Data Finds Arizona Private Prisons Are Poor Investment. Arizona Responds By No Longer Collecting Data

Since 1987, Arizona’s Department of Corrections has been legislatively mandated to produce cost and quality reviews for its private prisons, in part to judge how they compare with state-run facilities. The data on costs were collected, but in recent years, it took a lawsuit by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) for the Department of Corrections to release quality comparison data. Finally, in December it complied. The results were damning.

In mid-February, the AFSC released its report Private Prisons: the Public’s Problem.  It found Arizona had overpaid for private prison services between 2008 and 2010 by 
$10 million while receiving inferior services. Writing in The Nation, Sasha Abramsky reports, “One might think that, faced with evidence that the state isn’t getting enough bang for its buck, Arizona legislators would rethink their commitment to putting ever more prisoners into private facilities. Instead…they’ve simply tried to bar the state from collecting the evidence. On February 27 the legislature proposed a budget bill eliminating the requirement for a cost and quality review of private prison contracts.”

 

 

 

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David Morris

David Morris is co-founder of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and currently ILSR's distinguished fellow. His five non-fiction books range from an analysis of Chilean development to the future of electric power to the transformation of cities and neighborhoods.  For 14 years he was a regular columnist for the Saint Paul Pioneer Press. His essays on public policy have appeared in the New York TimesWall Street Journal, Washington PostSalonAlternetCommon Dreams, and the Huffington Post.