Word: wackenhut
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...after the Justice Department sued Louisiana in 1998 for inadequate care of its jailed youth, a privately owned juvenile-detention facility opened there. Here was the state's chance to prove it could run a prison right, even if it meant contracting with an outside company--the Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corp. Instead a Justice Department investigation of Jena prompted the state to transfer all the inmates out of there last...
...ground and told me to lay face down on the ground. And I told the Sgt. that I couldn't that I have on a bag, and he went put me to the ground. He came with his knee in my stomach." In its defense, Wackenhut Corrections says the boy had a number of disciplinary proceedings against him that year and that the distension might have been exacerbated by an oversize opening...
With hindsight, the head of Louisiana's prisons questions whether the state gave Wackenhut Corrections enough money to run a professional operation. Louisiana paid the company a per diem of $70 for each juvenile at the 276-bed facility. "We paid them approximately the same per diem that our own facilities cost," says corrections secretary Richard Stalder. "But they had to recover not only their operating but their capital cost. Seventy dollars a day is awfully close." Juveniles are twice as expensive as adults because they require more rehabilitative and educational programs...
...trained people to work in Louisiana's prisons is tough. The state's public corrections officers, who receive starting salaries just below $15,000, are the lowest paid in America. Recruiting is even harder in the private sector, where benefits tend to be less generous across the nation. Still, Wackenhut Corrections president Wayne Calabrese insists, "we had more staff to inmates than the state facilities themselves were required to have...