The prison industry pivots as sentencing reform threatens its captive market

Is there anything that cannot be turned into a weapon? Walk around the exhibitors’ hall at the conference of the American Correctional Association, held in Indianapolis in early August, and at some point the question will answer itself. Apparently, with enough malign intent and the right tools - a lighter, for instance - even disposable plates can be transformed into shivs.

“This is a piece of Styrofoam, rolled, then heated, then rolled and heated some more,” said Michael Robertson, salesman for a company called JonesZylon. He handed over a dark brown, 15-centimeter spike that looked nothing like a piece of Styrofoam. Touch its sharpened end and it felt like the tip of a blade.

“Now this,” he continued, handing over a plastic JonesZylon serving tray, “you can’t weaponise.”

The tray is part of an extensive line of plastic kitchen products, including cups, plates and bowls, sold by the company. You will find these in just about every federal prison, Robertson said. They can’t be rolled and heated into anything harmful, and if inmates throw them at you, they will not inflict much pain.

“You’d definitely feel it,” he said.

“But,” a colleague said, “it won’t penetrate the skin.”

Robertson was one of 264 vendors in booths at the Indiana Convention Center for what is essentially a trade show for the prison industry. It is the shiny, customer-friendly face of a fairly grim business. The ACA accredits jails and prisons and is also the country’s largest association for the corrections field, with a membership filled with wardens and state and county correctional administrators.

The convention is where those people window-shop. The United States imprisons about 2.2 million people, making it the world’s largest jailer. Those in charge of this immense population need stuff: food, gas masks, restraints, riot gear, handcuffs, clothing, suicide prevention vests, health care systems, pharmacy systems, commissary services - the list goes on. These outlays are a small fraction of the roughly $80 billion spent annually on incarceration, although precise sales figures are hard to come by because most companies in this niche market are private. Two publicly traded players, the private prison operators Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, have a combined market capitalization of almost $5.8 billion. Both companies had booths in Indianapolis.

For prison vendors, this would appear to be a historically awful moment. Sentencing reform has been gaining momentum as a growing number of diverse voices conclude that the tough-on-crime ethos that was born 40 years ago went too far. Mandatory minimum laws, many of them passed at the state and federal level in the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, locked people away for decades, often for relatively minor, nonviolent offenses.

The first stirrings of sentencing overhaul happened five years ago, around the time that California’s prison system was so bursting with inmates that a federal court called the conditions unconstitutional and mandated reductions. Texas has stepped up its use of community supervision programs and drug courts. For the first time in state history, it has closed prisons - three of them.

My goal ambling through the oddly colorful bazaar in Indianapolis for three days was to see what effect - if any - this much discussed change was having on the hard-nosed bottom line. Was anyone here experiencing a slump or even bracing for one? Nobody wants businesses to suffer financially, but if you think the current incarceration system is a calamity, there is no way around it: Bad news for these companies is good news for the country. And if change was coming, or had already arrived, these vendors would be among the first to know.

I had no idea what I would find. But a few days before the exhibition doors opened, I spoke on the telephone to a skeptic, a guy who just didn’t believe that the country was really on the verge of a correctional system makeover.

“It’s hard for me not to be cynical about it,” said Jack Cowley, a retired warden who lives in Oklahoma. “Think about the size of our system, all the judges and lawyers, putting their kids through college, people that make leg irons, Tasers. Crime is driving the train. It’s like a business that is too big to fail.”

Bob Barker started selling supplies to prisons in 1972. When Barker founded his company, he met a lot of incredulous wardens.

“I would go into jails and start talking toothbrushes and deodorant and I’d get, ‘What do you think this is, a Holiday Inn?’ If somebody didn’t bring you underwear or a toothbrush you didn’t get it.”

Then the drug culture grew, and detention professionals realized that to prevent the flow of drugs into prisons, they had to stop visitors from handing anything to inmates. When that happened, they started buying from Barker, who today sells about 5,000 different items, making him the largest detention supplier in the country. His inventory includes laundry bags, boots, board games and something called the BarkerBunk, described as “the toughest stackable correctional specific inmate bunk.”

Barker would not say much about his company’s financial performance in the last two or three years, other than to describe it as “sort of flat.” He seems unbothered by that, noting that the industry provided his family with a good living for 40 years. But his son, Robert Barker, who is the company’s president, was standing next to him, and he sounded anything but defeatist.

“We’re looking long term at how we can be part of the solution,” the younger Barker said. “With more re-entry programs out there, we’re looking at future supply opportunities.”

During the conference, there was a sign-up sheet for tours of local correctional facilities. This initially sounded ridiculous, the ultimate busman’s holiday, but the tours were overbooked. I snagged a spot for a visit to the nearby Marion County Jail. It started with a group of about 25 people climbing aboard what felt like a maximum-security minibus.

The Marion County Jail, our guide explained, is at capacity and recently sent some inmates to a nearby site operated by CCA. This speaks to a big reason that vendors in Indianapolis seem unruffled by talk of prison reform. It hasn’t had a big impact, at least not yet, and it doesn’t seem that it will in the future.

To understand the “not yet” part, consider California, site of the country’s most ambitious inmate reductions. The court-ordered program to ease cramped, triple-bunk conditions started in October 2011. To date, the system’s head count in the 34 facilities covered by the overcrowding litigation has dropped to 111,000, from 144,000.

“These declines are too small,” said Peter Wagner of the Prison Policy Initiative, which campaigns for prison reform. “The numbers are trending downward, but slowly and not consistently.”

Wagner also doubted that prison reform laws knocking around Congress, as well as many states, would reduce the prison population as much as some people thought, because they are focused on drug and nonviolent offenders. As numbers collected by the Urban Institute demonstrate, half of all inmates in state prisons are violent offenders, and state prisons are home to 86 percent of the nation’s inmates.

Against this backdrop, the relative serenity of vendors in Indianapolis made sense. Still, if you looked in the right places, the event quietly reflected a change in attitude that should hearten supporters of reform. For years, attendees said, the only people at these conferences talking about rehabilitation or the well-being of inmates were faith-based groups like the Salvation Army. This time, there were workshops on re-entry success stories and alternative sentencing for juveniles, and many others like it.

NYT

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