With Only Your Wits and an Empty Can of Pepper Spray to Protect You
Listen, Trousdale County, Tennessee, I get it: When a big, powerful corporation comes to town and promises 400 new jobs, that's a huge deal. Especially if you're a small, rural community of hardworking people trying to make an honest living.
So I get the impulse to be excited by the deal your commissioners just signed with the Corrections Corporation of America to open a new prison. But before y'all start submitting applications, let me tell you a little about working for the Corrections Corporation of America.
CCA has a track record of cutting corners to save money – often at the expense of their employees.
Just ask Sergeant Leonard King.
Like the people of Trousdale County, Leonard King just wanted to make an honest living working at a CCA prison over in Ada County, Idaho. At first, Sgt. King thought he'd work as a guard for CCA until he retired. Now he and his former co-workers are suing the private prison giant.
Sgt. King contends that staff were regularly put in harms' way so CCA could cut expenses – down to giving guards radios with dead batteries and containers of pepper spray with nothing inside, instructing them to "just fake it" if things got dicey. Understaffing was such a problem that at night, one guard would be expected to manage up to 300 prisoners by himself.
