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Pacific Business News reports that a major private corrections company is “very interested” in helping Hawaii solve its prison overcrowding problem by building new prisons here.

It’s the same company, , that houses hundreds of Hawaii prisoners in its Arizona facilities.

“We’re interested in the construction and financing of a facility (as well),” CCA spokesman Steve Owen . “Out-of-state placement of inmates is not an ideal permanent solution, (although) it is a viable tool to take away overcrowding and provide inmates solutions to get back into the workforce.”

CCA certainly has a lot of experience running prisons. But a lot of it is the kind of experience Hawaii could do without.

Update

Toni Schwartz, a spokeswoman for Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety — which oversees the state’s prison system — told me this morning, “The Department of Public Safety will continue to run all state prisons. Having an outside company run any of our state prisons is not an option and has never been an option.”

That’s good news. But there are reasons to be wary of CCA.

CCA describes itself as “America’s leader in partnership corrections.” By some measures, it certainly has done well. It made $1.7 billion in 2011, private prison company. CEO Damon T. Hininger took in $3.7 million in that year.

But by other counts, including the treatment of Hawaii inmates, it has a shameful track record. Consider the following reports:

• In CCA-run Idaho Correctional Center, 132 inmate-on-inmate assaults occurred between September 2007 and September 2008. (ProPublica)

• Also in Idaho, CCA employees falsified nearly 4,800 hours of staffing records. ()

• In Ohio, auditors found prison violations including toilets that lacked water; prisoners had to use plastic bags for defecation and cups for urination. ()

• In Mississippi, CCA has seen two deadly prison riots in the past 18 months. ()

• In Texas, two inmates at CCA facilities committed suicide within three days of each other, though both inmates were supposed to be closely monitored. ()

• In Arizona, government investigators looking into a man’s death discovered that medical care was so poor that detainee welfare was in jeopardy. ()

• In 2010, Vermont inmates being held at a CCA prison in Tennessee “were subdued with chemical grenades after refusing to return to their cells.” ()

“The grisly records of these CCA prisons exemplify why handing control of prisons over to for-profit companies is a recipe for abuse, neglect, and misconduct,” Carl Takei of the said in a June blog that linked to several of the above reports.

‘Failed Experiment’

And yet Hawaii, which has been shipping inmates to the mainland for nearly 20 years, contracted with CCA in 2006 to begin housing our prisoners in Arizona. While it has relieved overcrowded facilities in the islands, the arrangement with CCA has also been marked by abuse and death of Hawaii inmates and lawsuits from the and the .

“Why the State of Hawaii continues to contract with this company is mystifying, frankly,” said Paul Wright of the Vermont-based nonprofit HRDC at the time of a 2012 lawsuit against CCA. “After two murders, disturbances, allegations of rampant sexual abuse and a lack of accountability by CCA employees, it’s fairly obvious that CCA is unable or unwilling to safely house Hawaii prisoners, and the State is unable or unwilling to adequately monitor conditions at mainland prisons. Hawaii taxpayers are certainly not getting what they’re paying for.”

After another lawsuit was filed in 2012 regarding another murder of a Hawaii inmate in Arizona, ACLU Hawaii attorney Dan Gluck said Hawaii needs “to end this failed experiment with private prisons.”

Meanwhile, the State Auditor has been very critical of CCA.

In , it said the Department of Public Safety circumvented procurement law to give a non-competitive contract to CCA while at the same time provided “misleading” numbers to state lawmakers about the cost-effectiveness of keeping Hawaii’s inmates in Arizona.

The Auditor’s Office also has complained that Public Safety stonewalled the agency when it tried to access public information to determine whether taxpayers were paying too much to keep prisoners on the mainland. As recently as April, the auditor said state officials still weren’t doing a good job providing oversight of CCA operations.

Growth Industry

Critics say a big reason CCA has been so profitable is that it to keep costs down. Hawaii, strapped for cash to build and run prisons, may be tempted to contract with a company like CCA rather than pursue other paths that could reduce incarceration rates, such as justice reinvestment initiatives.

In its , released Nov. 14, Public Safety says the state wants to learn more “about potential approaches to designing, building, maintaining and financing for the new or expanded facilities.” The department is requesting information “on possible cost-efficient methods for the delivery of services in these facilities, including housing, security, programming, maintenance, transportation, meals, and medical services.”

With more than 1.6 million people in U.S. prisons, incarceration is a big, and growing industry. Despite bad press, CCA has succeeded in profiting in that industry, likely facilitated — as ProPublica reports — by $17.4 million in lobbying expenditures in the last 10 years, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and $1.9 million in total political contributions from years 2003 to 2012, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics.

Update

CCA’s reach extends to Hawaii, where its lobbyists, according to an Oct, 24, 2013, filing with the State Ethics Commission, . Among the many recipients of their campaign donations are Gov. , state Sen. (who is running against Abercrombie in the 2014 Democratic primary), and state Sen. (candidate for Congress) and state Rep. . Espero and Aquino chair the legislative committees that have oversight of Hawaii’s prisons.

On Dec. 16, CCA spokesman Steve Owen emailed us a statement which says in part: “The two lobbyists mentioned in the article, John Radcliffe and Red Morris, no longer represent our company. When they did represent CCA, they did not make any contributions on our behalf, neither to Governor Abercrombie nor to anyone else. As a state contractor, such contributions are banned, and CCA has never engaged in such behavior.”

Hawaii’s prison system is in bad shape. It seems like every month someone escapes from a facility, commits suicide in it or is murdered. But the state spends more and more on incarceration costs.

Since 2000, the state’s corrections budget has increased by 87.5 percent, or from $128 million in 2000 to $225 million in 2009, according to Meda Chesney-Lind and Kat Brady. They continue:

During the same time, the money spent to send prisoners to private prisons increased by 192 percent, from $20 million to $58.4 million. As it stands now, 26.0 percent of the Department of Public Safety general fund operating appropriations goes toward incarcerating prisoners outside of Hawaii; this is up from 15.6 percent in 2000.

A lot of that money is going to CCA.

There is another cost from for-profit prisons: On the mainland, African-Americans are disproportionately represented in the prison population. (Kanye West in a song about America’s class of “New Slaves.”)

In Hawaii and CCA’s Arizona facilities, it is Native Hawaiians who are overrepresented in the criminal justice system.

The Native Hawaiian Justice Task Force, created by the Hawaii Legislature and coordinated by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, said a year ago that the state had to do much more to help Hawaiians. It pointed to a 2010 study that confirmed that Hawaiians are more likely to be sent to prison for longer periods than nearly every other racial or ethnic group in the islands.

The task force had many recommendations to deal with this crisis, including this one: The state should stop contracting with for-profit private prison companies as it does in Arizona with CCA.