Utah Firm to Manage Three State Prisons

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by R.L. Nave June 8, 2012

A Utah private-prison firm will take over running the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility and two other Mississippi prisons from The GEO Group. Management & Training Corporation, based in Ogden, Utah, will also assume management of East Mississippi Correctional Facility in Meridian and the Marshall County Correctional Facility in Holly Springs.

The 10-year deal between MTC and the Mississippi Department of Corrections is worth $430 million, the Salt Lake Tribune reported yesterday. Neither MTC nor MDOC officials have returned our calls for comment at this time. With the Mississippi additions, MTC runs 22 state and federal prisons in Arizona, California, Florida, Idaho, New Mexico, Ohio, Texas and, now, Mississippi. MTC is also the nation's largest contractor with the federal Labor Department's Job Corps program, operating 19 Job Corps sites across 16 states.

The announcement raised eyebrows in prisoner-rights advocacy circles, which say private prison companies have a poor track record in the state.

Gail Tyree, a Soros Justice Fellow and an organizer against private prisons across the South, said she was disappointed to hear the news that a different private firm would be getting the contracts.

"Looking at their history, private prisons are giving Mississippi a black eye," Tyree told the Jackson Free Press.

As evidence, Tyree points to the beleaguered Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Leake County. Opened in 2000, Walnut Grove housed youth between 13 and 22 who were tried and convicted as adults. In Nov. 2010, civil-rights attorney Robert B. McDuff and lawyers from the Southern Poverty Law Center and American Civil Liberties Union sued MDOC Commissioner Christopher Epps, other state officials and the prison's Boca Raton, Fla.-based operator, The GEO Group, on behalf of incarcerated young men who alleged ongoing negligence and abuse.

In February 2012, the parties reached a settlement. Under the federal court decree, MDOC agreed to move the boys from Walnut Grove to a facility that would operate on principles of juvenile justice rather than standards of the adult prison system. The decree required Mississippi to offer an array of educational and rehabilitation programs and prohibited the state from putting children in its custody in solitary confinement.

Subsequently, GEO and MDOC agreed to terminate all the company's contracts with the state. Around the same time, MDOC and Corrections Corporation of America, agreed to terminate CCA's contract to manage the Delta Correctional Center in Greenwood. CCA, which ran three state prisons and one federal facility in Mississippi, said it could no longer manage the prison more efficiently than the state could.

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Utah Firm to Manage Three State Prisons