Blocks Private Guards:
Spitzer Signs Prison Privatization Bill

By REUVEN BLAU

Governor Spitzer has signed into law a bill prohibiting the privatization of security posts in state jails.

The measure, which was vetoed four times by former Governor Pataki, bars the state Department of Correctional Services from replacing Correctional Officers with private guards.

'A Tremendous Win'

"This is a tremendous victory," said Chris Leo, the legislative director for the New York State Correctional Officers and Police Benevolent Association. "We've been fighting since 1999 to get this into statute form in New York."

The state has never proposed privatizing Correctional Officer positions, but supporters of the legislation noted that other state and local governments have moved in that direction in an effort to cut operating costs. "Inevitably, hungry, bottom-line adventurers appear ready to take the public money," a justification memo attached to the measure stated.

The bill noted that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services recently canceled a contract with a private company after an investigation revealed that the firm employed untrained guards at $8 an hour. Those guards, the review showed, were totally unaware of what to do in emergency situations.

"We saw that over the years other states have been going to private prisons," Mr. Leo said during a phone interview last week. "And we saw the catastrophe that came out of those private prisons, and we didn't want that to happen in New York."

The measure also argued that privatizing jails doesn't actually cut costs. In addition, private employees are not subject to the Taylor Law, which prohibits safety-security titles from striking.

City Jails Covered

Mr. Pataki did sign a bill prohibiting privatizing city Correction Officer posts, which NYSCOPBA officials repeatedly pointed out, to no avail.

There is no projected cost for the state measure because it simply codifies existing practice, the legislation stated.

Ezekiel Edwards, a staff attorney and Mayer Brown Eyewitness Fellow at the Innocence Project, said that other states and the Federal government have been expanding the use of private firms to run prisons.

'End Prison Business'

Based on Department of Justice statistics, there are currently 84,867 state inmates held in private prisons nationwide, an increase of 12.9 percent between mid-2005 and mid-2006. Federal prisoners incarcerated in private jails jumped by 2.1 percent over that same period, to 27,108.

"America must take the profit out of the incarceration of its citizens," Mr. Edwards argued on the blog dmiblog.net. "Until it does, companies and CEOs and shareholders will continue getting rich off of the imprisonment of mostly people of color, and prison conditions will be only as good as greed allows."

Mr. Leo said NYSCOPBA couldn't understand why Mr. Pataki rejected the anti-privatization measure four times. "You wouldn't privatize Correctional Officers, just as you wouldn't privatize police officers and firefighters," Mr. Leo remarked.