 All right, ladies and gentlemen. It looks like we are about full. If you're getting food, that's fine, but we are going to get started here. Good afternoon, and welcome to the third in the Office for the Advancement of Research's Book Talk series for spring 2018. Third and final, I should say. I'm Dan Stageman. I'm the director of research operations, and this series is one that we put on every semester here at the college. Three talks, usually two featuring John Jay professors and one featuring an external speaker. And today is our external talk featuring Lauren Brooke Eisen of the Brennan Center for Justice and her book Inside Private Prisons, An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Ms. Eisen will be in conversation with our very own Martin Horn, who is a distinguished lecturer in corrections here at John Jay College in the Office of Law and Police Science. And Marty is also going to provide, I should say Professor Horn, my apologies, is also going to provide a more extensive introduction for Ms. Eisen. So if you'll welcome our guests. And thanks, Dan. Thank you, Dan. Pleased to be here. Great to see such a nice turnout. And Dan, actually, I think Lauren is sort of inside outside because she is an adjunct faculty member here at John Jay. So you may have to schedule a fourth talk. So I'm really pleased and privileged to be able to introduce Lauren Brooke Eisen to you. LB, as she prefers to be called, is a force of nature. She is a quiet person, but a remarkable power house of a person. So when I first met her, I underestimated her tenacity and determination, and I've come to have enormous respect and admiration for her work and her intellect. She is a little bulldog, actually. LB is a graduate of Princeton University and the Georgetown University Law Center. She has served as an assistant district attorney in New York County, where, among other things, she worked in the Sex Crimes Special Victims Unit. She was the real Mariska Haggerty. She also served in the Appeals Bureau and later was a senior program assistant at the Vera Institute of Justice's Center on Sentencing and Corrections. She has been an adjunct instructor here at John Jay. She supervises NYU law students participating in the Brennan Center Public Advocacy Clinic. And perhaps most instructive and most preparatory for her work that we are here to learn about today, she was once a reporter for a daily newspaper in Laredo, Texas. I think that prepared her for some of her journeys into the heartland of the American prison ecology. She has written and published extensively, including articles for the Journal of Law and Criminology and the Loyola New Orleans College of Law Journal of Public Interest Law. Since her book Inside Private Prisons that we're going to speak about today was published, she has been prominently featured in the press on TV, radio, and online. She is probably today considered one of the nation's foremost experts on private prisons. Certainly, she has written what is, I think, the most well-researched and certainly the most even-handed discussion of this contentious issue of prison privatization. I doubt that when she embarked upon this study, she fully comprehended how timely it would be and how divisive the question of prison privatization and privatization of imprisonment would become. LB is truly a fierce advocate for justice. We like those here at John Jay. And we are pleased to welcome her here today. LB will talk about her book for a while, and then we'll have some discussion and we'll have some time for questions. LB. Thank you, Professor Horne, for that amazingly kind introduction. And thank you to all of you for coming out in the rain or staying inside the building during the rain to hear this conversation. So please, I know a lot of you are studying these issues, so please ask lots of questions, because that's always the most interesting part of these conversations. So this book, Inside Private Prisons, explores the emergence and growth of the private prison industry in America and how it has come to be so entrenched in not only corrections, but also immigration detention in this country. And it asks a lot of questions. And if some of you might have read the book, you'll notice it doesn't necessarily give you all the answers. But it does ask a lot of questions, such as what does it mean for the for-profit industry to manage so many jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers in this country? Is it legal to delegate such a core governmental authority? Even if it is legal, is it moral to do so? Does this industry, this contracting out of corrections and immigration detention, save us money? How much money does it save? And again, does it matter and should it matter if it does save the government money? One of the themes of the book is corrections should be expensive. It's a significant decision to detain someone to deprive them of their liberty, of their ability to remain in the community. So it asks a lot of questions about the cost of incarceration and whether relying on this industry to save money is really the right thing to do. And perhaps the most important question that the book wrestles with is, how did we come to a point where in 2018, we have so many corporations involved in managing and owning these jails and immigration detention centers. It's such a significant public policy. How did we get there? And that's a lot of what this book explores, sort of this emergence of the industry in the mid-1980s and how by 2018, we have let corporations become such a significant part of our criminal justice system. Now, most people say, well, where did this industry come from? Have we always had private jails, private prisons? What about this privatization of the justice system in general? Now, our justice system is privatized in many levels. There is no jail, there is no prison that doesn't outsource, contract with another company for telephone services, for healthcare, for commissary supplies, for transportation services. But when we talk about the private prison industry, most people think of these corporations that manage wholesale the operations of a jail or a prison or an immigration detention center. And these corporations really emerged in the mid-1980s. This was a time in 1985 when about three quarters of states were under some sort of federal court order to reduce the population in one of its prisons. Prisons were overcrowded, they were unhygienic, they were inhumane. The Attica riots in New York had scared a lot of people and a lot of you are studying the history of criminal justice in New York and there's a nexus between the Attica riots and our drive towards truth in sentencing, three-strikes laws, more draconian punitive sentencing. And these images were broadcast on national news, you know, the front page of the New York Times, newspapers across the country. There were other prison riots, some less notorious, all across the country in the late 70s, the