Nowhere is the growth of the private prison industry more in evidence than in Florence in the Sonoran Desert. The town is a sort of prison-industrial complex that hosts 11 Arizona state prisons, a federal immigration detention center and four private lockups. It is home to 8,000 residents and about 17,000 inmates.
At the 2,200-bed Florence Correctional Center, Childress shares a cell with one inmate. Childress says he's far more comfortable in Arizona than he was when he bunked in a gym packed with more than 100 men at a California prison in a remote part of northeastern California.
Unlike most California prisons, the Florence facility is air-conditioned to handle the Arizona heat. But the Arizona prison is no country club, says Childress, California inmate No. P-24277. He and other California inmates, waiting for lunch in an austere cellblock day room, complained about the food at Florence and the lack of enough outdoor-exercise time.
Childress says he feels safer in the Arizona prison than he did in California, where racially segregated gangs often rule the exercise yards and guards watch inmates with automatic rifles at the ready.
"We're not around too much danger. Most people here are trying to get away from that," he said.
Corrections Corp. says its prisons are clean, safe and secure. But the company acknowledges that its prisons are not immune from occasional assaults, disturbances and violence.
"Safety and security is the obvious No. 1 priority for CCA," spokeswoman Louise Grant said. "We have a very strong record that compares very favorably with our public counterparts."
Government reports show that Corrections Corp. has had fewer escapes, suicides and homicides than comparable public prisons, she said.
In Florence, Corrections Corp.'s facility radiates little of the watch-your-back tension among inmates that permeates massive California prisons.
"It's less tense, and it's quiet," said Francisco Barrios, 37, of Burbank, doing five years for illegal discharge of a firearm. "The people who came here want to do their time and go home."
California is not shipping out prisoners wholesale. The state sends only medium-security and some minimum-security inmates out of state. Maximum-security prisoners, including those on death row, and others with mental illness or serious health problems are ineligible. Inmates at women's prisons, which are not as crowded as male institutions, are not sent out of state.
