Dornin: State should lock door on for-profit prison plans

10-14-2012 New Hampshire:

A consulting report is due Oct. 15 on four competing offers to build and manage a for-profit, co-ed prison or rent it back to the state.

Linda Hodgdon, the commissioner of administrative services, promised July 11 to release this study. If one of the vendors wins a contract, this state would be the first to substantially privatize its corrections system. That would be a tragic mistake.

Gov. John Lynch vowed to withhold the consulting report during a recent meeting with opponents of privatization. Officials would present their own review next month, he said, based in part on the secret advice of the MGT consulting firm. It was the sole bidder on a $171,000 contract to compare the for-profit prison proposals on an apples-to-apples basis.

I’d like to read that report by outside experts, led by George Vose, the former commissioner of corrections for Massachusetts and Rhode Island. There is reason to fear it will slant in favor of the private prison industry. Vose sits on the board of one of the worst prison vendors, Community Education Centers.

That firm manages 5,000 halfway house offenders at any given time in New Jersey and allowed an astonishing 452 escapes in 2011. The New York Times published a recent expose on CEC as a crowded, violent gulag that profits from warehousing people with unmet constitutional ...continued... by Chris Dornin is a retired Statehouse reporter and a prison reform advocate.