But do CCA's employees perform better than the county's? Are they more motivated, more sensitive to costs?
Under Sheriff Pitts, the Bay County Jail punished not only crooks but Pitts's deputies. If a deputy screwed up on the job, he got assigned to the jail. Likewise, guards who started in the jail sought only to get out, to work their way up into the cars-and-guns side of the sherriff's office. This did not do much for employee morale.
At CCA, however, corrections is king. "Now, our officers are number one," says David Myers, Durbin's predecessor in Bay County. "They are what we do."
Durbin looks for people who want to make a career out of corrections. Guards, like managers, are eligible for promotion anywhere in CCA's system. Durbin tries to make every worker pay attention to costs. Each CCA facility offers awards for employee of the month, quarter, and year; workers have received raises as high as 8%, based on performance -- not on whether they happened to be breathing the day the raises were decided. "This is their company," Durbin says. "The money they throw away is theirs."
The system seems to work. Most telling: the sudden, dramatic improvement in the Bayy County Jail was produced not by a whole new cadre of capitalistic workers, but by the old jail's staff, hired by CCA as a condition of the contract. "We didn't do this with new people," says Myers, who directed the transition. "They were the same people, wearing the same socks, the same underwear, living in the same houses." A grand jury evaluating CCA's operation of the Santa Fe County Detention Center found its staff "motivated and enthusiastic," and suggested this was due "to an awareness on their part that they do have a say in the running of the facility."
At CCA's Shelby Training Center, in Memphis, Anthony Tunstall, a former Air Force requisitions manager, runs the center's supply room and rides close herd on his fellow resident supervisors. Tunstall's domain is a large room with open metal shelves containing gym shorts, sweats, shoes, Vidal Sassoon shampoo, deodorant, and other products that make up each new inmate's kit. Cleaning supplies are stacked in shelves behind a wire fence. On Fridays, Tunstall inspects his colleagues' stockpiles to see whether they really need what they say they need, or are simply hoarding. "Friday's my hunting day," he says. "If I'm saving supplies, I'm saving the company money. And that's the name of the game."
Half the game. Tunstall, who's got a broad smile and who is not exactly the kind of tough-guy "screw" you see in the old James Cagney movies, figures the other half involves just being there, in case an inmate needs to talk. "I tell 'em I'm single, all I got at home is three goldfish; I tell 'em they're my 130 sons. You have to love 'em -- that's what it takes."
CCA seems able to run prisons cheaply enough. But can it run them better? The company keeps its jails spotless; the jails it builds are bright and fresh. Routine grand-jury reviews consistently give CCA's jails high marks. And three of the company's facilities have been accredited by the American Correctional Association. The standards are considered difficult to meet -- only 5% of U.S. corrections institutions have been accredited so far. Judge Kenneth A. Turner, juvenile-court judge in Memphis, has called CCA's Shelby Training Center, "the finest juvenile correctional facility in the world."
But prisons are prisons. People die in them, people escape from them. Private enterprise can't turn prisons into fairy castles. Consider CCA's 400-bed Hamilton County Penal Farm and Women's Jail, known as Silverdale, in Chattanooga, where a small riot broke out in 1986. Shaken, CCA's management revamped its security procedures. Early in 1987, an inmate died of hemorrhaging caused by an undiagnosed tubal pregnancy. County investigations cleared CCA of criminal negligence. But in a $100-million suit, the woman's mother has charged CCA and county officials with deliberately causing her daughter's death.
And CCA has its share of personnel problems. When it took over Silverdale in 1984, CCA hired most of the former county employees. Now, only about half remain, says Samuel Jan Brakel, an attorney with the American Bar Foundation, the research arm of the American Bar Association. Morale among some holdovers, he contends, is low. On the other hand, most of the new hires seem enthusiastic. "The ones I spoke to seemed to have a strong sense of mission and solidarity with what the company was trying to do," he says. Brakel notes, however, that in 1985 and 1986 CCA had to fire five of its own hires: one for sleeping in the control tower, one for allegedly dealing drugs, another for being drunk on the job, and two for absenteeism.
Brakel also conducted detailed interviews with Silverdale's inmates, many of whom could compare it with other institutions, and to its days under county management. Some inmates said the prison served too little food, and there were too few opportunities for recreation. Others felt the staff was stretched too thin: "If a fight breaks out, there's no one to stop it." But most gave rave reviews. One inmate told Brakel: "Silverdale is better than any place I've been in."
This kind of talk is likely to irritate John Fuller, of the Florida Sheriffs Association. He thinks CCA's jails may be too nice. He resents the fact, for example, that Bay County inmates watch color TV and have their food brought in on heated trays. "There's something to be said about sleeping on a hard mattress and eating cold food," he says. The jail, he argues, has lost that special something that so terrifies people they stop committing crimes. He suggests that Sheriff Pitt's approach to modern corrections wasn't all bad. "LaVelle Pitts wanted people to suffer when they went into the jail," Fuller says. "He wanted them to say, 'My God, this is not a nice place to be."
