Interstate Inmates
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Corrections Corporation of America started making money off inmates at its Youngstown prison before the first one walked in the door. To move the prisoners 300 miles to Ohio, authorities in Washington, D.C., hired TransCor America, Inc. -- a CCA subsidiary that dominates the growing trade in transporting inmates for profit. The transport industry is even less regulated than private prisons themselves, and has quickly racked up its own record of escapes and violence.
Since the 1980s, a flock of companies has sprung up offering a cut-rate alternative to paying sheriffs and federal marshals to haul prisoners from state to state. TransCor controls 85 percent of the market, moving more than 75,000 prisoners around the country every year. Since CCA bought the company in 1994, business has nearly quadrupled.
Like private prisons, transport companies boast that they save taxpayers money. One of their key cost-cutting techniques is making multiple pickups and drop-offs on each trip, like FedEx trucks loaded with human packages. The typically circuitous routes may trim expenses, but they often mean that prisoners are kept on the road for days or even weeks at a stretch -- giving them prime opportunities to escape.
Last October, while the only two guards aboard a TransCor bus slept peacefully, convicted child-killer Kyle Bell slipped out through a hatch on the roof. In 1997, another TransCor passenger escaped from a company van when it pulled into a Burger King on its circuitous route from Kansas to Florida via Minnesota. The escapee took a married couple hostage before he was recaptured.
All told, at least 25 convicts have escaped from TransCor vehicles since CCA acquired the company. Nearly a dozen more have escaped from other for-profit firms. Reported escapes over the same period during transit by the U.S. Marshals Service, which moves more than twice as many prisoners as private firms every year: zero.
Despite the rash of escapes, there are virtually no regulations forcing transport companies to hire experienced guards or provide adequate training. Only Florida requires employees hauling vanloads of murderers and rapists across the country to even be licensed as security guards. Elsewhere, almost anyone with a driver's license can go into the trade. The lax regulations result in operations like R and S Prisoner Transport, a husband-and-wife team who were taken hostage by six convicts they were moving in 1996.
TransCor president John G. Zierdt Jr. insists his firm doesn't cut corners. He says employees must have at least two years of relevant experience and receive 120 hours of training. After all, Zierdt adds, security measures make good financial sense: "When we have an escape, it hurts our stock price."
It's unclear how stock prices are affected when transport companies hurt inmates. TransCor currently faces lawsuits brought by female convicts in Texas and Colorado who accuse their guards of sexual assault. Prisoners elsewhere have filed suits charging that TransCor denied them food and bathroom breaks, provided inadequate ventilation, and kept them shackled in painful positions for hours. "I spent three years in the Florida penitentiary and two in Wisconsin," says inmate John Wilear. "Both were pleasant experiences compared to my 17 days of hell with TransCor."
Other transport companies face similar charges. "Circus animals and cattle receive more protection in interstate transport than these prisoners," says Mark Silverstein, an attorney representing a plaintiff in one of the sexual assault suits.
To provide some protection for prisoners and the public, Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota is sponsoring legislation to require background checks and training standards for transport employees. Said Dorgan in announcing his bill: "No family that pulls into a gas station should have to worry that the van next to them might contain violent criminals and untrained guards more attentive to their next nap or cheeseburger than to the safety of the rest of us."
