We'd rather have something else than a prison. I think anybody would. But if anybody's going to give us some job opportunities, we'd be crazy not to welcome them. If it comes online, we'll do all right. North Carolina canceled contracts last year at two CCA prisons because of frustration with staffing levels.
Similar lawsuits are pending in the state.
Four inmates and a guard were killed in Wackenhut's New Mexico prisons within a year. Two D.C. inmates were murdered at the once-overwhelmed CCA prison in Youngstown, Ohio. Meanwhile, the Oklahoma Corrections Department, which spends 25 percent of its budget on private incarceration, has calculated that private prison beds cost slightly more than public ones. But the evidence to date does not support either end of the claim. The proliferation of private prisons in the 1990s prompted a debate about the propriety of companies and their investors profiting from the jailing of others.