Private prison
A private prison, or for-profit prison, is a place where people are imprisoned by a third party that is contracted by a government agency. Private prison companies typically enter into contractual agreements with governments that commit prisoners and then pay a per diem or monthly rate, either for each prisoner in the facility, or for each place available, whether occupied or not. Such contracts may be for the operation only of a facility, or for design, construction and operation.
Global spread
In 2013, countries that were currently using private prisons or in the process of implementing such plans included Brazil, Chile, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, Peru, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand. However, at the time, the sector was still dominated by the United States, United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand.[1]
Australia
Australia opened its first private prison, Borallon Correctional Centre, in 1990.[2]
In 2018, 18.4% of prisoners in Australia were held in private prisons. [3]
Arguments for and against
A 2016 article by Anastasia Glushko (a former worker in the private prison sector[4]) argues in favor of privately owned prisons in Australia. According to Glushko, private prisons in Australia have decreased the costs of holding prisoners and increased positive relationships between inmates and correctional workers. Outsourcing prison services to private companies has allowed for costs to be cut in half. Compared with $270 a day in a government-run West Australian jail, each prisoner in the privately operated Acacia Prison near Perth costs the taxpayer $182. Glushko also says positive prisoner treatment was observed during privatisation in Australia by including more respectful attitudes to prisoners and mentoring schemes, increased out-of-cell time and more purposeful activities.[5]
However, a 2016 report from the University of Sydney found that in general, all states of Australia lacked a comprehensive approach to hold private prisons accountable to the government. The authors said that of all the states, Western Australia had the "most developed regulatory approach" to private prison accountability, as they had learnt from the examples in Queensland and Victoria. Western Australia provided much information about the running of private prisons in the state to the public, making it easier to assess performance. However the authors note that in spite of this, overall it is difficult to compare the performance and costs of private and public prisons as they often house different kinds and numbers of prisoners, in different states with different regulations. They note that Acacia Prison, sometimes held up as an example of how private prisons can be well run, cannot serve as a general example of prison privatisation.[6]
Private immigration prisons
Several
Canada
There have been three notable private detention facilities in Canada to date, and all have either gone defunct or reverted to government control.
The only private adult prison in Canada was the maximum-security
Two
As of mid-2012, private prison companies continued to lobby the Correctional Service of Canada for contract business.[17]
France
The involvement of the private sector in prisons in France grew significantly between 1987 and the late 2000s, as reported by French scholar Fabrice Guilbaud.[18] France's system is semi-private: so-called non-sovereign missions (kitchen, laundry, maintenance) are delegated to private companies, while guard and security functions are left to the State. Organization of inmate labor in prison workshops is another task that has been delegated to prison management companies. There are however no prisons in France in which every aspect of the prison is run by the private sector, as in the UK. The French approach to privatisation therefore necessarily divorces security and production functions. Prison is a space of forced confinement where the overriding concern is security. The fact is that at several levels, and depending on the type of prison (high security or not), production logic clashes with security logic. Structural limitations of production in a prison can restrict private companies’ profit-taking capacities. A field study conducted by Guilbaud in 2004 and 2005 in five prisons chosen by prison and management type shows that the intensity of the tension between production and security, and the various ways in which this tension arises and is handled, vary by type of prison (short-stay, for convicts awaiting sentencing, or relatively long-stay for sentence-serving inmates) and type of management. The production/security tension seems better integrated in public-sector prisons than in those managed by the private sector in the sense that it produces fewer conflicts in them. This result runs counter to the widespread understanding that shaped the 1987 reform, the idea that introducing private enterprise and the professionalism associated with it into prisons would improve inmate employment and prison operation.
It is worth noting that in the UK, this problem is overcome by handing over all aspects of management, including both security and prisoners' work, to the operating company, thereby achieving the integration of the two.
