Gilded Cage: Wackenhut’s Free Market in Human Misery
Greg Palast, June 11, 2003 In New Mexico, three state prisoners face the electric chair, accused of killing a guard in an August 1999 riot that also left an inmate dead. Can a book save their lives? The lawyers defending David Sanchez plan a novel defense to mitigate the death penalty in the case that begins this week in the state’s Fourth Judicial Court. They plan to cite investigative reporter Greg Palast’s exposé from his book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy," the story of how the callous hunt for profits by the prison’s private operator created conditions that led to riots and deaths.
This is the report, an exclusive excerpt for GNN.
Gilded Cage: Wackenhut’s Free Market in Human Misery
One of the hottest stock market plays of the 1990s was the investment in hotels without doorknobs: privately operated prisons. And the hottest of the hot was a Florida-based outfit, Wackenhut Corporation, which promised states it would warehouse our human refuse at bargain prices. In 1999, I thought it worth a closer look. That year, New Mexico rancher Ralph Garcia, his business ruined by drought, sought to make ends meet by signing on as a guard at Wackenhut’s prison at Santa Rosa, New Mexico, run under contract to the state. For $7.95 an hour, Garcia watched over medium-security inmates. Among the "medium security" prisoners were multiple murderers, members of a homicidal neo- Nazi cult and the Mexican Mafia gang. Although he had yet to complete his short training course, Garcia was left alone in a cell block with sixty unlocked prisoners.
On August 31, 1999, they took the opportunity to run amok, stabbing an inmate, then Garcia, several times. Why was Garcia left alone among the convicts? Let’s begin with Wackenhut’s cutrate Jails "R" Us method of keeping costs down. They routinely packed two prisoners into each cell. They posted just one guard to cover an entire "pod," or block of cells. This reverses the ratio in government prisons—two guards per block, one prisoner per cell. Of course, the state’s own prisons are not as "efficient" (read "cheap") as the private firm’s. But then, the state hadn’t lost a guard in seventeen years—where Wackenhut hadn’t yet operated seventeen months.
Sources told me that just two weeks prior to Garcia’s stabbing, a senior employee warned corporate honchos that the one-guard system was a death-sentence lottery. The executive’s response to the complaint? "We’d rather lose one officer than two." How does Wackenhut get away with it? It can’t hurt that it put Manny Aragon, the state legislature’s Democratic leader, on its payroll as a lobbyist and used an Aragon company to supply concrete for the prison’s construction.
"Isn’t that illegal?" I asked state senator Cisco McSorley. The Democratic senator, a lawyer and vice chairman of the legislature’s judiciary committee, said, "Of course it is," adding a verbal shrug, "Welcome to New Mexico." Wackenhut agreed to house, feed, guard and educate an inmate for $43 a day. But it can’t. Even a government as politically corroded as the Enchanted State’s realized Wackenhut had taken them for a ride. New Mexico found it had to maintain a costly force of experienced cops at the ready to enter and lock prisons down every time Wackenhut’s inexperienced "green boots" lost control. A riot in April 1999 required one hundred state police to smother two hundred prisoners with tear gas—and arrest one Wackenhut guard who turned violent.
The putative savings of jail privatization went up in smoke, literally. The state then threatened to bill Wackenhut for costs if the state had to save the company prison again. In market terms, that proved a deadly disincentive for the private company to seek help.
On that fateful August 31, during a phone check to the prison, state police heard the sounds of the riot in the background. Wackenhut assured the state all was well. By the time the company sent out the Mayday call two hours later, officer Garcia had bled to death.
Why so many deaths, so many riots at the Wackenhut prisons? The company spokesman told me, "New Mexico has a rough prison population."
No kidding.
My team at the Observer obtained copies of internal corporate memos, heartbreaking under the circumstances, from line officers pleading for lifesaving equipment such as radios with panic buttons. They begged for more personnel. Their memos were written just weeks before Garcia’s death. Before the riots, politicians and inspectors had been paraded through what looked like a fully staffed prison. But the inspections were a con because, claim guards, they were ordered to pull sixteen- and twenty-hour shifts for the official displays. One court official told me that Wackenhut filled the hiring gap, in some cases, with teenage guards, several too young to qualify for a driver’s license. And because of lax background checks, some ex-cons got on the payroll. A few kiddie guards and insecure newcomers made up for inexperience by getting macho with the prisoners, slamming them into walls.
