Anything But a Private For Profit Prison in Riverdale

No one seems to protest a for profit prison in Riverdale

Incarceration rates per country (credit below)

If you aren’t familiar with the Riverdale series, the characters are based on the Archie comic books. This is not your father’s Archie characters. I know, I am probably old enough to be your father and I read Archie in my younger days during the Nixon and Ford administrations. The plight of Archie, Veronica, Betty and Jughead were much more simple then.

One of the story lines focuses on a gangster named Hiram Lodge, father of Veronica. He still has ties to the New York underworld drama in the midst of the small city world of Riverdale.

There is a slant in the story that is way too middle class, however. Hiram Lodge intends to build a private prison on the grounds of the former South Side High School in the poorer section of the city. This will bring jobs and raise the economy, at least that is his selling point. He and his wife made a back door deal somewhat below board. Now as the truth comes out of why the city closed the high school, those from the more inner city South Side are hostile to the deal and the Lodges. They make it clear they do not want the town industry to be a prison. No one complains about the fact that it is a private for profit prison, just that it is a prison. If I was there, I would be inclined to say, “No Prison and definitely no private for profit prison.”

There is a difference between public and private prisons. The most obvious is that public prisons are not for profit.

The prison plays a major part in the latter part of season one, but a small behind the scene story in the rest of the series.

Jughead, who is a teen social justice warrior/journalist working to save South Side High in season 1 and Riverdale in the rest of the series, does not address, out of the gate, the social justice issues of a for profit prison. His loyalty to his neighborhood is there but his journalistic sense has not caught up with it. He has, however, been dealing with other things in the plots, so we can excuse him.

I want to ask the writers: “Is there no one in the town who is willing to say: We do not want our town making money off incarcerating anyone for any reason?” That one statement made by the citizens of Riverdale, may have undermined everything Hiram Lodge was planning.

Indeed in season three Hiram makes a deal that will require a string of inmates. Pawns in his money making enterprise.

For profit prisons are exactly what they sound like, prisons run by publicly held corporations in which share holders profit from the business of incarcerating people. It is so controversial an idea that more banks and financial institutions suffer social, political and economic pressure to stop funding them, the latest being Barclays. This according to Crain’s New York Business, citing Senate bill S5433a which currently has passed the New York State Senate but not the Assembly. It states:

No state chartered banking institution shall provide financing for or invest in the stocks, securities, or other obligations of any institution, company, or subsidiary that owns or contracts with a government to manage or run a prison.

The United States has the most amount of prisoners in its system in the world.

Researcher Anita Mukherjee in a study of the Mississippi correctional system found that because these prisons make money on filled beds, inmates suffer a great chance of getting violations based on their conduct which keep beds filled beyond the original sentence.

“Private prison inmates,” Anita Mukherjee writes “serve 90 additional days, alternatively estimated as 4.8 percent of the average sentence. The delayed release erodes half of the cost savings offered by private contracting and is linked to the greater likelihood of conduct violations in private prisons.”

She adds that the almost five percent of a sentence added to the inmate’s time in the facility does not improve recidivism, which in theory should be the reason for all prisons. She adds that the private prison contracts usually pays for each occupied bed per day. These companies receive income based on the number of full beds or even worse the low number of empty beds.

In an investment analysis for the website Seeking Alpha, for profit prisons, minus the social justice concerns, can be a great asset for investors, which in Riverdale is clearly Hiram Lodge’s concern. But that same article warns that these prisons do not create any extra value for society including in lowering costs or improving service. Since, social justice concerns affect the viability of investment, the website recommends holding off from buying for the current moment.

In fact, in a scene similar to the series story line, Alex Friedman, a former prisoner in both public and Core Civic private prisons and now the associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center wrote in The Tennessean that the CEO of Core Civic, a for profit prison corporation, donated $23,000 to Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s election campaign. Friedman reports that he also undermined efforts by shareholders to increase spending on programs to reduce recidivism rates among prisoners. He also prevented moves to lower telephone service costs incurred by families of the incarcerated, which also may have reduced recidivism.

The exact nightmare scenario for abuse in such facilities raised its ugly head in Pennsylvania in 2009 when a federal investigation found that two publicly elected judges in Lucerne County received kickbacks to send juveniles to private youth detention centers. “Children would be placed in private detention centers, under contract with the court, to increase the head count. In exchange, the two judges would receive kickbacks.” CNN Reported in 2009.

Pennsylvania not only had at the time the second largest number of private prisons in the United States, it also has a law where a juvenile can waive his right to an attorney. The Innocence Project warns that most false convictions are caused by poor legal representation, in these cases there was none.

Further, these incidents did not happen in a vacuum, according to the same report on CNN.

Judges must verbally explain the consequences of appearing in court without counsel to minors and parents, lawyers say. Juvenile Law Center officials say Ciavarella [judge] neglected to do so in many cases.

Yet in the past five years, attorneys, law enforcement officials and other judges did not report Ciavarella’s behavior to the Judicial Conduct Board of Pennsylvania, says Joseph A. Massa Jr., chief counsel at the board.

This is an irony for Riverdale because Archie, the main character, ends up in a juvenile prison which is actually controlled by Hiram Lodge. Meanwhile, his estranged daughter joins the Innocence Project to get Archie released.

Massachusetts residence who had relatives in its prison system will remember that on November 1, 1995, 299 inmates in Massachusetts were awoken in the middle of the night and shipped to prisons in Texas. This took them from an important part of the rehabilitation process which is family contact.

Two years later, the Waco Tribune-Herald and Port Arthur News both of Texas reported that journalists discovered that Texas public prison officials punished for inmate abuse were found to have become wardens in private prisons. (Private Prisons Have No Place in Texas, Waco Herald-Tribune; Port Arthur News, September 11, 1997 p. 5a)

CoreCivic on its website indicates that its private prison system offers a counter vision to social justice forces working to stop these facilities:

“evidence-based programs like educational, vocational, substance abuse and faith-based offerings that help inmates develop the skills and values they need to be successful when they leave prison. For example, we have helped more than 11,000 people earn their GED (high school diploma equivalent) in the past six years, and we work with numerous residents in our reentry facilities to find meaningful employment through job placement programs.”

The same statement indicates that less than half of their contracts require “occupancy guarantees”. The company also affirms that governments can terminate the agreements if the capacity is not needed.

I am not sure the townspeople in the real world would so concerned about a former high school and its nostalgic values as they would about being known as the citizens who profit and make a living off of incarcerating people in a move that benefits stockholders. I think it would have to be successful in reducing recidivism and helping the formerly incarcerated rebuild their lives for it to be something the people could embrace.

I who hated school after the fifth grade anyway, might not protest the loss of South Side High, but call for it to be turned into a mall, a housing development (like what happened to my junior high school) or even a casino instead of a private for profit prison.

Photo: Nsflynn [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]