Informant38

Children's Comprehensive Services is another case in point. CCS grew out of a Tennessee-based prison company named Pricor, which in 1994 was $10 million in debt. Five years later, in 1999, when CCS was at its peak, it had programs in fourteen states and annual revenues of $115 million. William J. Ballard, the company's CEO and the man largely responsible for the turnaround, is a businessman who specialized in mergers and acquisitions and came to CCS with, he says, "no background in treatment or education" of children. In 1998, at a CCS psychiatric-treatment center in Montana, two suicides and three attempted suicides occurred within fifteen days; allegations in a lawsuit brought by the State of Montana attributed the deaths to chronic understaffing, which investigations by three outside agencies seemed to support. (Children on suicide alert were left unsupervised.) Understaffing and low pay are common cost-cutting techniques among for-profit providers of social services, for whom staff salaries are by far the largest expense.