The Informant

Private prisons are making subtle advances into California–albeit via the back roads. This week, an initial group of California inmates arrived at GEO Group’s North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan–part of a larger strategy initiated by former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to relieve some of the overcrowding in California’s prisons.

For decades, private prisons have been a contentious issue in California. While states like Texas and Florida have embraced privatization as a cost-effective supplement to state-run institutions, California has resisted. Not that private prisons haven’t tried to make gains into one of the country’s largest correctional markets. Several Community Correctional Facilities run by private companies currently house lower level offenders in California, but their role has been limited.* The Correctional Corporation of America tried building a prison in California City on speculation, hoping to take in overflow from the state system, only to sit vacant until it obtained a contract to house federal prisoners.

Out-of-state prisons, however, have provided something of a back-road into the California market, according to Joshua Page’s new book, “The Toughest Beat.” Page writes that after meeting heavy resistance to re-opening private facilities for low-level offenders, former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger found a work-around to the notoriously steady opposition to privatization by public employee unions: he declared a state of emergency “arguing that extreme overcrowding in the state’s prisons created ‘extreme peril’ for the safety of officers and prisoners. The governor and his legal staff argued that the declaration gave them authority to transfer California prisoners to private facilities in other states.”

California began shipping inmates out of state in 2006 and currently reports 10,152 are housed out of state in Arizona, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. An additional 2,580 are expected to move to Michigan for $60 million a year, but doubts have begun to emerge that Governor Jerry Brown, who has his own plan for alleviating prison overcrowding, has fully embraced the out-of-state program. Nevertheless, reports the Michigan Messenger, a convoy carrying California inmates arrived last weekend:

[Lake County Clerk and CFO Shelly Myers] says area residents were happy to see a convoy carrying prisoners into town Sunday.

“I think once they saw the buses come back in, it’s a sense of relief because we know it’s going to happen. Even though we had meetings and we were told it’s going to happen, you still hold your breath,” she says.

Myers says the re-opening should spur economic activity in the area, especially in housing for incoming prison guards.

North Lake Correctional Facility, Michigan’s only private prison, has been vacant since 2005.

*This passage, which originally stated that CCFs have closed down, has been corrected.