-bed estimate.
“This (Miller’s) proposal suggests there is only one solution to prison growth,” Roy said.
His statement was rebuked by the committee’s chair, Tony Cornish, R-Vernon Center, who said, “I don’t know anybody here who thinks it’s the only solution.”
A state budgetary estimate said the prison would cost just under $21 million a year to house up to 550 prisoners — or $58 million if housing its full capacity of 1,650 inmates.
But the state noted the current cost of housing state prisoners in local county jails was $5.2 million — money that would be saved by the prison. In all, with 550 inmates or fewer, the prison would thus cost the state $15.5 million a year.
Still, the same estimate noted there was a lot the state didn’t know. “Acquisition costs are unknown,” the fiscal note said, adding, “more time is needed to conduct a thorough analysis” of both state needs and the condition of the Appleton facility to get actual annual costs.
Last year, Gov. Mark Dayton publicly opposed leasing the Appleton facility, as well as the idea of private prisons in general.
A spokesman for the governor said Tuesday that his stance hasn’t changed.
“The Commissioner of Corrections has said it is not needed for prison capacity at this time, and the price tag is unaffordable,” spokesman Sam Fettig said.