Volume 3, Number 2: October 2019 | Op-Ed
All countries have them, but little is known about them: prisons. How many are there? What do they cost? And who pays for these costs? Many people do not know the answer to these kind of questions and yet many governments spend great amounts of tax money on them. Especially in countries like the United States, where in 2016 2.2 million people lived behind bars (Gramlich, 2018), this accounts for a big part of the budget. Many governments choose for prisons to be a public good, while other governments allow a certain percentage of their prison system to be run by companies (private systems) to reduce cost. I argue that public prisons are preferred over private systems, not because public prisons are perfect, but because private prisons are worse.
Private prisons are places of confinement which are run by companies hired by the government. Public prison are on the other hand prisons which are run by the government itself. It is not for the reason that public prisons operate perfectly that they are preferred over private prisons, it is for the malfunctioning of private prisons that public prisons benefit society more. Nobody likes prisons and in an ideal world there would be no crime and therefore no prisons. Since this is not the case a choice has to be made. In private prisons there is less government supervision which results in a strongly decreasing quality of life for both inmates and employees. Private prisons also create the incentive to get more people to jail. Opposite to this there is argued that private prisons save cost and create efficiency.
So what is true? In 2016 the U.S. Justice Department did a research concerning day to day functioning of contract prisoning. The conclusions of this report, which took a closer look at private prisons, are worrying. Contraband, reports of incidents, lockdowns, inmate discipline, telephone monitoring, selected grievances, urinalysis drug testing, and sexual misconduct were monitored. The results are that in private prisons there is a 28 percent higher rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults and more than twice as many inmate-on-staff assaults, as well as twice as many illicit weapons than comparable federal facilities. The report also showed that some private prisons operated for months without a full-time doctor and that there is a lack of adequate security and healthcare both endangering inmates and employees (U.S. Department of Justice, 2016). Similar research done by Vicky Pelaez found that U.S. private prisons receive a fixed amount per inmate, not dependent what it costs to maintain this person. This results in Mexico like situations in the U.S., where U.S. private prisons hire as little guards and use as little facilities as possible for as many inmates as possible.
A second reason why private prisons are less beneficial than public prisons is that private prisons create incentives to increase the inmate population. Private prisons are run by companies which see this as a way to make profits. The most logical way of doing this is by pursuing economies of scale to drive costs down. To achieve economies of scale more inmates are needed: the more inmates, the more profit. Another way through which companies try to pursue high inmate rates is through their powerful lobbies. As mentioned by (William W. Goldsmith, 2012) prison lobbies are among the most powerful in the United States and they use this power to keep “inmate increasing programs” like the war on drugs going.
There are on the other hand also many advocates of a private prison system. According to these people private prisons lower the cost and increase the quality by introducing competition. It is true that public and private prisons compete in a certain way, but it is not true that private prisons compete with each other for prisons contracts. In the United States for example there are 18 corporations who guard 10000 prisoners in 27 states (V. Pelaez, 2019). Of these 18 companies are the two largest Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut, which together control 75%. This results in price negotiations and domination preventing fair competition in the private prison market.
Where private prisons are portrayed to be the best “low cost – high quality” solution for the prison problems, the opposite is true. According to (Peleaz, 2019) crime is decreasing but prison rate go up. Due to incentives for companies to keep inmate rates high, and the costs concerned with this low, inmates are treated as cattle rather than humans. So where private prisons really try to change the boundaries of ethically correct imprisonment, we rather turn to public prisons. Lets hope that in the future this debate will be unnecessary and crime rate has gone down, till then, the outcome seems pretty straightforward.
Gramlich, J. (2018, 2 mei). America’s incarceration rate is at a two-decade low. Geraadpleegd op 17 oktober 2019, van https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/02/americas-incarceration-rate-is-at-a-two-decade-low/
Pelaez , V. (2019, 13 september). The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery? – Global Research. Geraadpleegd op 18 oktober 2019, van https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-prison-industry-in-the-united-states-big-business-or-a-new-form-of-slavery/8289
U.S. Department of Justice . (2016). Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Monitoring of Contract Prisons. Geraadpleegd van https://oig.justice.gov/reports/2016/e1606.pdf
William W. Goldsmith (2012) “The Drug War and Inner City Neighborhoods,” Chapter 11 in Brooks, N., Donaghy, K., & Knaap, G-J. (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Urban Economics and Planning, 248-276.