early 80s. And this was really the beginning of the drive towards mass incarceration. Today we have 2.2 million people behind bars, whether in county jails, state prisons, or federal prison. We have 11 million people cycling in and out of our jails every year. And we have thousands of people in immigration detention centers. And those people are not counted in the 2.2 million people behind bars. When we talk about mass incarceration, those statistics are separately reported. So we have a lot of people incarcerated in this country and all of you at John Jay, I'm sure are very aware of the statistics that we have 5% of the world's population but 25% of the world's incarcerated population. That's significant. You know, we are the world's largest incarcerator. But in the mid-1980s we weren't. And what we as a country were dealing with was departments of corrections that were slowly not able to handle the capacity. The number of incarcerated people that they were required to keep behind bars. Caps on incarcerated people were ordered by federal courts and directors of corrections across the country had to start thinking about what to do with these projections indicating that their prison populations were gonna skyrocket in the next few years. They had already started to skyrocket. A fledgling corporation called Corrections Corporation of America emerged in the mid-1980s. And Tennessee was one of these states that was under federal court order to reduce the prison population. And Corrections Corporation of America made an unprecedented offer to the state of Tennessee. Can you hear me in the back? So Corrections Corporation of America made an unprecedented offer to the state of Tennessee. They offered to take over Tennessee's entire state prison system for $250 million, along with a 99-year lease. Now at the time, the governor of Tennessee, Lamar Alexander, thought long and hard about this offer. His wife, Honey Alexander, was an early investor in the company, but the state's attorney general and other policy makers in the state met and ultimately Tennessee rejected Corrections Corporation of America's unprecedented offer to take over its entire state department of corrections. And there was a prescient article in the Chicago Tribune at the time, and I like to quote from this article because it still rings true today and it sort of encompasses the title of the book, which is Inside Private Prisons, An American Dilemma and the Age of Mass Incarceration. So a reporter for the Chicago Tribune was sent down to Tennessee, spent some time talking to officials, spent some time in the Capitol. And the quote is, there was considerable disagreement as to whether Corrections Corporation of America lobbyists roaming the Capitol halls last week were cavalry coming to the rescue or profiteers coming to exploit. And I think this article really honed in on the core of what would become a debate over private prisons for the next four decades. Remember, this is a time when the Department of Corrections needed help. Their prisons were overcrowded, there had been riots that summer, incarcerated individuals in one Tennessee prison. They were fed up with the food, with the heat, the, what really got to them was that they were forced to wear uniforms with horizontal stripes. They rioted, they were on television. And so Tennessee needed to really think about its prison system and how they were going to make their prisons more safe and more humane. And so this is sort of the central theme of this book is how these corporations sort of leapt on stage in the mid 1980s. And one of the most significant themes here is why was there no great national debate at the time? You know, it's 2018, there's bipartisan consensus, conservatives, progressives have come together, national groups, there's, you know, today on Capitol Hill, there are conversations about prison reform as we sit here today with conservatives, with Democrats. But in the mid 1980s, there were no grand conversations about mass incarceration, about why we were starting to send so many people to jails and prisons. Whether incarceration was the proper sanction for so many people who violated the criminal code, there weren't conversations about funding alternatives to incarceration using drug courts, diversion courts. And my argument in the book is that the private prison industry did not cause mass incarceration. You know, all of you here in this room know that our policies, our laws created mass incarceration. But they're an important industry to examine because they also didn't sit idly by. You know, my argument in the book is that they let policymakers off the hook to a certain extent because policymakers, directors of corrections didn't have to have these grand conversations about our system of punishment because the private prison industry made it possible for them to outsource the number of individuals that they couldn't handle. And again, it's Monday morning quarterbacking. You know, I'm sitting here in New York City talking to you about, you know, there were no philosophical debates. But I wanna read a passage from the book because I think it provides some context to just how new this industry was and how confused policymakers were, advocates were, directors of corrections were at the time. So there was a congressional hearing in the summer of 1985. And it provided Corrections Corporation of America with its first opportunity to testify on Capitol Hill. Richard Crane, Vice President of Legal Affairs for CCA made the case for the government's need to save money. Yes, there are indeed con artists in the world, but if we are going to attribute that attitude to everyone, then the government get in the business, then the government better get in the business of running everything from used car lots to taco stands. So novel was the industry at the time that Kentucky Congressman Ron Missoli asked Crane, what do your people wear? Remember, this is a congressional debate on Capitol Hill. Do they wear uniforms? Crane answered uniforms, to which Congressman Missoli asked the same uniform that would be standard, blue trousers and so on. Crane responded no, brown is our color, light and dark brown. The judiciary chair at the end of the committee hearing noted it is something in which in year 2000, we may look at in terms of failure or it may have disappeared from the scene entirely or indeed it may have become something very significant in terms of this country. So I read that passage and I include it in the book because this industry was so new and directors of correction at the time were sort of over a barrel, thank you. This was the heyday of tough on crime. This was Ronald Reagan was president. Ronald Reagan loved his blue ribbon commissions and he had two giant commissions focused on privatizing aspects of the government, including corrections and the private prison industry was able to emerge at this time without a lot of discussion and academics really