A new lawsuit brought by eight inmates of the Idaho Correctional Center alleges that the company is cutting back on personnel costs by partnering with violent prison gangs to help control the facility. Court documents and an investigative report issued by the state’s Department of Corrections show how guards routinely looked the other way when gang members violated basic facility rules, negotiated with gang leaders on the cell placement of new inmates, and in one instance may have even helped one group of inmates plan a violent attack on members of a rival gang.

Rather than working with corporate headquarters or local authorities to combat the growing threat of gangs, CCA officials at the prison — the state’s largest, with more than 2,000 beds — used those same gangs as a way to control the rest of the inmates and save money:

The inmates also contend that CCA officials use gang violence and the threat of gang violence as an “inexpensive device to gain control over the inmate population,” according to the lawsuit, and that housing gang members together allows the company to use fewer guards, reducing payroll costs.

“The complaint alleges that CCA fosters and develops criminal gangs,” attorney Wyatt Johnson, who along with T.J. Angstman represents the inmates, said in a statement. “Ideally, the lawsuit should force this to come to an end.”

The CCA has operated the prison in partnership with the Idaho corrections department since 2000, at the beginning of a boom period when the number of inmates detained in CCA’s private prisons nationwide climbed nearly 50 percent between 2000 and 2009. States have invited private prison corporations to run some of their facilities as a cost-cutting measure, even though recent studies show that private prisons ultimately cost states millions more than public ones.

Private prisons are also experiencing a boom in the number of corruption complaints being leveled against them. In Arizona, lawmakers passed several pieces of favorable legislation after receiving more than $60,000 from industry lobbyists, in Alabama a judge likened one private facility to a “debtors prison,” and in Pennsylvania a judge was sentenced to nearly three decades in prison after it was discovered he had sent hundreds of younger residents into a privately-run juvenile detention facility in exchange for millions of dollars in bribes from the owners of those detention centers.

An Ohio prison owned by Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest private prison companies in the US, has failed to meet state standards in food quality, sanitation, hygiene, and many other areas, according to a recently concluded audit. In total, the CCA prison had 47 violations.

CityBeat details the abysmal conditions at the Ohio facility, the first privately owned state prison in the country:

The local fire plan had no specific steps to release inmates from locked areas in case of emergency, and local employees said “they had no idea what they should do” in case of a fire emergency.

The audit also found all housing units provided less than the required 25 square feet on unencumbered space per occupant. It found single watch cells held two prisoners with some sleeping on the floor, and some triple-bunked cells had a third inmate sleeping on a mattress on the floor.

Inmates claimed laundry and cell cleaning services were not provided and CCA could not prove otherwise, recreation time was not always allowed five times a week in segregation as required, food quality and sanitization was not up to standards, infirmary patients were “not seen timely,” patients’ doctor appointments were often delayed with follow-ups rarely occurring, the facility had no written confined space program, the health care administrator could not explain or show an overall plan and nursing competency evaluations were not completed before the audit was conducted. Many more issues were found as well.

Despite the many abuses discovered at private prisons all over the country, CCA and other industry giants have greatly benefited from cash-strapped states’ attempts to save money. However, recent studies show that private prisons actually cost more than state-owned ones. Undeterred, CCA has started offering states millions to buy state facilities like the Ohio prison. Ohio sold the prison to CCA last year to help balance the state’s 2012-2013 budget, and CCA recently offered to buy another one in exchange for the state’s guarantee of 90% occupancy for 20 or 30 years.

A deadly riot in a privately-run Mississippi detention center was sparked in protest of poor food and medical care, according to an FBI agent’s affidavit. The riot, which killed one guard in May, was at the time chalked up to gang violence. But the group of Mexican immigrants leading the riot, called the Paisas, had no ties to gangs and reportedly ordered other inmates to disobey orders from prison staff until their list of grievances had been addressed.

The protest soon got out of control, with inmates taking hostages and inflicting more than $1.3 million worth of damage on the prison. Correction officer Catlin Carithers was beaten to death, while 20 others were injured.

The prison, Adams County Correctional Facility in Natchez, Mississippi, is run by Corrections Corporations of America (CCA), one of the biggest for-profit incarceration companies in the nation. CCA is notorious for cutting corners by understaffing facilities, charging inmates $5 a minute for phone calls, and using prison labor as a maintenance staff for $1 a day. The Adams County detention center, according to its inmates, was no different.

On the day of the riot, an inmate called the local news channel, explaining:

They always beat us and hit us. We just pay them back. … We’re trying to get better food, medical [care], programs, clothes, and we’re trying to get some respect from the officers and lieutenants.

Another inmate emailed the Jackson Free Press with the same message:

The guard that died yesterday was a sad tragedy, but the situation is simple: If you treat a human as an animal for over two years, the response will be as an animal. … Most of the correctional officers were not harmed. … Most of them that were taken hostage were shaken and afraid, but none of them was harmed.

