March 14, 2013 09:05 AM UTC

Why is Corrections Corporation of America still sucking down Colorado taxpayer money?

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• by: For People Over For-Profits

(Corporate welfare of the worst kind? – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Right now, the prison population in Colorado, as it is nationally, is declining. The inmate population growth in the 1990s that resulted in for-profit prisons popping up like mushrooms to absorb the overflow is receding.
 
Which begs the question: why are we still sending taxpayer money to Corrections Corporation of America and subsidizing their economic race to the bottom for jobs? If you work at a state facility in Colorado, you make a decent living, staring in the $40,000 range, with health insurance and PERA.
 
CCA pays entry-level guards $12.66 an hour, about $25,000 a year – low enough wages to qualify for public assistance. And that doesn’t include even lower-paying administrative jobs. It’s the Walmartization of the public safety sector and it comes will all the short-cuts we’ve come to expect from that trend. 

The Colorado Department of Corrections is closing prison beds, but most of those closures are in state facilities – the public sector has absorbed 93% of the cost savings. CCA has gone nearly untouched – until now.
 
The Department of Corrections is recommending the closure of 318 beds at CCA’s Kit Carson facility, and CCA is expected to fight back. They, and their lobbyist Mike Feeley, a Democrat who works for Brownstein Hyatt & Farber, would like to keep profiting from the misery of others. Feeley, by the way, has pulled in over $264,000 in lobbying fees since 2007. At $12.66 an hour a Kit Carson guard would have to work 20,858 hours or 869 24-hour days to make that much.
 
Folks, it’s pretty simple here: the Hickenlooper DOC has started down the right track by drawing down the state subsidy to an out-of-state, for profit corporation answerable to their shareholders, not taxpayers. We’re at a critical juncture, and the choices being made will impact southern Colorado for years to come.
 
Just down the road from nearly every low-wage paying for-profit prison, sits a taxpayer-accountable,state-run facility. CCA is trying to hold rural Colorado economies hostage in an effort to extract more corporate welfare from Coloradans. Workers in rural CO shouldn't be pawns in some corporate game,  and poverty level wage jobs are not the economic development that we need in rural Colorado.
 
We need to stop sending money to CCA and invest it in our state workers at public facilities at home in Colorado.