looking into the legality, the constitutionality of the industry and there were few and there were some professors who testified at this hearing that other than this congressional hearing there really wasn't a lot of debate conversation at the time and today we have these task forces, we have justice reinvestment, we have the second chance act, we have a lot of people thinking about the proper sanction for people who come into contact with the justice system but at this time in the mid 1980s CCA and a corporation called Wacken Hut really emerged as the two biggest players in the industry and they were able to within a decade really gain a huge footprint in corrections in the United States and at the time in the summer of Tennessee after the governor rejected CCAs on precedent and offer, the head of CCA said, but it was a success, everyone paid attention to us, we were in the front page afternoon edition of the New York Times and people did start to pay attention and in fact by 1994 in CCAs in CCAs shareholder report they acknowledged the profit opportunity the next few decades would bring and it's 1994 annual report to shareholders, they stated, there are powerful market forces driving our industry and its potential has barely been touched. Today we have two corporations that make up the market share of private corrections on these two corporations earned about four and a half billion in revenue in 2016. They own and a lot of people are unaware that the private prison industry has a huge market share in immigration detention about 65% of ICE detention beds are in the hands of the private prison industry and I know we're gonna have a discussion about a lot of these issues but I wanna leave you with a few things. The book ultimately explores the impacts of the for-profit prison industry and asks what were the industry's innovations, what are their flaws and can they be fixed? And I acknowledge that even asking these questions has worrying moral ramifications if as a matter of principle it is wrong to profit from punishment, anything short of abolition, including proposing important and significant reforms risks complicity with an industry that many feel is indefensible. But in the meantime, tens of thousands of people are cycling in and out of private jails, private prisons and private immigration detention centers every day. Given the political reality that Donald Trump is president, Attorney General Sessions is at the helm of the Justice Department, they are relying on the private prison industry more and more. The book does posit some reforms through the industry and one of the most important reforms and there are a lot in the book is this idea that if we are going to rely on the private prison industry for one more day we really need to move towards these performance based contracts. And the idea is that these contracts need to be tighter, they need to include outcomes and the contracts need to be written such that these contracts will not be renewed if these prisons do not reduce recidivism, do not improve outcomes, do not improve programming. And I scoured the country looking for models like this in US corrections and I couldn't find any. In Pennsylvania there are some models with halfway houses that are privatized but none with prisons. And in Australia and New Zealand there are a couple of prisons that are managed by a private prison industry but their governments are paying these contractors more if they can reduce recidivism more than the government can and all of you are aware of our lousy recidivism rates in this country about 60 to 70% of people who leave prison will return within three years and we have not asked these private prisons to do better to do more than the government and at the end of the day that's really important because we have let this industry emerge as a government partner but the government's not doing a good job of running corrections and it's about time that we really hold corporations feet to the fire a little bit more and say if you want these contracts you have to reduce recidivism, you have to improve public safety, you have to improve the lives of so many people who are behind bars. And I know I don't wanna run out of time for our discussion but the book looks at different aspects of the private prison industry and it's really told through the eyes of formerly incarcerated people who spent time in private prisons, incarcerated people who are in private prisons today, mayors of small towns that have lured the private prison industry to their town for economic development and job creation, policymakers who are struggling with opening shuttered private prisons in their towns, what it will do for their economies if it opens but even scarier what will happen in 10 years if these private prisons close. And so the book looks at a lot of these issues and happy to answer questions about all of them but at the end of the day, I think the reforms are important and I think a lot of people say well what can I do sitting here in this room today, New York state doesn't have private prisons, there is a private immigration detention center in Queens but at the federal level, we can advocate for better transparency requirements. The private prison industry is not subject to FOIA at the federal level so there's a lot of things we can do, you can call your congressmen, congresswomen and advocate for change and we'll talk about all of that in our discussion in Q and A. Thank you. So I have so many questions and I hope we don't run out of time but let me start with a couple, try and be a little provocative. Last month, this month, earlier this month, there was a riot at Lee Correctional Facility in South Carolina, seven prisoners died. We've all been reading about the situation here in New York City with our own jails, Rikers Island. Two years ago we saw the escape from Danomora, we've read about things in our own New York state prisons. So could private prisons be any worse? That is an excellent question and when I saw that riot, the first thing I looked at, I tried to figure out if it was a government prison or a privately managed prison and you're absolutely right and the book starts with me walking around a private prison and having spoken to advocates in the justice reform community who said, look for slime on the walls, they didn't have time to clean up before your visit, things like that and I was struck at how humane and how well this prison operated and I think at the end of the day, there are some terribly run state prisons, there's some terribly run county jails, there's some terribly run federal prisons and there's some terribly run private jails and prisons and I hope that the book makes that point that this at the end of the day, the book explores the role of profit and incarceration and what that means and what it says about our society and our democracy but at the end of the day, we need to improve our state prisons, our county jails and our private