Israel
Initial attempt
In 2004, the Israeli Knesset passed a law permitting the establishment of private prisons in Israel. The Israeli government's motivation was to save money by transferring prisoners to facilities managed by a private firm. The state would pay the franchisee $50 per day for inmate, sparing itself the cost of building new prisons and expanding the staff of the Israel Prison Service. In 2005, the Human Rights Department of the Academic College of Law in Ramat Gan filed a petition with the Israeli Supreme Court challenging the law. The petition relied on two arguments; first, it said transferring prison powers to private hands would violate the prisoners' fundamental human rights to liberty and dignity. Secondly, a private organization always aims to maximize profit, and would therefore seek to cut costs by, such means as skimping on prison facilities and paying its guards poorly, thus further undermining the prisoners' rights. As the case awaited decision, the first prison was built by the concessionaire, Lev Leviev's Africa Israel Investments, a facility near Beersheba designed to accommodate 2,000 inmates.
Israeli Supreme Court rejection
In November 2009, an expanded panel of 9 judges of the
Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch wrote: "Israel's basic legal principles hold that the right to use force in general, and the right to enforce criminal law by putting people behind bars in particular, is one of the most fundamental and one of the most invasive powers in the state's jurisdiction. Thus when the power to incarcerate is transferred to a private corporation whose purpose is making money, the act of depriving a person of [their] liberty loses much of its legitimacy. Because of this loss of legitimacy, the violation of the prisoner's right to liberty goes beyond the violation entailed in the incarceration itself."[20]
New Zealand
The use of private prisons has also been tried, stopped and reintroduced. New Zealand's first privately run prison, the Auckland Central Remand Prison, also known as
On 16 July 2015, footage of "fight clubs" within the prison emerged online and was reported by
Serco has also been given the contract to build and manage a 960-bed prison at Wiri. The contract with Serco provides for stiff financial penalties if its rehabilitation programmes fail to reduce re-offending by 10% more than the Corrections Department programmes.
The
South Korea
Somang Correctional Institution in Yeoju, Gyeonggi Province, is the only private prison for adult inmates in South Korea.[35] The correctional institution was set up with an investment of 30 billion won (US$27 million) from the Christian Agape Foundation and opened on 1 December 2010.[36][37] It is capable of accommodating up to 400 prisoners with convictions for violent crimes, but inmates at the prison usually serve sentences of less than seven years or have less than a year remaining on longer terms.[38]
United Kingdom
Number of prisoners
- In 2018, 18.46% of prisoners in England and Wales were housed in private prisons.
- 15.3% of prisoners in Scotland were housed in private prisons.[39]
Development
The privatization of prisons can be traced to the contracting out of confinement and care of prisoners after the
In the modern era, the
In addition, a number of the UK's Immigration Removal Centres are privately operated, including the Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre, Yarl's Wood Immigration Removal Centre, and Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre.
In 2007 the new Scottish National Party Government in Scotland announced that it was opposed to privately run prisons and would not let any more contracts.[43] Since then, new prisons in Scotland have been built and run by the public sector. The last contract let in England and Wales was for HM Prison Northumberland, which transferred from the public sector to Sodexo in 2013. The most recent new prison to be built in England and Wales, HM Prison Berwyn near Wrexham, was given to the public sector to operate without any competition when it opened in 2017. Since 2017, it has been Labour Party policy not to commission any new private prisons in England and Wales.
On 5 November 2018, the prisons minister, Rory Stewart, told the House of Commons that two new prisons at Wellingborough, Northants, and Glen Parva, Leicestershire, would be built using conventional public finance, but their operation would be contracted out.[44] On 29 November, he announced a framework competition, under which private operators would seek to be placed on a list of companies which would be eligible to bid in future competitions, including the planned programme for 10,000 new places to replace old prisons, and also for prisons currently operated privately, when those contracts end. It was implied that the public sector would be excluded from all such competitions. He said: "This Government remains committed to a role for the private sector in operating custodial services. The competition launched today will seek to build on the innovation and different ways of working that the private sector has previously introduced to the system. The sector has an important role to play, and currently runs some high-performing prisons, as part of a decent and secure prison estate.....A balanced approach to custodial services provision, which includes a mix of public, voluntary and private sector involvement has been shown to introduce improvements and deliver value for money for taxpayers."[45]
The Secretary of State for Justice announced on 9 July 2019 that 6 companies had been accepted on to the Prison Operators Service Framework: G4S Care and Custody Services UK Limited, Interserve Investments Limited, Management and Training Corporation Works Limited, Mitie Care & Custody, Serco Limited, and Sodexo Limited.[46] Of the two new contenders, Interserve had operated offender services in the community as part of the Purple Futures consortium: the Chief Inspector of Probation had rated 4 out of their 5 operations as ‘requiring improvement’.[47] The other, MTC, has run prisons in the USA, several of which have been the subject of serious failures and scandals.