"Just sickening," a witness told me in confidence.
Right after the prison opened, a pack of guards repeatedly kicked a shackled inmate in the head. You might conclude these guards needed closer supervision, but that they had. The deputy warden stood nearby, arms folded.
One witness to a beating said the warden told the guards, "When you hit them, I want to hear a thunk."
The company fired those guards and removed the warden—to another Wackenhut prison. Conscientious guards were fed up. Four staged a protest in front of the prison, demanding radios—and union representation. Good luck. The AFL-CIO tagged Wackenhut one of the nation’s top union-busting firms. The guards faced dismissal. Senator McSorley soured on prison privatization. New Mexico, he says, has not yet measured the hole left in its treasury by the first few months of Wackenhut operations.
After the riots, the company dumped 109 of their problem prisoners back on the government—which then spent millions to ship them to other states’ penitentiaries. Still, let’s-get-tough pols praise Wackenhut’s "hard time" philosophy: no electricity outlets for radios, tiny metal cells, lots of lockdown time (which saves on staffing). And, unlike government prisons, there’s little or no schooling or job training, no library books, although the state paid Wackenhut for these rehab services. The company boasted it could arrange for in-prison computer work, but the few prisoners working sewed jail uniforms for thirty cents an hour. Most are simply left to their metal cages. Brutality is cheap, humanity expensive—in the short run.
The chief of the state prison guards’ union warns Wackenhut’s treating prisoners like dogs ensures they lash out like wolves. Wackenhut Corporation does not want to be judged by their corrections affiliate only. Fair enough. Following the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, an Exxon–British Petroleum joint venture wiretapped and bugged the home of a whistleblower working with the U.S. Congress. This black-bag job was contracted to, designed by, and carried out by a Wackenhut team. Wackenhut did not have a very sunny summer in 1999. Texas terminated their contract to run a prison pending the expected criminal indictment of several staff members for sexually abusing inmates.
The company was yanked from operating a prison in their home state of Florida. Mass escapes in June, July and August threatened Australian contracts. In New Mexico, Wackenhut’s two prisons, which had barely been open a year, experienced numerous riots, nine stabbings and five murders, including Garcia at Santa Rosa. Wackenhut’s share price plummeted. But there was a ray of hope for the firm. At the end of Wackenhut’s sunless summer, between the fourth and fifth murder in New Mexico, the office of Britain’s Home Secretary announced he would award new contracts to the company.
Wackenhut opened a new child prison in County Durham one month after Texas prosecutors charged executives and guards at Wackenhut’s juvenile cen- ter with "offensive sexual contact. Deviant sexual intercourse and rape were rampant and where residents were physically injured, hospitalized with broken bones." Based on its stellar performance in the United States, Wackenhut has become the leading operator of choice in the globalization of privatized punishment.
It wasn’t a convict but an employee who told me, "My fifteen months in the prison were hell on earth. I’ll never go back to Wackenhut."
Those sentiments need not worry the company so long as they are not shared by governments mesmerized by the free market in human misery. Since publication of the book, it was revealed that James Clayton, the gymnasium guard, wrote a memo two weeks before Garcia’s death that the word on the prison floor was of an imminent ‘hit’ on a guard. Clayton was so concerned with what inmates had warned that he went over the heads of his immediate superiors, who had criticized his reports of safety concerns in the past, and spoke directly to Assistant Warden Joe Sprunk. Sprunk told him to go back to his duties and leave the look-out to him. Having reported too many other unheeded security deficits in the past, and in fear for his safety, Clayton quit the next day. Instead, the warning was deleted from the company’s computer, which was then passed on to New Mexico State police who ignored all rules of forensic protocol and booted the machine with new software, permanently erasing the still-retrievable file.
For more on the political fallout from the Garcia killing see "Prison report raps politics, fast move to privatization" (Albuquerque Tribune)
Read www.gregpalast.com for updates on this story.
Greg Palast is the author of several books, including "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy" (Penguin-Plume, 2003), which is currently on The New York Times bestseller list. He also reports for the BBC News and writes a column for the Guardian newspapers. He was GNN's Guerrilla of the Year in 2001.
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