PRISONERS
OF PROFIT
percent are convicted again within
that timeframe.
Slattery and other Youth Services International executives
declined interview requests over
several months. In an emailed
response to written questions, a
senior vice president, Jesse Williams, asserted that the company
carefully looks after its charges
and delivers value to taxpayers.
“We are the best operators in
the state of Florida, and that is
why we continue to have contracts awarded to us,” Williams
said. “While there have been occasional issues, we are inspected
regularly and overwhelmingly
receive positive reports.”
He added that the company has
introduced “independent, thirdparty reviews” of the programs listed in the Bureau of Justice Statistics report and has engaged national
experts on prison sexual abuse in an
effort to improve conditions.
More than a decade has passed
since a Florida judge tonguelashed Correctional Services
Corp., Slattery’s former company,
during a hearing convened to
probe widespread complaints of
violence at one of its facilities two
hours north of Miami. Juvenile
Judge Ron Alvarez was so horri-
HUFFINGTON
11.03.13
fied by the descriptions of that
particular institution — a fetid,
graffiti-covered jail called the Pahokee Youth Development Center
— that he compared it to a “Third
World country that is controlled
by ... some type of evil power.”
In a recent interview, the same
judge expressed amazement that
Slattery has continued to run facilities in Florida right up to the
present day. “I don’t know how
the hell they still have business
with the state,” Alvarez said.
This is how.
FORGING CONNECTIONS
A one-time New York City hotelier who began renting out
rooms to prisoners in 1989, Slattery has established a dominant
perch in the juvenile corrections
business through an astute cultivation of political connections
and a crafty gaming of the private contracting system.
Even as reports of negligence
and poor treatment of inmates
have piled up, his companies have
kept their records clean by habitually pulling out of contracts before the government takes official
action, HuffPost found.
In Florida, his companies have
exploited lax state oversight while
leaning on powerful allies inside
the government to keep the con-