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Policy Matters research was conducted by ex-Plain Dealer reporter Bob Paynter, a longtime investigation journalist who took the buyout bus in 2008. His mission was to examine whether or not the private prisons the state opened in 2000 really saved Ohioans at least 5 percent of what it would have cost the government to handle the work themselves, as the statute requires. Right now the government likes to say privatization has saved the state $45 million. But Paynter found out that the states work with a measuring stick has been spotty.
Their methods for calculating the seemingly robust savings have changed substantially and, in some case, inexplicably over the last several biennia. A detailed examination of those calculations shows them not only to be riddled with errors, oversights and omissions of significant data, but also potentially tainted by controversial accounting assumptions that many experts consider deeply flawed
In fact, revised calculations suggest that it may actually have cost taxpayers MORE to contract with a private vendor for operations at the Lake Erie Correctional Facility in Conneaut for fiscal years 2006 and 2007 than to have allowed the state to run it.
Policy Matters Ohio: Privatized Prisons Don't Always Save Money | Scene and Heard: Scene's News Blog
Their methods for calculating the seemingly robust savings have changed substantially and, in some case, inexplicably over the last several biennia. A detailed examination of those calculations shows them not only to be riddled with errors, oversights and omissions of significant data, but also potentially tainted by controversial accounting assumptions that many experts consider deeply flawed
In fact, revised calculations suggest that it may actually have cost taxpayers MORE to contract with a private vendor for operations at the Lake Erie Correctional Facility in Conneaut for fiscal years 2006 and 2007 than to have allowed the state to run it.
Policy Matters Ohio: Privatized Prisons Don't Always Save Money | Scene and Heard: Scene's News Blog