prisons and every jail and prison is different. You can't wholesale say every private prison is bad or every state prison is bad or every county jail is bad. They're all under different management, different wardens, different contracts and that's why the book really focuses on the contract because there is power in the contract and there is power in finding these corporations when they're not compliant and there is power in being able to make reform that way. So why is that? Why can't government contract effectively? Contract effectively. John Jay doesn't run food service. In fact, I just learned today that they are continuing the contract with MBJ. MBJ and I was getting an A rating for cleanliness. I know a lot of us were very concerned last year when their cleanliness rating for the health department went down. And I think we all agree it's not part of John Jay's core function to prepare food for all of us. So we contracted out and apparently we were able to get our vendor MBJ food services to do better. So why is it so hard in the private prison industry? It shouldn't be so hard, but it is hard. And part of the reason is, and we've had conversations about this that. That's why I'm asking. But I didn't know he was asking it today. When the industry emerged, there wasn't a lot of deep thinking about how these contracts would be structured. And again, this is at a time, you know, 1991 was the peak of violent crime in this country. The Bill Clinton signed the 1994 crime bill that sense, you know, funding to states that passed truth and sentencing laws and they built more prisons or more wings of prisons with that money. We didn't know that our crime rate would significantly go down. This was, in New York City, we had the lowest number of homicides that New York City has ever had since New York started counting homicides. This was a time where people could envision, right? I mean, nothing but more and more incarceration. And so creating performance-based contracts with focusing on recidivism rates and cognitive behavioral therapy and rehabilitation and reentry services, it just wasn't part of the vernacular, the conversation, the thinking at the time. But now with four decades of research on evidence-based decision-making and how, you know, working with individuals on, you know, substance abuse issues, the drivers of why they may commit crime, trauma in the first place, people didn't, they weren't armed with that research. I mean, it's almost intuitive that prevention would be much cheaper, humane, better for communities than incarceration. But it was a very different time. And now when we have low crime rates, when states and the federal government simply can't pay their corrections bills anymore, this is the time to start having those conversations and start rewriting those contracts. So I'm getting at something perhaps a little more insidious. To your credit, the economist in reviewing your book called Scrupulously Fair, and you are indeed scrupulously fair. But let me suggest to you that there is a deeper reason why government has a hard time managing these contracts that the industry is resistant to oversight and zealously guards its prerogatives. Could you comment on the, you know, there was a bank robber in New York, he escaped from Singsing, his name was Willie Sutton. When they asked Willie Sutton, why do you rob banks? He said, because that's where the money is. So perhaps that will help you in answering this question. So what Professor Horn is getting at is, so that was sort of the academic answer. And I do stick by that answer. I do think that at that time, I mean, you were a director of correction. If you had walked into a room and said, here's your performance-based contract, improve your programming, focus on cognitive behavioral therapy, the industry would have looked at you like you had three heads, I would assume. But there is a resistance and that's because the government depends on the industry because we have so many people behind bars. So this idea that the industry emerged hands in hands with mass incarceration I think is an important one. And the industry does bulk at oversight. I mean, they will lobby or they say they don't lobby, but you read their websites, they say we educate policy makers, right? There's a fine line between educating policy makers and lobbying, but they certainly lobby at the state level, at the federal level against a lot of these oversight bills. You know, Sheila Jackson Lee, congressman from Texas introduces an oversight bill in every congress. I think she's introduced it eight times. It's never moved past committee. There are state bills, there are federal bills to improve oversight, improve transparency and accountability and the industry will lobby against them. But in their defense, and I am no defender of the industry, they will say, why should we have this oversight? We're providing an important government service and these other industries don't have that same oversight. So those are the conversations that are being held with the private industries and the corrections departments. So how do they save money? Do they save money, do we know? And if so, how do they do it? That's a great question. So the book has a little bit of a literature review looking at all of the studies that examined whether private prisons have indeed saved money, right? And that's important because that was their reason for being, you know, their reason for being relied on as a government partner was initially to save money. And because they could build capacity quickly, more efficiently, they could do an end run around procurement laws, efficiencies of scale. The short answer is there is no definitive answer about whether the industry has saved money and there's a reason for that, right? It's because it's incredibly difficult to compare the costs of a private prison and a government prison. I mean, it's comparing apples to oranges. You have to have the same cohort, you know, staffing, same, you know, incarcerated individuals with the same security issues. It's very, very difficult to find comparable facilities. Additionally, you know, if the industry says they've saved money and some of the studies say they do, some say they don't, you know, what they've done traditionally is they've cherry-picked the incarcerated individuals who they'll take. So, you know, in the 90s, they were very hesitant and some contracts were written such that they wouldn't take anyone who was HIV positive, who had significant medical needs, who was over a certain age, who was geriatric, because those individuals were much more expensive to house behind bars. And that's one way they save money. Additionally, they hire non-union correctional officers. So what that means is they're not paying pensions, they're paying lower wages, they tend to hire less correctional officers. And the fines, so there's these, when we've had conversations, there's no jail, there's no prison, that's 