The Secretary of State added: "The Government is committed to a mixed market of custodial services. The Prison Operator Framework will increase the diversity and resilience of the custodial services market in England and Wales, by creating a pool of prison operators who can provide high quality, value for money, custodial and maintenance services and enable us to effectively and efficiently manage a pipeline of competition over the next six years."
On 26 June 2020 the Government announced plans for a further 4 prisons, although a site only exists for one of them. It claimed, without evidence, that the new prisons would cut reoffending. It stated that at least one of the four would be publicly run.[48]
Contractual arrangements
In the UK there are three ways in which a private company may take on management of a prison:
- Companies compete to finance, design, build and run a new prison under the private finance initiative. Most prisons in the UK are of this kind, although the use of PFI has now been abandoned.
- The Government builds a prison and then contracts out its operation.
- A prison formerly operated by the public sector prison service may be contracted out after competition ("market testing").
Prisons may be re-competed at the end of the contract. Increasingly, a range of services within all prisons, whether public or privately run, are contracted out on a regional basis: this includes works and FM services, and rehabilitation programmes.
Governance and accountability
Privately run prisons are run under contracts which set out the standards that must be met. Payments may be deducted for poor performance against the contract. Government monitors ("controllers") work permanently within each privately managed prison to check on conditions and treatment of prisoners. The framework for regulation and accountability is much the same for privately run prisons as for publicly run ones. In England and Wales they are subject to unannounced inspection by HM Chief Inspector of Prisons, to monitoring by local Independent Monitoring Boards and prisoner complaints are dealt with by the Prison and Probation Ombudsman. Similar arrangements exist in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
Evaluation
There has been little systematic, objective evaluation of private prisons in the UK. The best study, by the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, using direct observation of staff and prisoner behaviour, found that public sector staff tended to be more knowledgeable and confident, while the private sector treated prisoners more respectfully, though one private prison scored well on both.[49] Earlier, cruder, studies came to broadly the same conclusion.[50] Another study found marked improvements in prisoner quality of life at Birmingham prison after transfer from public to private sector (though subsequently, conditions at Birmingham deteriorated to such a degree that the contract was ended and the prison returned to public operation).[51] An analysis of performance assessments of individual prisons by the Chief Inspector of Prisons and by the Prison Service suggested no consistent difference in service quality between sectors [52] The same study showed that construction and operating costs were for many years much lower in the private sector, but that the gap has narrowed. In May 2019, the Labour Party spokesman on prisons published data showing that the rate of assaults in privately run local prisons is around 40% higher than in publicly run ones.[53]
Controversies
In early 2012, Frances Crook, chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform said Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Prisons encountered an almost nine-fold rise in restraint used in the previous year at Ashfield Young Offenders Institution, which holds 15- to 18-year-olds. She cited "many incidents of strip searching children unnecessarily". Force had been used almost 150 times a month compared to 17 times monthly the prior year, recalling it had "chilling echoes" of circumstances in the choking death of a 15-year-old at Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre after restraints had been applied. Frequent use of force followed failure of wards to obey staff instructions. Three years earlier the institution recorded more than 600 attacks on inmates in one year - the highest number of every jail, including adults, in the country. Crook claimed "This jail has a history of failing children and the public." Managers claimed the increase was due to better reporting of the use of restraints. The institution had been half full during the previous unannounced inspection in 2010. The chief inspector of prisons noted "some staff lacked confidence in challenging poor behaviour." The director of the prison and the YOI admitted there is "room for improvement."[54]
Six members of staff were dismissed from G4S-operated Rainsbrook Secure Training Centre for children in Rugby in May 2015 following a series of incidents of gross misconduct. G4S took the action in response to an Ofsted inspection that reported some staff being on drugs while on duty, colluding with detainees and behaving "extremely inappropriately". The behaviour allegedly included causing distress and humiliation to children by subjecting them to degrading treatment and racist comments.[55][56]
