Molly Ivins August 24

AUSTIN — Well, looking on the bright side, Texas' reputation as the National Laboratory of Bad Government can only be burnished by this charming new training-film footage of guards abusing prisoners. You must admit, it's unique in the annals of such films.

For those who keep an eye on the Great State just to know what to avoid in their own more civilized precincts, it's also a large hint about privatization: not a good idea. Actually, we could have told them that quite some time ago. Don't you just hate it when the National Lab wastes time on an experiment?

Those with long memories will recall that once before, Texas had an industry that consisted of taking undesirables from other states and keeping them locked up for money. These were private "schools" for juvenile delinquents, who were shipped here from Illinois and other states that had run out of room in their juvie halls. For a modest fee, Texas "schools" took these kids and promised to "reform" them.

One of the schools, by no means atypical, was called Artesia Hall, which featured such innovative reforming techniques as keeping the kids in cages and scrubbing them with wire brushes. One day, in an effort to reform a 15-year-old girl, someone at the school forced her to swallow lye and then left her without treatment for three days. This surely would have reformed her, except she died instead. Did I say she was 15?

For some reason, Illinois and the other states felt that death-for-truancy was a trifle strong and pulled all their kids out. What can you do with those soft-on-crime Yankees? They're probably all in the ACLU. It just ruined the reform- school industry.

Now, you may be asking yourself how we got into the private-prison industry for out-of-state perps after our unfortunate experience with the reform schools. You get one guess, and of course, you're right: It was a lobby deal in the Legislature.

Everyone who knew anything about prisons told the Lege it was a bad idea, but an outfit called N-Group lobbied it through anyway. N-Group worked it through the counties — the Sheriffs' Association was big on the idea — and as they say in the Lege, "It's the counties.

They're all nuts. You can't do anything with the counties."

But, of course, there was profit in the building and in the bonds to build with. Lot of bond lawyers made a bundle, including the firm of Ray Hutchison, a former state rep and also husband of Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. Former Democratic Guv Mark White's law firm in Houston also got some of that business. A bipartisan deal, you see. A lot of private prisons were poorly built and promptly went belly-up, so Ann Richards had the state buy 'em back for 10 cents on the dollar and then rehab 'em. A sordid tale.

Of course, we can't blame the Lege for the fact that some sheriff's deputies in Brazoria think sicking a German shepherd on a prisoner is such a keen idea that it should be in a training film — but, as was noted at the time that N-Group muscled this bill through, anyone with any sense knew these private prisons would be a mess. It's like letting the Department of Energy hire Fly-by-Nite Garbage to handle nuclear waste — and expecting it to work out beautifully.

I do wish those simple-minded ideologues in Washington who insist that privatization is the answer to everything — they chant "privatization, privatization" as though it were a mantra — would come down here to the National Lab for Bad Government and watch how it works out in practice. What else are our dumb experiments good for if not to set a national example?

Speaking of dumb ideas, privatizing the public schools is one worthy of the Texas Legislature itself — yet, according to the Associated Press, it is the foundation stone of the GOP's election strategy for 1998. This is the nifty notion that we can improve the public schools by taking money out of them and putting it into private schools.

Minnesota Gov. Arne Carlson, pushing this bean-brained scheme under the name "school choice," said: "We want every child in America to have the same choice as Chelsea Clinton." Chelsea Clinton went to a private school in Washington, D.C., where tuition is more than $10,000 a year. Your little $500 school-choice voucher is not going to get your kid into Sidwell Friends like Chelsea Clinton. What a totally phony sell.

On the other hand, I phoned Stanford, where young Clinton is going to college this fall, and found out that 68 percent of her entering freshman class went to public schools. Better odds, and much, much cheaper.

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Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

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