100% staffed. You know, it's very hard, hard jobs to hire for. The turnover rate's incredibly high. So government prisons and jails don't have enough correctional officers. But the private prison industry is fine if they don't have an adequate number of officers. But it's actually cheaper in many ways for them not to get properly staffed up because their fines are lower than what it would cost to hire more correctional officers. That's an interesting question. There is no fault. But I would change the question and what I would say is, you know, the book examines how this happened. The book examined from the, you know, the eyes of mayors and controllers of small towns that lured the industry from incarcerated individuals behind bars, from federal policy makers, directors of corrections. We were all in this together. You know, we're still all in this together today. It's like asking who's fault is mass incarceration. You know, it's a series of some unintended consequences and some intentional consequences, you know, like the racial disparities of crack cocaine and powder cocaine. You know, there's so much about our criminal justice system that is rooted in racism and rooted in punitiveness. But I think we have a chance as we start to de-incarcerate and we've seen, you know, 27 states have reduced crime and incarceration over the last decade. We're starting to see states decarcerate. We've seen the federal government drastically reduce the number of people behind bars in the Bureau of Prisons. I think we need to be having these conversations simultaneously. So while the reformers and the advocates work on the hill to change policies and work in states to reduce the number of people who are behind bars, you know, we're increased funding to programming to keep people out of the justice system in the first place. We also need to do what we can to change outcomes of those who are inside private prisons and we need to use the contracts to change those outcomes. So it's interesting because your answer, I think, gives me an opportunity to suggest a virtue of private prisons. Let's, for a moment, if we can't separate the issue of immigration detention, which is a whole separate issue, but if we just look at criminal incarceration, the private prison industry only holds about what, 9% of all of the state and federal prisoners? It's about 8% of state incarcerated people and about 18% at the federal level. Okay. Yeah. If I am a state and my prison population is going up, but I suspect that in the future it's going to go down. I have to house the people when it goes up. I have a constitutional requirement to house them adequately. So I have two choices. I can build, create new state prisons and hire new state employees to run those prisons. When the population drops, I'm still stuck with those old, with those new prisons that I've built and I'm stuck with the future liability for all of those benefits that I promise the employees, all of their pensions, right? Might it not be a good idea for me, a good business decision to contract out and say, look, I expect that the prison population is going to peak. It's going to go up by 10,000, but then it's going to drop again. So why don't I just contract with the private sector to accommodate me for a period of time when it peaks and then just fire them when it goes down and not be burdened with the buildings and with the pension liabilities and with all these disgruntled state employees who don't want me to close the prisons that they worked at? So I have two answers for your question. The first one is in the summer of 2016, Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates did just that. So the, so there was a Inspector General's report that was issued a few weeks prior that was not actually as scathing as the media made it sound, but did indicate that there were a lot of challenges with the private prison industry and that some of the private prisons, they were worried about what was happening in some of these prisons compared to government federal prisons. And Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates issued a memo to the Bureau of Prisons, asked them not to renew any of the contracts with private prisons at the federal level. At the time, I think it was about 11 prisons that would, where the contracts were up for renewal the next couple of years. There were headlines all across the country. This is the end of private prisons, United States Justice Department ends private prisons. And their stock prices tanked. Their stock prices tanked for very short while. And one of the reasons that Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates indicated in her memo that she had written that memo that she was urging the BOP not to rely on private prisons was because they didn't have need for them. The number of incarcerated individuals had significantly dropped in the last couple of years. But I asked that very question of a state policymaker in Minnesota. And I spent some time in Appleton, Minnesota where there is a, what you corrections folks called turnkey ready facility. It is, it was operate. You can read all about it in the book. It was operational for some time. It has been closed for a number of years at this point. But Core Civic, which is the company I spoke about at the beginning of this talk, used to be called Corrections Corporation of America. They've been keeping it up to code. It's compliant with the American Correctional Association standards. There's someone who flushes the toilet in the winter, just to make sure that the plumbing is working. And I, so this Appleton, Minnesota prison has been the subject of immense debate in Appleton. And I went there because it's really a microcosm of what's happened in so many states across the country. And Minnesota's prison population is increasing. And they don't have capacity to house a number of people that they need to house behind bars. And they have this facility that's sitting empty. And there's been a debate in the legislature about what to do with this prison and if they open it, if they do, then they're relying on the private prison industry. And so I asked this policymaker, Ron Latz, after one of these commission hearings, I spoke to Latz about the possibility of reopening the Prairie Correctional Facility. And he noted that many legislators, including himself, had no appetite for the proposal. Quote, there is no such thing as a short-term lease. Once you set up an operation like that and the local community becomes dependent on it, it is almost impossible to pull out of it. Latz looked down for a moment. It's like pulling out of a military base. So on the one hand, at the federal level, the Justice Department did try to close private prisons when they didn't have the need for them anymore. But on the other hand, policy makers worry that even opening them for a short while to get more space, to get more humane facilities will have immense repercussions down the line