Four G4S team leaders of Medway Secure Training Centre in
G4S-run Medway managers received performance-related pay awards in April 2016, despite the chief inspector of prisons weeks saying weeks earlier that "managerial oversight failed to protect young people from harm at the jail." In January, Panorama showed an undercover reporter working as a guard at the Medway secure training centre (STC) in Kent. The film showed children allegedly being mistreated and claimed that staff falsified records of violent incidents. No senior managers were disciplined or dismissed. Prior to the Panorama programme's broadcast, the Youth Justice Board (YJB), which oversees youth custody in England, stopped placing children in Medway. In February, a Guardian investigation revealed that, in 2003, whistleblowers had warned G4S, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and the YJB that staff were mistreating detained children. Their letter, forwarded by Prof John Pitts, a youth justice expert, was ignored. When the prisons inspectorate carried out a snap inspection at Medway it found detainees reported staff had used insulting, aggressive or racist language toward them and felt unsafe in facility portions not covered by closed circuit TV. Reviewers agreed to the legitimacy of evidence presented by Panorama showing, "...targeted bullying of vulnerable boys," by employees, and that, "A larger group of staff must have been aware of unacceptable practice but did not challenge or report this behaviour."
In an earlier Ofsted report on Medway, inspectors said staff and middle managers reported feeling a lack of leadership and having "low, or no confidence in senior managers." Nick Hardwick, at the time the chief inspector of prisons said, "Managerial oversight failed to protect young people from harm. Effective oversight is key to creating a positive culture that prevents poor practice happening and ensuring it is reported when it does." The Guardian newspaper learned that senior managers at Medway received performance-related pay awards in April amounting to between 10-25% of their annual salaries, according to seniority. One 15-year-old girl placed at Medway in 2009 said she was frequently unlawfully restrained over 18 months, citing an occasion in which her face was repeatedly slammed into icy ground. "I assumed the senior management team would be sacked... But now it looks like they have been rewarded for allowing children to be abused in prison," she said. Former Labour MP Sally Keeble has complained about G4S maltreatment in STC's for over ten years, stating: "This is people making personal profit out of tragedy. I hope that justice minister Liz Truss would intervene and make sure these bonuses are not being paid by a Ministry of Justice contractor." Notwithstanding the results of the investigations no senior managers at Medway were disciplined or dismissed.[60] In May, the MoJ said the National Offender Management Service (NOMS) would take over the running of Medway. In July, it formally assumed control of the STC. In February 2016, G4S had announced that it was to sell its children's services business, including the contract to manage two secure training centres. The company hoped to complete the process by the end of 2016.[61]
Following release of an extremely critical report regarding a G4S-operated jail, the Labour party's shadow justice secretary said they would be inclined to take control of for-profit prisons if the industry competitors had not met deadlines imposed upon them. Sadiq Khan's response stressed the need for better contracting, to include liquidated damages provisions. The chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick, recommended the crafting of a takeover contingency plan. "It's not delivering what the public should expect of the millions being paid to G4S to run it." Khan said, " I see no difference whether the underperformance is in the public, private or voluntary sector... We shouldn't tolerate mediocrity in the running of our prisons." Khan continued: "We can't go on with scandal after scandal, where the public's money is being squandered and the quality of what's delivered isn't up to scratch. The government is too reliant on a cosy group of big companies. The public are rightly getting fed up to the back teeth of big companies making huge profits out of the taxpayer, which smacks to them of rewards for failure."[62]
United States
In 2018, 8.41% of prisoners in the United States were housed in private prisons.[63] On January 25, 2021, President Joe Biden issued an executive order to stop the United States Department of Justice from renewing further contracts with private prisons, although most facilities are run by the states so the order will only apply to about 14,000 inmates housed in federal prisons.[64]
Early history
One of the earliest examples of prison privatization in the US was in Louisiana in 1844, where a company produced clothing in a factory with inmate labor.
