It was money, of course. A little over $1 million is not much when the rewards of privatizing community corrections are so great.

Earlier this month, AFSC of Arizona, Grassroots Leadership, and the Southern Center for Human Rights issued a report, TREATMENT INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: How For-Profit Prison Corporations are Undermining Efforts to Treat and Rehabilitate Prisoners for Corporate Gain. The report looks into three areas that are being transformed by privatization.

Private interests are moving into the civil commitments and psychiatric care facilities. Since commitment to one of these facilities carries the potential of a lifetime sentence, the potential for profit is great.

Corporations are also moving into subcontracted prisoner mental health and medical care, the fastest-growing sector in the treatment industrial complex. It is a $3 billion a year business for the private companies that provide close to a third of all state correctional health care.

But the incursion of the profit industry into the field of community corrections must surely be what attracted the $1.25 million from B. Wayne Hughes, Jr.



Community corrections include corrections programs outside of jail or prison walls: probation and parole services including halfway houses; day reporting centers; drug and alcohol treatment programs; home confinement; electronic monitoring; and an array of supportive services such as educational classes and job training. Community corrections is a huge business, with three times as many people under “community corrections” programs as currently incarcerated in prison facilities.

Over the past 30 years of our War on Drugs, the private prison industry has profited handsomely as we locked up more and more people for longer and longer periods of time. State and federal prisons ran out of beds. And as ready as the Wall Street investment banks were to finance the bonds that would be used to build the prisons that would house even more American citizens, it still wasn't enough. So corporations like the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation) and Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), offered to help out.

However, today the federal prison population is being reduced for the first time since 1980. The Department of Justice has announced that the reduction for the year ending in September 2014 was 4,800 prisoners, and a further reduction of 10,000 could be anticipated over the next two years. The reductions are due to a more reasonable approach to sentencing for non-violent offenders.

As states have followed suit, the private prison industry has expanded its operations, with the main players buying up smaller operations that provided "health care, mental health and substance abuse treatment; 'alternatives to incarceration' such as electronic monitoring; re-entry services; and community corrections."

As reported in Truthout, Human Rights Watch has issued a report, Profiting from Probation: America's 'Offender-Funded' Probation Industry:



Every year US courts sentence several hundred thousand misdemeanor offenders to probation and place them under the supervision of for-profit probation companies. These companies charge courts nothing for their services. Instead, they charge those they supervise a range of fees that sometimes become exorbitant – often with minimal judicial or government supervision of how they treat probationers or how much money they collect from them in fees....Many of those affected are guilty only of minor traffic offenses and would not be on probation at all if they had the money to pay their fines immediately.

What do people actually owe to these companies in fines and supervision fees? Harriet Cleveland, an Alabama mother of three, was ticketed for traffic offenses. She could not pay her fines in full and so was sentenced to two years of probation with a for-profit company, Judicial Correction Services (JCS), one of the industry behemoths. The only job she'd been able to find was as a part-time custodian, for which she was paid $7.25 per hour. JCS required her to pay $200 per month, $40 of that amount going to supervision fees, to settle fines amounting to several hundred dollars. She scraped to find the money, and even turned over a $2,000 tax rebate to JCS, only to discover, over time, that she now owed almost $5,000 in fines and fees. As she fell behind on payments, JCS employees dunned a number of her relatives, threatening to send her to jail if the debt wasn't paid. Eventually, she did go to jail. She was among the few people whose dilemma comes to the attention of attorneys fighting such injustice. The lawsuit filed on her behalf – alleging denial of Cleveland's right to counsel, due process, and equal protection – not only got her released from jail, but has exposed negligent court handling of fines she had paid and JCS financial practices that sometimes steered most or all of a payment into their own coffers without applying funds to reduction of her court costs.

Little more than debt collectors, these firms use abusive methods in their collection operations, up to and including threats of imprisonment. From Truthout And while these firms badger misdemeanor offenders for payment for their own probation, courts around the country are levying fees on top of fines for misdemeanors like traffic violations. In San Leandro, California, the fine for running a red light is $100 . However, the state has added a state penalty assessment of $100, a county penalty assessment of $70, a DNA identification fund fee of $50, court construction for $50, a state surcharge of $20, emergency medical services gets $20, emergency medical air transportation is $4, court operations cost $40, the conviction assessment runs $35, night court another $1, for a total of $490 for the ticket. Plus $59 for traffic school for a grand total of $549.

The problem with all of these add-ons, as Radley Balko pointed out earlier this year in The criminalization of poverty, is the way they drive the working poor farther into the shadows:



With driving infractions, a failure to pay fines can also result in a suspension of your license. In areas of the country where a car is really the only way to get to your job, to the doctor, or to pick up your kids, many low-income people have no choice but to continue driving without a license, an offense that can also land them in jail.

Which comes with even more fines and fees. Yes, some states now charge prisoners for room and board as well as court costs, public defender fees, and of course, fees for probation or parole supervision.

The price of justice seems be inversely proportional to one's income. The less you have, the more it costs.