These attractions, though, are clearly of secondary importance to local government officials. What they respond to is trouble. They need lawsuits, court orders, or some other pressing motive before they'll consider so novel and politically treacherous an idea as private corrections. CCA has found that advertising and blind sales calls do little good. Instead, its marketing department waits for prospects to call; the company gets 75 inquiries a week. It politely turns down callers from the Northeast; the company prefers doing business in the southern tier, where unions are weak and a soaring population has caused severe prison overcrowding. Besides, CCA already has jails there to show off to interested officials.
The saga of CCA's Bay County contract shows how vicious the skirmishing can get -- and offers a case study of how the company makes crime pay.
The Bay County Jail, in Panama City, Fla., is an angled, six-story tower that, had it been built a bit farther south, on the sands of Panama City Beach, would look more like a hotel than a jail. Under former sheriff E. LaVelle Pitts, the decade-old jail was anything but a hotel. An inspector found more than 70 violations of state corrections rules. The jail was so overcrowded that inmates slept on floors.
The county commissioners, facing lawsuits by the state and by the family of an inmate who died while in custody, invited CCA to visit. They liked what they heard; the sheriff, his turf now threatened, did not. His supporters campaigned hard to block any takeover of the jail by the private sector. Some amiable townsfolk took to their pickups for late-night drives across the lawn of pro-CCA commissioner John Hutt Jr. He says he got threatening phone calls, but took only three seriously. Someone also proposed blowing up the house of commission chairperson Helen Ingram.
CCA's pitch was compelling, and the price was far better than anything the sheriff himself was proposing. The board of county commissioners voted three to two to take the jail away from the sheriff's office. Vengeful supporters of Pitts voted Ingram out of office.
Just after midnight on October 1, 1985, CCA took over the jail, and quickly moved to assert control. By five a.m. inmate crews were cleaning the floors and walls. The company brought in fresh clothing for the inmates, and fire-retardant mattresses and pillows. By evening, county officials say, the Bay County Jail was a different place.
Walk in there now and the first thing you notice are the floors, gleaming with that hard-wax shine you see only on TV commercials. But CCA's improvements go far deeper. Neighboring police chiefs say CCA has cut booking times at the jail in half, simply by streamlining paperwork. Roger C. Haddix, chief of the Panama City police, says CCA has defused a lot of the traditional cop-prisoner tension.
Under its contract, CCA also had to build a new 200-bed annex to ease the old jail's overcrowding. On November 4, 1985, CCA bought the land for the annex; six months later, inmates were asleep in its beds.
The new jail, with arctic white walls and bright green trim, looks like something you'd see in Silicon Valley. It was designed, as are all the jails CCA builds, to use as little labor as possible -- six guards per shift. A single guard works all the doors that open onto the corridors. Thus, an inmate with permission can travel from one part of the prison to another without an escort. The annex also makes extensive use of surveillance devices. "They had it planned, built, and occupied in six months," says Larry Davis, the county's emergency-management director. "We can't find an architect in six months."
Davis is also the jail contract monitor. He keeps track of how many inmates are kept in the jail and computes how much money CCA should get. Under the Bay County contract, as under all CCA's contracts, the company is paid a per diem rate for each inmate. For the first 310 inmates, Bay County pays CCA $31.01 each per day. The rate drops roughly $10 for the next 20, then plummets to only $7.88 a day for every inmate over 330. It is that last clause that makes Larry Davis practically glow with pride -- at present, Bay County has 400 inmates, a population neither the county nor CCA anticipated. "We're looking at 70 people for $7.88 each," Davis says, grinning. "It's all in the contract."
That's one of the advantages of privatization, he figures: both sides work out the toughest deal possible. The county believes it saved $700,000 in the jail's first year under CCA control. Moreover, CCA began an inmate work program; in one year the county got $600,000 in free labor.
Beasley says the Bay County jail is indeed contributing a profit: "It's not making good money, it's not making enough to justify it to an investor, but it's making money." All the company's facilities are, he says. In 1987, according to CCA's financial results, the company's facilities chipped in $1.3 million of operating profit, double the 1986 amount; marketing costs, headquarters salaries, and other central office costs produced the $1.9-million loss.
The man most responsible for controlling Bay County's costs is Thomas Denny Durbin, the facility administrator. A big man, Durbin is wearing the latest in lawman fashion -- tan slacks, short-sleeved blue shirt, blue blazer, beeper on his belt. He is not your typical middle manager. Durbin spent 17 years with the Texas prison department. County officials say they'd never be able to attract so seasoned a warden on their own.
Durbin runs his jail as if it were a small business that just happens to have killers, rapists, and a few hundred lesser criminals locked up inside. He explains what he does by comparison with the way things were in Texas, in the public sector. Here, for example, inmates get measured portions of food, with the nutritional content calculated by a dietician; in Texas, inmates wasted food in "huge amounts." CCA buys food and supplies in bulk from Nashville at an advantageous price, but each facility buys fresh vegatables, milk, and some meats by haggling with local vendors for the best prices.