During
Southern prisoners laid railroad tracks, worked on plantations, mined coal and performed other labor while enduring terrible conditions including torture as a form of punishment. The system was extremely profitable for former slaveowners and the states. For example, ten percent of Alabama’s budget came from convict leases between 1880 and 1904. This system of unpaid labor remained in place until the early 20th century.[65]1980s–2009
Federal and state governments have a long history of contracting out specific services to private firms, including medical services, food preparation, vocational training, and inmate transportation. However, the 1980s ushered in a new era of prison privatization as the
Modern private prisons first emerged in 1984 when the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), now known as CoreCivic, was awarded a contract to take over operation of a jail in Hamilton County, Tennessee.[71] The following year, CCA gained further public attention when it offered to take over the entire state prison system of Tennessee for $200 million. The bid was ultimately defeated due to strong opposition from public employees and the skepticism of the state legislature.[72] Sixty-six additional private prisons were opened in the US between 1984 and 1990.[66]
CCA's $52 million January 1997 purchase of Washington, D.C.'s $100 million Central Treatment Facility was "the first time a prison has been sold outright (although under a lease-back arrangement, ownership is supposed to revert to D.C. after 20 years)."[73]
2010s
Statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice show that, as of 2019, there were 116,000 state and federal prisoners housed in privately owned prisons in the U.S., constituting 8.1% of the overall U.S. prison population. Broken down to prison type, 15.7% of the federal prison population in the United States is housed in private prisons and 7.1% of the U.S. state prison population is housed in private prisons.[74]
As of 2017, after a period of steady growth, the number of inmates held in private prisons in the United States has declined modestly and continues to represent a small share of the nation's total prison population.
According to journalist Matt Taibbi, Wall Street banks took notice of this influx of cash, and are now some of the prison industry's biggest investors. Wells Fargo has around $100 million invested in GEO Group and $6 million in CCA. Other major investors include Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, General Electric and The Vanguard Group. CCA's share price went from a dollar in 2000 to $34.34 in 2013.[76] Sociologist John L. Campbell and activist and journalist Chris Hedges respectively assert that prisons in the United States have become a "lucrative" and "hugely profitable" business.[77][78]
In June 2013, students at Columbia University discovered that the institution owned $8 million worth of CCA stock. Less than a year later, students formed a group called Columbia Prison Divest, and delivered a letter to the president of the University demanding total divestment from CCA and full disclosure of future investments.[79] By June 2015, the board of trustees at Columbia University voted to divest from the private prison industry.[80]
CoreCivic (previously CCA) has a capacity of more than 80,000 beds in 65 correctional facilities. The GEO Group operates 57 facilities with a capacity of 49,000 offender beds.[81] The company owns or runs more than 100 properties that operate more than 73,000 beds in sites across the world.[82]
Most privately run facilities are located in the southern and western portions of the United States and include both state and federal offenders.[83] For example, Pecos, Texas is the site of the largest private prison in the world, the Reeves County Detention Complex, operated by the GEO Group.[84] It has a capacity of 3,763 prisoners in its three sub-complexes,[85]
Private prison firms, reacting to reductions in prison populations, are increasingly looking away from mere incarceration and are seeking to maintain profitability by expanding into new markets previously served by non-profit behavioral health and treatment-oriented agencies, including prison medical care, forensic mental hospitals, civil commitment centers, halfway houses and home arrest.[86][87][88]
A 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Justice asserts that privately operated federal facilities are less safe, less secure and more punitive than other federal prisons.
