DENVER—Colorado’s largest private prison company wants the state to pay more for housing its prisoners and has threatened to get rid of all state inmates from one of its four prisons if it doesn’t get the increase.
Corrections Corporation of America of Nashville, Tenn., agreed to lower its daily rate for taking care of prisoners from $53.11 to less than $50 in 2001, when Colorado was forced to make deep budget cuts during the recession. Currently the Nashville, Tenn.-based company is paid $52.69 per inmate each day and wants the rate increased to $55.32.
“We were basically asked to help with the burden of trying to ease some of those (budget) constraints, which we did,” company spokesman Steve Owen said. “So there’s nothing Draconian at work here in terms of what has been presented to the state.”
The company operates four of the state’s five private prisons. If it doesn’t get the rate increase, it says it will move Colorado inmates out of one of the prisons and only use it to house federal prisoners or inmates from other states, which pay the company up to $15 more a day per prisoner.
Sen. Ken Kester, R-Las Animas, said the Legislature should acknowledge that the company accepted a pay cut during the recession and said he believed they could work out a deal.
Rep. Bernie Buescher, D-Grand Junction, chairman of the Joint Budget Committee, said the situation leaves the state in the position of paying the rate increase or building hundreds of millions of dollars worth of additional prisons.
“We don’t have that hundreds of millions of dollars, and they know it,” Buescher said.
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Information from: The Pueblo Chieftain,
