Prison Guards Assn. Pickets Convention Over Jail Privatization

Members of a state prison guards association picketed the American Correctional Assn. convention in San Diego on Tuesday, saying the organization exerts an unhealthy private-sector influence on public prison policy nationwide.

The guards said such influence is manifested locally in the planned construction of a 200-bed prearraignment jail in the East Otay Mesa Correctional Complex, which will be built and operated by Florida-based Wackenhut Corrections Corp. through a joint San Diego city-county contract.

The pickets, about 40 members of the California Correctional Peace Officer Assn., wore neon-green shirts and carried placards up and down the length of the San Diego Convention Center.

“Privatization is a slap in the face to corrections officers as professionals,” said Jeff Doyle, a prison guard and CCPOA vice president. He called the ACA a leading proponent of privatization.

“It’s irresponsible for government to turn this over to the private sector,” he said.

Although Doyle acknowledged there is an element of self-protection among the state guards who are upset with privatization plans, he emphasized that the Wackenhut guards do not have the same level of training and experience that state corrections officers do.

Pete Abrahano, the San Diego manager for Wackenhut, said the guards who will run the Otay Mesa facility, scheduled to be completed in April, will be better trained than the rest of the company’s guards.

“They will have the necessary training and experience required by federal law,” he said. “These will not be just regular guards.”

The 120-year-old Maryland-based ACA, composed of correctional administrators, wardens, superintendents, parole board members, educators and others, exerts a large influence on the formation of public policy regarding correctional facilities in the country.

While the CCPOA maintains that influence has much to do with the germination of private projects such as the Otay Mesa jail, Tony Travisono, the ACA executive director, said the question is not a matter of ACA support for such projects, but of making sure that any private-sector security be “held to higher levels of competence than the public sector.”

“It’s hard for me to understand” the CCPOA’s motivation, Travisono said.

He also denied the group’s claim that the influence of private bodies--including the companies that contract with correctional facilities--affects ACA policy formation.

Both sides agree that ACA policy has a large influence on the way prisons and jails are run in the United States. All such policy decisions are made at a delegate assembly, Travisono said.

“No private vendors sit at that table,” he said, adding that, of the ACA membership, “70% to 80% work in correctional facilities.”

The pro-capital punishment CCPOA also has problems with the ACA’s neutral stance on that issue.

“How can you be neutral on the death penalty?” said CCPOA member Barbara Burchfield. “They are because they have to be to hold their coalition together.”

The ACA last year denied permission to a group--made up of survivors of correctional officers who were killed in the line of duty--to attend their convention, Burchfield said.

The group did not try to get a spot on the convention floor this year because it knew it would be turned down, she said.

“When they found out who we were, they didn’t want us,” Burchfield said.

Burchfield’s husband, Hal, a correctional officer at San Quentin, died after being stabbed through the heart by an inmate in 1985.

“I took (the denial for space) as a real personal slam,” she said.

But Travisono said the group was offered space last year, and would have been offered it this year if it had applied.

Meanwhile, former U.S. Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork spoke to about 400 conventioneers during an afternoon session.

Most of the speech centered on the legal scholar’s well-known views on what he says are the pitfalls of judicial activism, or judicial decisions made on grounds that do not appear to be guided by the U.S. Constitution.

He also spoke favorably on the nomination of David Souter to the high court.