PRISONERS
OF PROFIT
in Miami-Dade County, who has
followed YSI for more than a decade. “They’re scrupulous with
individual employees, but a corporation can have this corporate
rap sheet, and it’s no problem.
They can get contracts.”
GOVERNMENT POCKETS
Before James Slattery came to
embody the for-profit corrections
business, he built a career in another industry that thrives on
high occupancy rates: hotels.
A graduate of St. John’s University in Queens, N.Y., Slattery
worked for the Sheraton Hotel corporation beginning in the
1970s. While working at a hotel
in Queens, Slattery became close
to his boss’s son, Morris Horn.
The two joined forces with other
investors to start a property management company, buying up older hotels across New York City.
But as New York’s real estate
market dried up in the 1980s amid
fears of crime, Slattery and his
business partners began searching
for more rewarding pursuits. They
discovered the growing — and lucrative — world of doing business
with the government.
With President Ronald Reagan
HUFFINGTON
11.03.13
in office, the 1980s marked one of
the first major movements toward
the privatization of government
services. Outsourcing government functions to private companies was widely embraced as a
means of seeking taxpayer relief.
His administration and some in
Congress floated the idea of privatizing U.S. Customs inspections,
electrical power utilities and,
eventually, the management of
federal prison systems.
In New York City, property owners learned that if they opened up
their buildings to growing numbers of homeless people and families on welfare, they could capture
local and federal anti-poverty dollars — a steady stream of revenue.
So-called welfare hotels proliferated, becoming de facto warehouses for people grappling with
mental illness, drug addiction and
extreme poverty.
The hotels were among the
most squalid buildings in the
city, racking up hundreds of code
violations. Slattery’s company
managed a particularly notorious
example, the Brooklyn Arms, a
once-lavish hotel across from the
Brooklyn Academy of Music that
had deteriorated into a ramshackle blight on the neighborhood. The
property was infested with rodents and cockroaches, and some
rooms lacked running water.