Outsourcing our prisons

You would think that having Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)  manage your state prison would be a good thing. After all, it is the largest private prison company in the United States. It owns and manages more than 60 prisons across the country, with a capacity of more than 90,000 inmates. But, sometimes outsourcing is not a good thing. There is probably a good reason why CCA has been a defendant in 379 lawsuits in the past 5 years. some of the cases are for:

• intentional understaffing 
• rampant violence
• policies which create dangerous working conditions and allow violence to proliferate
• allowing inmates to be forced to participate in 'fight clubs' 
• chronically understaffing the Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Ohio, where the facility allegedly lacked appropriate video surveillance equipment to permit employees to monitor inmates
• falsified staffing records to mislead the Idaho Department of Corrections 
• employees are undertrained in hand-to-hand combat and are consistently left by themselves to conduct routine duties 
• employees are in constant contact with more than one inmate, with no backup, with defective radios and in some cases without standard-issue pepper spray or handcuffs
• handcuffs that can be used to restrain prisoners at critical times are also often in short supply, and employees consider themselves lucky to get a pair if they arrive for their shifts early enough