Someone should have noticed that none of the major private prison companies opposed California’s Assembly Bill 32, the bill that aimed to ban private prisons.

That’s because California’s ban on private prisons isn’t a ban even though legislators and advocates advertise AB32 that way. Calling it a ban that signals a bigger victory than it is and takes our eyes off the future threats of privatization.

The law bans private detention facilities, but has specific carve-outs that will allow private prison companies to continue to do business in California. Specifically, the law says that it doesn’t apply to: “any facility providing educational, vocational, medical, or other ancillary services to an inmate” or “any privately owned property or facility that is leased and operated” by a law enforcement agency or any private, for-profit prison facility “to provide housing for state prison inmates in order to comply with the requirements of any court-ordered population cap.”

None of the media coverage of the passing of this law— it was signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom last week—mentions any of these exceptions.

The exceptions are vitally important in that they allow companies like CoreCivic and GEO to continue to be involved in prisons in the state. In particular, the exception for “housing” to comply with court-ordered population caps seems like the state could use out of state private prisons if it so chose.

It’s happened before. In order to comply with the Supreme Court order in Brown v. Plata, California’s Realignment efforts involved dispatching around 9000 inmates far away, to be housed in private facilities in Arizona, Michigan, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

The last out-of-state inmate boarded a bus back to California in June when the state decided to stop using out-of-state private prisons, so it’s not clear why the law would allow it.

Within the state, California is still using private prison companies, just not for management and staffing. The California City Correctional Center is leased from CoreCivic by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation who staffs it with public employees.

Since it’s private management’s slavish dedication to profit margins that causes the deplorable treatment of inmates in these facilities, some might think that leasing is innocuous, but it’s not. Because the management of prisons has become less profitable, leasing is where private prison companies have placed their bets.

Leasing to a public agency and allowing those state employees to run it isn’t a laissez faire approach to corrections. According to the think tank In the Public Interest, many lease contracts contain the same perverse incentives found in private management contracts, like quotas, requirements to fill beds or riders that obligate the state to pay even when they’re empty. These penalties aren’t small; in the past, they’ve ranged from half a million to several million dollars.

The leasing that the bill explicitly authorizes plays right into the private prison companies’ plans. Both of the leading private prison groups, CoreCivic and GEO Group, became Real Estate Investment Trusts in 2013 for the tax advantage that such a status confers. GEO Group received $44 million in tax advantages in 2017. To maintain their REIT status, they must maintain real estate holdings. Leasing is the easiest way to make those real estate investments work for them as they do business as usual—profiting off the confinement of people.

Private prisons been deservedly demonized. The United States Justice Department’s inquiry into private prisons found that they were more violent than public facilities. One Mississippi prisoner testified that he was assaulted by another inmate with a knife and a four foot section of pipe for several minutes before guards stopped him. Another Mississippi prison had to be closed because of its violence —young inmates being raped—and general lawlessness, like the marijuana smoke being so thick that a visiting lawyer worried about getting “a contact high.”

In 2019 alone, seven banks JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, SunTrust, PNC Bank, BNP Paribas, and Fifth Third Bancorp pledged not to finance them anymore in response to public pressure.

It’s a good message for California to send that inhumane mismanagement won’t be tolerated in any form, even federal immigration detention. But the law’s focus solely on private immigration detention, while completely exempting private prisons in the criminal legal system, is hardly the purge it’s been made out to be.

Moreover, touting this law as a ban and centering private prisons in discussions of mass incarceration is disingenuous. If all private prisons were closed tomorrow, no one would be freed; they would just be moved to public facilities. Only about 8.5-9% of people incarcerated nationwide would be impacted. Indeed only one and a half percent of California’s prisoners are in private prisons now. Most research suggests that they would be subject to less violence, but more overcrowding in publicly run prisons.

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UBI grows in popularity among local governments If California really wanted to rid the state of prison profiteers, legislators would need to address the companies that make money off of all inmates, even those confined in state-run prisons, like the phone service providers who boast $1.2 billion of revenue per year and the commissaries that rake in at least $1.6 billion annually. The state collects a commission from these sales so it’s in the state’s interest to keep these vendors. Even under the new law, their plunder will continue and drain money from families, often leaving them in debt.

If this law is hailed as ending private prisons in California, it can chill advocacy efforts to rid the profit influence in corrections and create the wrong template for other jurisdictions. Let’s keep AB32 in perspective.

Chandra Bozelko is nationally syndicated columnist with Creators Syndicate. Ryan Lo is the founder of Unlabeled Digital Media. Both are formerly incarcerated. You can follow them on Twitter at @ChandraBozelko and @4ryanlo, respectively.