because people will move to the town for jobs, families will depend on the prison, hotels will be built, restaurants will be built. And if they ever need to close the facility again, they won't be able to because of the economic impact on the town. So I think there are really two answers for that. So I have two more questions and we'll open it up to the room. The first is this. So there's this moral argument that we shouldn't, privatizing prisons is different than privatizing John Jay's food service or the bookstore for that matter. And that one of the arguments is that the private prison industry has an incentive, and you mentioned it briefly, to promote policies that lead to more incarceration. And while you say in the book that they're not the cause of mass incarceration, but rather a symptom of it, one of the arguments is that through the American Legislative Exchange Council and other lobbying efforts, they have an interest in increasing the number of people incarcerated to increase their customer base, obviously. Is that a fair criticism? And are they the only ones with an interest in increasing the number of people behind bars? Today, the industry I think has matured, has become more sophisticated. They were part of the American Legislative Exchange Council meetings in the past. In fact, some officials from the private prison industry were actually on the criminal justice task force that wrote a lot of the model legislation that was incredibly punitive, such as Three Strikes Laws. The way Alec works is conservative lawmakers then take those bills to their home states, and they have an incredible track record of enacting Alec model legislation. Today, they're not members of Alec. They're very, communications teams will go out of their way to tell you they don't lobby for these policies. They see themselves as government partners, they are government partners, and the industry has diversified. So as we as a country have increased the number of people on community corrections, with ankle monitors on probation, on parole who are in some sort of court ordered drug treatment, halfway houses, these industries have diversified into those industries and to manage and own drug treatment centers and electronic monitoring companies. And I see a lot of you shaking your heads. They're good and bad things, right? And I asked Michael Jacobson, who used to be head of New York City Probation, and I asked him in the book, why does it matter if isn't it better that this industry is diversifying into programming and rehabilitation instead of just locking people away behind bars? And his response was, well, it's about the incentives. And the way electronic monitoring and sort of drug treatment works is you want people to stay out of the justice system. You don't want them coming back in. And that's something that we need to watch and that's why I'm gonna come back to the contracts. You need to incentivize the outcomes that you want. We need to incentivize the public policy outcomes, which are reducing recidivism and keeping people out of the system. And so that is what's happening today. And so I know I digress and the question was about the lobbying and their role in more and more people behind bars and these draconian laws. You know, I think there was some of that in the 80s and 90s, but we're not seeing that today. They weren't alone, right? I mean, there are other parties that have an interest in growth of prisons. Absolutely, the corrections union in New York and our current governor Cuomo has closed 14, 16 prisons in New York state and the New York corrections union made it incredibly difficult for him. But interestingly enough, it's my understanding that they know correctional officer lost his or her job despite all of those closings. Which gets to my earlier point about all those future liabilities that you incur when you bring on state employees as opposed to private sector. Let me ask one last question and then I'll open the floor. So people who find the notion of private prisons abhorrent were ecstatic when in the summer of 2016, just before the election, the assistant attorney general Sally Yates who went on to later fame and was fired by Donald Trump, when she announced that the Justice Department was directing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to terminate the contracts they had with private prisons as those contracts expired and as their prison population decreased. And upon the election of the new administration, the industry took off again primarily with respect to immigration detention but the policy with respect to the Bureau of Prisons was reversed as well and the industry today appears to be doing quite well. Given that, would you prognosticate that if there were a change in administration after the 2020 election, given how that turnaround, right? That those dashed expectations on the part of the advocacy community will affect an incoming, if the Democrats were to win, that any Democratic candidate would take a position with respect to private prisons and if I owned stock in private prison companies, would I be well advised to sell that stock prior to November of 2020? I love that question because when I was writing the book, for most of my time writing the book, everyone thought Hillary Clinton was gonna be our next president and I spoke to an analyst who wouldn't let me use his name in the book, who covered the private prison industry and he thought Hillary Clinton was gonna be the next president and I said this has to be a terrible investment and he said no, even with Hillary Clinton as president, we're not worried about the industry because it's so entrenched, it's so diversified at this point and for those of you who are following the election carefully, Senator Sanders never took a dime from the private prison industry. Hillary Clinton, Senator Clinton did take money from the private prison industry but after Black Lives Matter showed up at one of her speeches and protested, she gave all the money back. I think she might have donated it but she never took another dime from the private prison industry. It was the first presidential election that the private prison industry was actually part of the conversation and where Democratic candidates were under fire for taking this money. So I do think if a Democrat is in the White House we might see a sort of 180, Attorney General Sessions ripped up Yates' memo quickly upon taking over the Justice Department and told the Bureau of Prisons to continue to rely in private prisons. I do see the next Attorney General in a Democratic administration reversing Attorney General Sessions' memo but I think they're so entrenched in the states. We've seen a little bit of a trickle-down effect in Kentucky, the prison population is increasing and there have been some pretty punitive opioid laws that have increased the prison population and they just signed a new contract with Corsivic to deal with a number of incarcerated