THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

And don't let our branding change fool you, our privately run prisons are still the same badly managed understaffed shitholes that they were before the riot.

As of April 2016, the Adams County facility was one of 13 privately run prisons holding criminal immigrants, a practice begun in Taft, California. The Obama administration planned to phase out their use, though the Trump administration could shift course.

Designed to serve up to 2,567 low-security, non-U.S.-citizen male inmates, the Adams County prison is operated by CoreCivic Inc., a firm formerly known as Corrections Corp. of America. The company challenges some of the audit’s findings, and notes the improvements underway.

“We are dedicated to our mission to advancing corrections through innovative solutions that benefit and protect all we serve,” the company stated in its official response.

The company was managing the facility at the time of the 2012 riot, during which one correctional officer died and about 20 staffers and inmates were injured. A Federal Bureau of Prisons after-action report found “deficiencies in staffing levels, staff experience, communication between staff and inmates, and CoreCivic’s intelligence systems,” the new report said.

“Four years after the riot, we were deeply concerned to find that the facility was plagued by the same significant deficiencies in correctional and health services and Spanish-speaking staffing,” the investigators wrote.

The investigators noted that in July 2015, the facility’s inmate population consisted of approximately 2,300 immigrants, predominately Mexican nationals, but only four of 367 staff members spoke fluent Spanish. The company offers “substantially lower pay and benefits” than comparable state or federal agencies, investigators noted further, adding that this contributed to “significantly higher turnover rates” and a corresponding lack of experienced staff.

The Office of Inspector General also calculated staffing levels in a different way than the private contractor, leading to different results than had been reported to the Bureau of Prisons.

“Staffing levels were lower than the levels represented by CoreCivic’s headcounts and were frequently lower than the BOP’s minimum staffing threshold,” investigators said. “We found similar issues regarding CoreCivic’s reporting of health services staffing.”

In the meantime the former CCA is disputing the report so as to insure no action is taken prior to The Time of Trump when the inmate population should double.