Louisiana Voice

The news just doesn’t get any better for LaSalle Corrections.

The Ruston-based private prison company has been cited by authorities for failure to properly train its employees, for falsifying documents certifying that received training courses they never received, falsifying documents certifying that guards checked prisoners periodically when those prisoners ultimately died or had to be transferred to nearby hospitals after their physical conditions deteriorated after beatings or after being denied medications for conditions prison officials were aware of.

The company has also been the subject of numerous lawsuits by inmates, their families and former employees – lawsuits that have cost the company hundreds of thousand of dollars in awards and settlements.

A federal investigation was launched when a whistleblower at its facility in Georgia accused the prison of performing unwanted hysterectomies on female detainees.

More recently, LaSalle has taken down web pages for all 25 private prison it runs in several states, including 10 in Louisiana, as well as the web page for its corporate headquarters in Ruston.

Almost exactly two years ago, a Lafourche Parish resident was found dead in his cell at the LaSalle-run Catahoula Correctional Center, prompting a joint INVESTIGATION by the Catahoula and Lafourche parish sheriffs’ departments.

Kevin Percle, 50, of Chackbay, had been transferred to Catahoula Correction Center on Oct. 21, 2018 and during his stay he became involved in an incident with another inmate during which he suffered a blow to the head.

The incident was not reported at that time and he was transferred back to Catahoula Correctional Center on Nov. 4 for an impending court date. On Nov. 12, correctional officers found him unresponsive with labored breathing. He was later pronounced dead and an autopsy determined the cause of death to be homicide, the result of trauma to the brain.

At LaSalle’s ICE Processing Center in Jena in March of this year 79 female protestors were left in a room filled with PEPPER SPRAY.

When LaSalle took over the local jail in JOHNSON COUNTY, TEXAS, guards Marion Dahn, 65, and Chris Stevenson, 43, were fired. They sued and ultimately were awarded $795,321 ($222,846 for Dahn for harassment on the basis of his age and $572,475 for Stevenson for retaliation for reporting a sexual harassment claim).

Because Catahoula is a poor parish, it needs to remain in the good graces of LaSalle for jobs, according to SHERIFF TONEY EDWARDS.

LaSalle first approached the parish in the late 1990s with a proposal to build what Edwards described as a “turnkey operation” to house Louisiana Department of Corrections prisoners. The facility was at first managed by LaSalle but paid for by the parish. Within a few years, the parish handed ownership of the prison over to LaSalle, which agreed to pay the sheriff a “sponsorship fee” of $10,000 per month for the right to operate the prison.

Was that a good deal for LaSalle? With the influx of federal detainees under the Trump administration, the answer to that would be a resounding “yes.” The State of Louisiana pays private prisons about $24 per day to warehouse inmates while Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has upped the ante to $65 to $75 per person per day.

Using conservative figures that indicate LaSalle houses about 2,800 federal detainees at its 10 Louisiana facilities and is being paid $65 per day per prisoner. That comes to more than $5.8 million per month. There is overhead to consider, of course, like employee salaries and splitting some of that income with the local sheriffs but you’re still looking at nearly $70 million per year gross for LaSalle – and it’s one of your smaller private prison companies.

Of course, LaSalle doesn’t overlook the help it gets from the local sheriffs. During the 2019 campaign, the company contributed $5,000 to Edwards’s reelection campaign.

And private prisons offer little, if any, rehabilitation or educational programs for prisoners, which helps keep costs down and profits up.

If you’re still not convinced that private prisons are big business, consider the numbers:

In 1980, there were 41,000 persons in state and federal prisons in the U.S. Today, that number exceeds a half-million. Has crime really increased that much over the past 40 years? Not likely.

State and federal governments spent $6.9 billion on jails and prisons in 1980 compared to $80 billion today. Private prison companies have shelled out millions of dollars to persuade state and local governments to create new crimes, impose harsher sentences and keep more people locked up so they can earn more profits.

In 1980, the U.S. violent crime rate was 596.6 per 100,000 population. In 2019, the rate was cut by more than 38 percent to 366.7. During the same time period, the murder rate was cut by more than half, from a 10 per 100,000 of population to 4.9. Likewise, property crime was cut by more than half, from 6,353.3 to 2,565.3.

Make no mistake: It long ago stopped being about crime prevention. It’s all about profits now.