Meanwhile, the Adams County Sheriff told reporters the riot stemmed from a gang fight. But the FBI affidavit, filed last week in the U.S. District Court in Jackson, confirms the inmates’ motive was their alleged mistreatment in the prison.

This was hardly the first riot in a CCA prison. Inmates at a different CCA prison in Mississippi started a fire in 2004. In Tennessee, CCA inmates were hit with chemical grenades after refusing to return to their cells.

Unlike a state-run prison, CCA and other private prisons have an incentive to cut corners in order to pad their profit margins. The private prison industry also invested millions in lobbying for policies that increase sentences and incarcerate more people. And it’s paid off; CCA, which lawsuits pushed to the brink of bankruptcy in 2000, reported $37.3 million in second quarter profits last week.

Private prisons, touted as a cost-efficient alternative to state-run penitentiaries, are not living up to their promises in at least one state. A new study of Arizona’s private prisons finds that the state is actually losing money — $3.5 million a year — by turning their inmates over to for-profit corporations.

According to the Tucson Citizen’s analysis of Arizona’s three oldest private prison contracts, the rate to hold one prisoner for one night has increased 13.9% since the contracts were awarded. Compared to the cost of state-run prisons, Arizona overpaid for its private prison beds by $10 million between 2008 and 2010.

The cost of these private prison contracts was no surprise to the legislators who awarded them. In an earlier investigation, the Citizen discovered the Legislature was well aware how expensive the private prisons were and simply circumvented a law requiring corporations to show cost savings before receiving a contract. In 2012, the Legislature repealed the requirement entirely — as well as a requirement that the state conduct a review comparing the quality of private and public prisons.

After removing any incentive to maintain facilities, the Legislature made things even easier for these corporations by guaranteeing their prisons will always be 100 percent occupied:

The documents refer to a “dispute” between the Department of Corrections and for-profit operator MTC as to whether or not the 5-year contract renewal was done in a timely manner (ADC says yes, MTC apparently said no). The negotiated settlement of this dispute consolidates 450 rated beds with 50 emergency beds into a total of 500 rated beds. These 500 beds will carry a guaranteed occupancy of 100% at a rate of $49.03 per prisoner, per day.

What’s more, this agreement was applied retroactively to October 6, 2010, effectively erasing all but three months of the reduced emergency bed per diem in the previous amendment (from July 2010). It also guaranteed that Arizona would continue to pay about three times as much for the emergency beds. In essence, ADC is handing over four years’ worth of extra money to keep MTC happy.

How much money? In the July 2010 contract amendment for the facility, the state had bargained the emergency beds down to a $12.60 per diem. Now they will be paying $49.03 per diem for the same beds. Which means that MTC is raking in an extra $36.43 per prisoner, per day. Multiply by 50 such beds, and MTC will make additional profits of $664,847.50 per year– a total of $2,659,390 through the remainder of the contract, which expires in October of 2013.

MTC made headlines in Arizona in 2010 after 2 prisoners escaped from their poorly maintained facility and allegedly killed a vacationing couple. The corporation has a long history of understaffing facilities, punctuated by inmate riots all over the country. Arizona now plans to buy back one of the MTC-managed prisons for $150,000.

In spite of the monetary and human costs, state and federal officials all over the country have embraced private prisons, perhaps because of the millions of dollars these corporations have lavished on politicians.

Nearly half of all immigrants detained by federal officials are held in facilities run by private prison companies, at an average cost for each detained immigrant is $166 a night. That’s added up to massive profits for Corrections Corporation of America, The GEO Group and other private prison companies:

A decade ago, more than 3,300 criminal immigrants were sent to private prisons under two 10-year contracts the Federal Bureau of Prisons signed with CCA worth $760 million. Now, the agency is paying the private companies $5.1 billion to hold more than 23,000 criminal immigrants through 13 contracts of varying lengths.

CCA was on the verge of bankruptcy in 2000 due to lawsuits, management problems and dwindling contracts. Last year, the company reaped $162 million in net income. Federal contracts made up 43 percent of its total revenues, in part thanks to rising immigrant detention. GEO, which cites the immigration agency as its largest client, saw its net income jump from $16.9 million to $78.6 million since 2000.

As the AP explains, these remarkable profits come in the wake of an equally remarkable lobbying campaign. In the past decade, three major private prison companies spent $45 million on campaign donations and lobbyists to push legislation at the state and federal level. At times, this money has gone to truly nefarious legislation. A 2011 report found that the private prison industry spent millions seeking to increase sentences and incarcerate more people in order to increase the industry’s profits. 30 of the 36 legislators who co-sponsored Arizona’s now mostly invalidated immigration law — which would have landed many more people in detention — received campaign contributions from private prison lobbyists or companies, including CCA and GEO. According to a report released last year, CCA spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent between $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span in 2011. $450,000 went to the Republican national and congressional committees, while Democrats received less than half that number. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) were also among the private prison lobby’s top benefactors.

