The contemporary commissioner's delicate task of building among the officers a sense of mission, esprit de corps, and high morale is further complicated when, in response to a judicial decree, he or she must be the instrument of changes in agency policies and procedures, the real or perceived impact of which is to expose lowest-level employees to new and greater stresses and demands. The contemporary corrections commissioner is sometimes forced to choose between being held in contempt of court and being held in contempt by his or her subordinates.
Together with judges and union leaders, among the contemporary commissioner's most important "coaches and critics" are politicians and the members of the press. Even with the increases in public spending on corrections noted earlier, the work of barbed-wire bureaucracies remains low on the list of public priorities; by some measures it ranks dead last. Assignment to legislative committees that deal with corrections is no more prized by most politicians than assignment to the "prison beat" is coveted by most journalists. Both politicians and news pundits have strong incentives to emphasize what is wrong with corrections, stir controversies, oversimplify problems, and otherwise reinforce the impossible elements of the corrections commissioner's job.
Shifts in legislative sentiment about corrections have occurred every few years. A review of state and federal penal codes and the annual reports of corrections agencies suggest that between 1967 and 1987 the legal mandates of barbed-wire bureaucracies migrated from individualized treatment of adjudicated offenders to punishment. As should be obvious, it costs more to run meaningful inmate educational programs and the like than it does to merely "warehouse" offenders. To the extent that the aggregate data on corrections spending reveals anything, however, it appears that in most jurisdictions more money per inmate was being appropriated even as the lawmakers shifted the emphasis to "no-frills" custody. Thus, the politicians were inviting corrections commissioners to do less with more, while judges and activist organizations (e.g., the National Prisoners Project of the American Civil Liberties Union) were prodding them to expand their programs and to provide offenders with greater amenities and services.
Elected officials pay attention to what corrections agencies are doing mainly after some major prison disturbance has happened. Across the nation, more government hearings were held and reports issued in the two-year period following the 1971 uprising at New York's Attica Correctional Facility than in any two-year period since. There was a similar flurry of activity (at least in the southwest) following the bloody 1980 riot at New Mexico's Santa Fe Penitentiary. Governors are inclined to turn corrections departments into political footballs and to cashier directors at any major disturbance; new governors have been quick to replace incumbent commissioners.
Journalists who cover correctional issues can be great resources for the corrections commissioner, but more often they are great adversaries. Most corrections workers, including many commissioners, believe that members of the press are biased against them either because they have "watched too many Jimmy Cagney movies," or because they harbor ideological views that are antithetical to what penal administrators do, or both. However, some commissioners recognize that journalism has some occupational tendencies that work against accord regardless. Journalists prefer to embrace the "powder keg" theory of prison disturbances. Stories about unsafe, unclean, unproductive prisons that can blow any minute make excellent copy. As human interest material, the colorful and bitter book-length accounts of former convicts naturally garner more media attention than the dry and studied memoirs of former corrections officials.
There is a strong "no-win" element to the media's coverage of prison issues. For example, in reporting on escapes of short-term, nonviolent offenders from an experimental minimum-security work camp, the television cameras focus on the high walls of a maximum-security prison where no escapes have occurred for a generation. The next day the same station runs an editorial about how spending $70,000 per higher-custody prison cell is too much and more innovative ways of housing convicted criminals are needed. In one year, a leading state newspaper prints a series of articles criticizing corrections officials for doing too little to handle the prison crowding crisis and to cut costs. The next year the same paper runs a series denouncing the officials for experimenting broadly with tax-saving early-release programs. As one commissioner lamented, "No matter what you do or how you respond to public pressures, you're bound to play the goat or scapegoat."
In part as a response to the widespread public perception that corrections agencies have failed, by 1987 three states had enacted laws authorizing privately operated state correctional facilities, while more than a dozen states were actively considering the option. In 1985, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), a leader among the twenty or so firms that have entered the "prison market," made a bid to take over the entire Tennessee prison system. Though its bid was unsuccessful, CCA now operates several correctional facilities, among them a Bureau of Prisons halfway house, two Immigration and Naturalization Service facilities for the detention of illegal aliens, and a 370-bed maximum-security jail in Bay County, Florida. More than thirty-six states now contract for at least one correctional service or program.