Picture: https://www.google.nl/search?q=private+prisons&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiy4fb3nKrlAhVKfX0KHSSyDxoQ_AUIESgB&biw=1215&bih=594&dpr=1.58#imgrc=ePmT-LF8F8BMvM
I like the article and I think it’s important to show, how private corporations can once more drive profit out of peoples well-being. What is interesting is that is completely contradicts the idea of why we have people go to prison in the first place. It is supposed to give them a new start and to make them ready to be part of society again. I highly doubt that this is going to happen in those private prisons.
Another big question from my side is how the decision takes place on who gets to go to which prison. Since we can see a clear case of inequality from one to the other, this will have a tremendous effect on the time spent inside the prison.
Great topic of discussion! I agree with most points mentioned and find it interesting how private corporations do not tackele the issue of crime at its root, but rather manage to abuse the legal system for their own interests. Especially the monopoly position of these private corporations in the prison industry seems shocking to me.
Moreover, artificially filling prisons with petty crime offenders is not only morally questionable, but also imposes higher bureaucratic costs in the conviction process.
Another important issue that should not be disregarded is the process of resocialization of ex-convicts. It would be interesting to see whether public or private prisons offer different opportunities after completing one’s imprisonment or not.
This is actually great topic for discussion, however, I could still argue that private prison would still be possible and it could also potentially lowering the cost of the government if these issues aren’t serves for profit driven and monitored carefully enough. So I think if we applied the concept of good governance into the establishment of these private prison, then would that solves those problems, however one must concern other possible consequence that can occur. Great article to raise these issues into discussion.
I really like your article because it is interesting to know more about public and private prisons and their differences. According to the article, the fact that private prisons try to make more profit and expand economies of scale by filling up as many inmates as possible seems uncomfortable to me. Prison is supposed to be a place where convicts serve their punishment and redeem themselves through social services. It should be a place that give them chances to be better, so seeking profit out of their lives is unfair as the more crowded the prison is, the lower quality of lives they will be. On the other hand, having government run all the prison operations may cause a lot of expenses even though it provides good services. Therefore, government should allow both public and private prisons but it needs to find balance: otherwise, inequality could happen whether it would occur among inmates or among corporations in this field.
I think it is a very interesting topic to be discuss. Prison should not be a place where prisoners think it is the end of their lives. Instead, prison should be a place where they realize that they made mistakes or what they have done, learn from the mistakes, repent oneself, and prepare themselves to be back to the society. In my opinion, companies should not seek profit from people lives. From what the author mentioned about the observation in Mexico like situations in the U.S. that private prison hired few guards and use as little facilities as possible for as many inmates as possible, just because they want to save cost. I think prisoners are also human and they must also be treated as human. Therefore, I think public prison is still the best solution for now as there is no accounting profit involved. However, the government would bear a large cost. Maybe, both public and private sectors could negotiate and agree on solutions which it benefit more to the society than to themselves.
I do agree with you that private prisons are worse compared to public companies and I want to add some more reasons on why private prisons are worse. As private prisons receive their funding from government contracts and many of these contracts are based on the total number of inmates and their average length of time served. This means that the more inmates these prisons can hold with longer sentences, the more money they earn. Public prisons receive their funding from tax dollars, so public prisons are required to make certain information about the prison to the public in order to show them how the prison is operated and how well taxpayers’ money is used. On the other hand, private prison are not required to release information on how the money they receive is being used. Public prisons can choose to accept or decline offenders and most of the times they decline offenders who have medical conditions or mental health issues as it is costlier. According to Criminal Justice Programs, private prisons will usually choose less violent offenders because serious offenders require more security. In other words, public prisons hold more violent offenders and private prisons hold more nonviolent offenders. In my opinion, government need to monitor private prisons both in terms of quality of the prisons and inmate rights in order to continue using private prisons.