people in that state. But I think they're pretty well entrenched in state corrections and immigration detention and in these other industries. So it's a resilient industry, don't sell your stock. So it's a resilient industry. The two large corporations are also now real estate investment trusts. So they also, they own real estate. It just, you can read about it in the book but it means that they're nimble in certain ways and that's why the book really does take this pragmatic approach to reforming, improving the outcomes of so many people behind bars. We need to do this in public prisons as well but in the private prisons, the contract is really a really significant way to do so. Thank you. So, questions? Yes, this young lady. So my question is, you said that they closed down 16 prisons, private prisons? State. Oh, state prisons. So what do they do with the inmates then and when they closed down Rikers in 2020, what are they gonna do with the inmates? So I know Professor Horne is involved, you're involved with the closed Rikers campaign too. No, a little bit. He can certainly answer some of this question. It's my understanding that they, some of the incarcerated people were released. Some of them moved to different prisons. They closed wings in some prisons but the prison population in New York state is incredibly low when you look at historical numbers and so that's what allowed Governor Cuomo to close prisons but a lot of governors are afraid to do so because they go up against the correctional unions. Well, and they affect the towns where the prisons are based. The reason they were able to close prisons in New York state is because the number of people in prison dropped from about 75,000 in 1995, right, Joe? Down to about 50,000 today. So there were 20,000 fewer prisoners so they were able to close 20,000 beds. So five prisons of 4,000 each although New York's prisons were never that big but 16 prisons each with a couple of, with a thousand people and that's 16,000 so they dropped by 20,000 and the people weren't there. The same is the plan, the whole plan for whatever becomes of Rikers Island, closing it, shrinking it, whatever, relies on reducing the number of people in custody in New York City from 9,000 today to 5,000 so they will need 4,000 fewer beds. And the idea is that they could create that number of beds elsewhere than on Rikers Island so there would not be prisoners to move. They wouldn't be overcrowding new facilities or anything like that, okay? Jeff? My question is, did you have a chance to review the RFPs because all contracts come out of an RFP and everybody has to bid on what's in the RFP and also when you were looking at the contracts were you able to determine if it was always the lowest bidder that was awarded the contract because that would tell me just like with private correctional health care that sometimes they do wanna do more but the way the RFP is structured it's either there's no money in it and even if they do recommend it they lose the contract because it costs more. I think that's an excellent point and the book makes that point that in the industry's defense how can you ask them to save money and outperform the government? Is that fair? And there's some RFPs that I've been looking at recently on Department of Homeland Security's website. They've recently issued some pre-request for proposals for the federal government wants to increase immigration detention capacity in the interior of the country in Chicago, St. Paul, additionally along the southern border and so they're asking for these confirmation from contractors who can build this capacity. Every state is different. I looked at some of the RFPs. There were some really interesting anomalies. There's the Dilley, it's a family detention, the South Texas Family Detention Center in Dilley, Texas. The contract is with Corsivic and the town of Eloi, Arizona and ICE and the contract's not with Dilley. It's this pass through through Eloi. There was no open bid process and if there were some lawyers who were interviewed at the time by NPR who said they'd never seen a contract like this. So there's certainly a lot of anomalies out there. Sometimes it's the lowest bidder, sometimes it's the company that has the best relationship with the government, with the director of corrections. But I think a really important point there is we shouldn't be asking the industry to save us money and that to me is one of the big problems with the way the industry emerged is they emerged as a cost cutting technique. And we know program is expensive. We know cognitive behavioral therapy is expensive. We know these train the trainer programs cost a lot of money to improve outcomes, to provide the necessary mental health treatment, drug treatment and if we want the private prison industry to be a real government partner, we shouldn't be asking them to save money. And some states like Florida and their legislation actually requires these corporations to save. I think it's six or 7% and to me that just doesn't make any sense. So one other way that private prisons are different than a public college contracting out its food service is that obviously this is an area with a lot of constitutional litigation that's developing and has been developing during this same time period that there's been fluctuations in prison population. So it's as troubling to me as it would be contracting out your police department because the government is now going to be held liable for the performance constitutionally of private prisons. So how does it save money in the end even if you save 6% because you're paying the litigation costs because you're still responsible, aren't you? That's an excellent point. So when these researchers evaluated the cost savings, you know, one of the things they said was this doesn't include litigation costs. This doesn't include the cost of having a permanent monitor at these facilities from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. This doesn't include so many of the costs of contracting out these services. So that's why it's so hard to compare. And it's unlikely that this industry is saving us a lot of money at all. Even industry officials have been cited as saying it's really a mixed bag of research. But that's an excellent point because the litigation costs are enormous as are the monitoring costs. You don't need a statistician to tell whether an experiment worked or not. You don't need a statistician. You need a new experiment. And it seems like the private prison industry can't tell us whether it's saved us any money. And unlikely you say it hasn't. So why, and you also seem to think that they can't really scale down in the face of declining demand as quickly as you could if you fired, say the number of food service workers. So why do you have so much faith that the contracts can provide adequate incentive to get them to behave well in the face of 40 years of evidence of them not behaving well? So you