Private prisons have also been found guilty of abuses ranging from understaffing facilities to bribing judges to sentencing juveniles with minor offenses to disproportionately long terms in privately-owned correctional facilities. A recent report found a Georgia prison run by CCA charges detainees $5 a minute for phone calls while paying them just a dollar a day for menial labor that keeps the facility running; immigrants in civil detention centers have been exploited by the same program.

An eight-part series by New Orleans’ Times-Picayune describes how Louisianans became the most incarcerated people anywhere in the world: “Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly triple Iran’s, seven times China’s and 10 times Germany’s.” As Charles Blow explains, much of the blame for this result rests at the feet of prison privatization:

In the early 1990s, the state was under a federal court order to reduce overcrowding, but instead of releasing prisoners or loosening sentencing guidelines, the state incentivized the building of private prisons. But, in what the newspaper called “a uniquely Louisiana twist,” most of the prison entrepreneurs were actually rural sheriffs. They saw a way to make a profit and did. . . .

But in order for the local prisons to remain profitable, the beds, which one prison operator in the series distastefully refers to as “honey holes,” must remain full. That means that on almost a daily basis, local prison officials are on the phones bartering for prisoners with overcrowded jails in the big cities.

It also means that criminal sentences must remain stiff, which the sheriff’s association has supported. This has meant that Louisiana has some of the stiffest sentencing guidelines in the country. Writing bad checks in Louisiana can earn you up to 10 years in prison. In California, by comparison, jail time would be no more than a year.

This is hardly an unusual story from the for-profit prison industry. The industry spends millions lobbying lawmakers to put more people behind bars. Two Pennsylvania judges were recently convicted of a “cash for kids” scandal where they took bribes from corporate prisons in return for sentencing juveniles to lengthy sentences for very minor offenses. Meanwhile, corporate prisons pad their profits by skimping on basic services for inmates or by hitting prisoners with inflated fees. A prison corporation in New Mexico was recently hit with $1.1 million in fines for understaffing its facilities, and another corporate prison in Georgia charges inmates $5 a minute for phone calls — while paying them only $1 a day for their work.

If outside bidders make a high enough offer, New Hampshire may be the first state with the dubious distinction of privatizing its entire male prison population.

The New Hampshire Department of Corrections recently put out a request for proposals that would contract out state penitentiaries to an outside contractor, and at least four companies have responded with their plans to build a new prison for all of the state’s male prisoners:

The New Hampshire Department of Corrections has put out a request for proposal that would essentially hand over the keys to a future penitentiary to an outside contractor for 20 years. Though the RFP still has to clear several hurdles, four companies have responded with plans to build, and probably run, a new prison for all of New Hampshire’s male (and perhaps female) inmates.

Two of the firms interested are publicly traded — Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections Corporation of America and The GEO Group of Boca Raton, Fla., with combined annual revenues of over $3 billion.

Although corporate-run prison systems are often touted as an effective way to cut costs, prison privatization — which has negative effects on prisoners and their families and impedes criminal justice reform as a whole — doesn’t actually end up saving taxpayers money. And, as ThinkProgress has reported, when companies profit by incarcerating people, they often spend millions on lobbying legislatures to put more people in jail simply to increase their profits.

Florida also recently proposed to expand its private prisons, a measure that was voted down in the state senate earlier this year. Unless New Hampshire also decides against their new for-profit prison plan, the state may be about to go down on the wrong side of history.

The largest proposed expansion of private prisons in the nation will not proceed after the Florida Senate voted down the proposal on Tuesday.

Though the GOP enjoys a 16-seat advantage in Florida’s upper chamber, nine Republicans joined twelve Democrats to defeat the massive prison privatization bill 21-19. The Miami Herald has more:

The state will not undertake what would have been the single greatest expansion of prison privatization in U.S. history, affecting 27 prisons and work camps in 18 counties and displacing more than 3,500 correctional officers.

Senators debated privatization for nearly three hours, and opponents’ floor speeches often showed more passion. Rather than talk about numbers, they talked about people, such as the treatment of correctional officers, whose starting salary is $34,000 a year and who have not received an across-the-board pay raise for the past six years.

“What’s wrong with state employees?” said Sen. Dennis Jones, R-Seminole. “We should be taking care of them, rather than kicking them under the bus.”

As ThinkProgress reported last year, private prisons corporations have spent millions lobbying legislatures to put more people in jail. After all, leaving for-profit prison beds unfilled hurts their bottom line.

In Florida, the private prison industry wrote large checks to members of the Florida legislature. One such company, GEO Group, doled out $1.3 million in campaign contributions in the Sunshine State over the past 5 years. Gov. Rick Scott (R), a major recipient of private prison money, also attempted to privatize large swaths of the Florida penitentiary system last year, only to have the move declared unconstitutional by a state judge.

To learn more about the disastrous impact of companies that profit by incarcerating people, read this recent report from the ACLU.