Thread: Video beckons California inmates to Tennessee

Tuesday, 03/06/07

Video beckons California inmates to Tennessee
Marketing effort stars Weststate prisoners

By GETAHN WARD
Staff Writer


Thousands of California inmates are getting a daily pitch on the finer side of what prison life could be like in Tennessee.

The video they're watching touts a private Tennessee prison's larger and cleaner jail cells; 79 TV channels, including ESPN; views of peaceful cow pastures; and inmates in the "Dorm of the Week," staying up all night, watching a movie and eating cheeseburgers or pizza.




The video's stars are some of the 80 California inmates who transferred to Corrections Corporation of America's West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason last fall in what was the Golden State's first export of prisoners to ease overcrowding. Their taped testimonials are being used in an attempt to entice some of their former jail mates to follow them to the promised land of prisons.

"If they know what we know now, that system would be emptied out," one Tennessee transfer said about those remaining in California.

A judge's ruling has halted the transfers, but the tape has continued to air on California's prison TV channel pending results of an appeal. "We're anticipating we eventually would be allowed to move inmates and we have to prepare for that," said Bill Sessa, a spokesman for California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The first runs of the video, made soon after the first group of volunteer inmates landed in Tennessee, attracted only several hundred of the roughly 5,000 medium-security prisoners who California had hoped would volunteer to transfer.

California then began a forced transfer that's on hold by the courts until a resolution of whether Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger exceeded his authority by declaring an emergency over prison overcrowding that has 16,000 of the state's inmates sleeping in hallways and gymnasiums.

"There's nothing more credible to an inmate than the views of other inmates," Sessa said, adding that the video was meant to boost volunteering after the emergency declaration, which allowed the state to send inmates out of state and to sign contacts with private prison companies to house California prisoners for more than a year.

The video starts with the inmates in California talking about their pending transfer and ends with them summing up experiences with everything from the food to recreation to interactions they said wouldn't have been possible in California.

"You're not a number here," one inmate says of the Mason prison. "You come here, it's personalized. It's please, thank you, sirs, you got — I mean you really feel like not so much — I wouldn't say equal, but you feel like a human being in here."

Video is a first

For CCA, California is the first customer to use such a video to target other inmates. "It's unusual," said Tony Grande, vice president of state customer relations for the Nashville prison operator. "Then again, so is the severe situation in California."

A Nashville advertising executive appreciates the video's question-and-answer approach. David Bohan, chief executive of BOHAN Advertising|Marketing, said, "I would have never thought about prisoners as an import product, but evidently a Tennessee company and a Tennessee community has found a niche that works."

Corrections industry consultant Richard Crane of Nashville, however, said he would have used more shots of dining, work areas and classrooms where inmates would be spending time rather than mostly questions and answers. "There is a world of difference between how inmates view something when given a choice versus being forced," he said. "If they'd been forced to go, you wouldn't have got anywhere near the positive comments."

Judy Greene, a justice policy analyst with nonprofit policy research group Justice Strategies, said the video painted a different image of life inside CCA's prisons than she had found in her research, which has included conversations with inmates.

"Once you start a prison bed market, that's sort of where it's going to go ultimately," Greene said. "Shipping people out of a state is a bad stopgap measure because it cuts them out from their families. And one of the best indicators of parole success is when a prisoner maintains those family ties. If we care about what's going to happen to people after they get out, we don't send them to Tennessee or Texas. We keep them nearby."

http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll ... /703060372

Tennessee must be crazy to allow this to happen.