State of Mississippi Closes A CCA Prison For Charging To Much!

Did Corrections Corporation of America's (CCA) greed just catch up with it and cost it a prison contract? Or is this just even more evidence that CCA is NOT cheaper than the state when it comes to running prisons?

Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps says a privately run prison in Leflore County will close in January. Epps and CCA officials say plans are to cease operations of the 1,172-bed Delta Correctional Facility in Greenwood, Mississippi on Jan. 15, 2012. Epps says the law requires private prisons to operate facilities more cost effectively than the state and CCA couldn't do that.

No surprise that CCA's press release reads something totally different and not that "CCA is not cheaper than a state run prison." I'm guessing this will not show up in any of it's self paid for prison safety or cost analysis studies or in any of it's endless marketing materials and campaigns.

CCA apparently also ran a 125 bed county jail out of the facility for the local county. This is one of the ways that CCA gets local counties to support it. My understanding is that at one time this was an option on the table in Stewart County with the Stewart Detention Center/Stewart County deal. It's worth noting that the community of Greenwood Mississippi appears to now have only about 2 months to figure out what to do with it's county jail inmates! It's sad and pathetic that CCA continues to parrot it's support of local communities, how it saves the tax payers money and all it's other corporate dogma while in truth it leaves a trail of neglected prisons and prisoners in it's wake. Just ask the good folks at the Hernando County Jail about the leaky and trashed facility CCA left it with. The reality is I think at this point we all know how CCA does it cheaper while running off with the taxpayers money!

The 270 View can't help but wonder how a company like Corrections Corporation of America that repeatedly says it's better than state and local governments can keep claiming it cares about the safety of communities where it has prisons in when it repeatedly seems to put those same communities at risk. CCA acts like a spoiled child running away with its ball when someone tells it no or stands up to it for running sub par prisons while over charging the local taxpayers. It's worth noting that this is not the first time CCA has put a local community at risk by saying you have very little time to figure out what to do with your prisoners because the parties over and we are leaving town! Perhaps communities that do business with CCA should be paying closer attention to how it behaves when it looses contracts.