can quickly close private prisons. And a number of them have been closed quickly in Arizona recently closed some private prisons, New Mexico. And the quote I read, and you saw what happened at the federal level, but the quote I read really goes through the worries and the challenges and sort of the human condition and the worry that a policymaker has of letting down a whole community that now depends on this private prison. But if you had a different policymaker who wasn't thinking like that, this might have made more sense. And the question about the contract, when you try to make change, when you try to improve conditions of confinement, do there's no one answer, right? I mean, the country needs, I think what's happening on the Hill right now is an excellent example. There's a Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act bill that would focus on changing sentencing law and then there's a prison rehabilitation act that would focus on improving, programming. And the advocates, the civil rights community is sort of up in arms about this prison, the Prison Redemption Act because it doesn't actually keep people out of prison, it just improves programming. There's so many ways to make change and I would argue that one way is to incentivize better performance, incentivize better outcomes. And you're right, we don't know if it'll work and what's happening in Australia and New Zealand is brand new and that's why I think it's exciting because it's innovative and Corrections is not historically the most innovative industry. And I mean, look at Rikers Islands, I mean, it's a medieval building with very little light. We need to innovate and we need to offer that opportunity to really focus on improving the programming and changing conditions of confinement. The book also argues for more access to these facilities and transparency as well. So I got a burning one, I'm afraid, I just have to ask it. So you're mentioning Australia and New Zealand which are pretty centralized, sort of common law style approaches to governance. In a country with 50 different correctional systems and multiple federal systems, I feel like the law of unintended consequences is something to consider here. In a nimble industry, how do you approach the contracting so that say one state makes better contracting rules for the private prison industry, what's to stop them from moving to another state, what's to stop them from moving from state contracts to immigrant detention contracts? So the question is about what if the private prison industry just pulls out of the state because they don't like the contract? That's the price of doing business, I would argue. If they want to be government partners, then they need to really focus on recidivism. And there is some good work happening. There were some private prisons I visited where they did go above and beyond, where they did call the re-entry trucks and they did pay incarcerated people more money than the contracts that they had to, but that's not necessarily very common. You really need to hold their feet to the fire and the book, one of the themes of the book is that we've never made the industry accountable. We've never made them focus on beating the government's recidivism rates on improving conditions of confinement and now is the time to do so. And I think if they do pull out of a state, they pull out of a state that we traditionally, with mass incarceration, we haven't had that luxury because the states relied on the private prison industry so much, but as we are starting to de-incarcerate, this is the perfect time. Just thinking in terms of alternative models, if we're trying to think more of corrections as a social service, what about allowing only non-profit entities to be these government partners the way that we do with international development, the way that we do with other social services and what would it take or what would be the repercussions of that? So the question is about having non-profits be these government partners instead of the private prisons. I think they're too entrenched right now to do that. You know, there are too many private jails, private prisons, private immigration detention centers in this country and when I was in South Texas visiting some of these immigration detention centers, I said to you some of the ICE officials, it was a couple of weeks after Sally Yates' memo and there were rumors and mumblings about whether the Department of Homeland Security would also issue a similar memo saying don't rely on private prisons for ICE contracts anymore. And I posed that question to an ICE official and I said, are you worried? What if this happens with DHS? And I mean, she didn't miss a blink. She didn't blink. She said, ICE is not in the habit of building and managing facilities. We just don't have this capacity, I'm not worried. And I tell that story because I think it illustrates how entrenched these corporations are. There are a lot of models for non-profits running and operating treatment and rehabilitative services but it's traditionally not an area that non-profits wanna get in when we talk about corrections in the US, yeah. We're actually out of time. Sorry, I know you have another appointment. You wanna do one more? Oh, sure, sure. If you wanna, I think this is the only. Hi, so my question for you is, I know that prisoners entering back into prisons like within the three years span is very common in the US, right? And a lot of people in the US also believe that programs that help rehabilitate them, they shouldn't have access to it. So in my class I'm learning rehabilitation through the arts which is a program where you introduce theater into prison and one of the biggest things that why all prisons don't have it is the funding. So how would you answer to the American people that prisoners should have the rights to have these type of programs to be able to rehabilitate into society? Absolutely, and we do not have enough programming in this country, programming is very expensive and there are non-profits, faith-based groups that provide some programming free of cost or low cost or low volunteers that tutor incarcerated people for their GED. Their Second Chance Act funding. We used to have the Pell Grants where incarcerated people were eligible to take classes behind bars and the Obama administration actually funded a pilot program to start to re-institute Pell Grants in some prisons, sort of small subset of prisons, but we need to, that's where we need to invest. We need to invest in rehabilitative services, preventative services, and I know that program that you're talking about, it's a wonderful program. It's not just in private prisons but in public prisons as well. In all prisons, yes. So join me in thanking LB. This was a great conversation and thank you for hosting this, Dan. Absolutely and if anybody is interested in purchasing a copy of the book, there's a table set up outside this door so please stop by and get one.