PRISONERS
OF PROFIT
to overall improvements the state
has made in its contract monitoring process, such as conducting
more interviews with randomly
selected youth to get a better understanding of conditions and
analyzing problematic trends such
as high staff turnover.
“Our primary concern is the
health and safety of the youth in
our care and we take any allegation of misconduct very seriously,”
she wrote in an emailed statement.
“We have a comprehensive reporting system in which any incident is
thoroughly investigated and corrective action is taken as necessary.”
Experts say the continued
growth of for-profit prison operators like Youth Services International amounts to a cautionary
tale about the perils of privatization: In a drive to cut costs, Florida has effectively abdicated its
responsibility for some of its most
troubled children, leaving them in
the hands of companies focused
solely on the bottom line.
“One of the problems with private corrections is that you are
trying to squeeze profit margins
out of an economic picture that
doesn’t allow for very much,” said
Bart Lubow, a leading juvenile justice expert who heads the Annie E.
HUFFINGTON
11.03.13
Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. “So
you either hire people for minimum wage who are afraid of the
environment in which they work,
or you don’t feed people properly.
There are not a lot of margins.”
RATS IN A MAZE
Florida logs reports of serious
incidents that occur inside its
juvenile prisons, but the state
does not maintain a database that
allows for the analysis of trends
across the system. HuffPost obtained the documents through
Florida’s public records law and
compiled incident reports logged
between 2008 and 2012. According to the data, YSI’s facilities generated a disproportionate
share of reports of prison staff
allegedly injuring youth offenders
by using excessive force.
Although YSI oversaw only
about 9 percent of the state’s juvenile jail beds during the past
five years, the company was responsible for nearly 15 percent
of all reported cases of excessive
force and injured youths.
In 2012, 23 incidents of excessive force were reported at YSI
facilities. By comparison, G4S
Youth Services — the state’s largest private provider of youth
prison beds — generated 21 such