Stock prices for CCA and GEO Group surged following Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 elections.[92][93] On February 23, the DOJ under Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned the ban on using private prisons. According to Sessions, "the (Obama administration) memorandum changed long-standing policy and practice, and impaired the bureau's ability to meet the future needs of the federal correctional system. Therefore, I direct the bureau to return to its previous approach."[94] Additionally, both CCA and GEO Group have been expanding into the immigrant detention market. Although the combined revenues of CCA and GEO Group were about $4 billion in 2017 from private prison contracts, their number one customer was ICE.[95]
Impact
According to a 2021 study, private prison inmates serve longer time in prison than comparable inmates in public prisons.[96] According to Elizabeth S. Anderson, private prisons generate profits by "maximizing the number of beds filled per day" and "primarily by cutting salaries, staff numbers, and staff training." As a result of the latter, according to a 2016 report by the OIG on privatized federal prisons, privatized facilities see prisoner-on-prisoner assault rates that are 32 percent higher, prisoner-on-staff assault rates 260 percent higher, and rates of prisoner-on-staff sexual assault 500 percent higher when compared to state-run facilities. She says while the state-run facilities are "horrific" for both staff and prisoners, "the profit motive in privatized punishment merely adds to the unconscionable harms and injustices of the American system of mass incarceration."[97]
Increase in the prison population
From 1925 to 1980 the prison population stayed consistent with the general population. The private prison population began to increase at an disproportional rate in 1983 (the year that private prisons began operation in the United States). From 1925 to 1980 the prison population had a gradual increase from 150,000 to 250,000. However, From 1983 to 2016 the prison population has increased from 250,000 to 1,500,000.[98]
The exact causes for this overwhelming increase cannot be assigned to individual policies as even similar types of criminal sentencing policies were associated with wildly different rates of incarceration in different communities due to powerful external factors such as income disparity, racial makeup, and even the party affiliation of the lawmakers [99] Correlated with the rise of incarceration rates in the United States was the abolition of loose sentencing guidelines for crimes.[99] Before 1970 in the United States judges were given generally wide sentencing frames (2–20 years), allowing judges ample room for judicial discretion. Liberal Americans argued that this system left room for discrimination in sentencing while conservatives argued that this discretion led to unduly lenient sentences. Under pressure from both sides, many states adopted presumptive sentencing practices or presumptive sentencing guidelines. These policies presented a single recommended sentence among the wider statutory range. This left judges with some room to increase or reduce the sentence in response to mitigating or aggravating circumstances but generally limited their discretion under penalty of automatic appeal through appellate review. Accompanying this change was the adoption of determinate sentencing practices. These acted in the same way as presumptive sentencing but instead concerned release. Adoption of these type of laws effectively ended discretionary parole release for all offenses and made mandatory minimum sentences the norm.[99] Researchers have had mixed results in trying to determine whether these policies themselves led to increased incarceration rates and the results largely depended on the demographics of the community in question. Based on a correlation matrix assembled by Stemen and Rengifo it was shown that the percentage of black residents in a community had a much higher correlation with an increased incarceration rate than the area's choice of sentencing policy. Determinate sentencing was however linked with increased drug arrests which correlated highly with increased incarceration rate and minority population percentage. Determinate and structured sentencing policies on their own lead to more stable jail times as they leave less room for judicial input. In doing so they embody the attitudes of the population at the time they were created. As a result of their static nature these policies were not well adapted to face the wave of drug related offenses created by the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the modern opioid crisis.
When Reagan's War on Drugs lead to a massive rise in numbers in prisons, private prison operators were quick to seize the opportunity. According to statistics from "The Problem with Private Prisons—Justice Policy Institute",[100] from 1990 to 2005 there was a 1600 percent increase in the American private prison population. However, the vast majority of prisoners, over 90 percent, remain in publicly-run prisons .[101]
Cost–benefit analysis
To properly compare the benefits of private versus public prisons, the prisons must share common factors such as similar levels of security, number of staff, and population in the prisons.[102] Studies, some partially industry-funded, often conclude that states can save money by using for-profit prisons. However, academic or state-funded studies have found that private prisons tend to keep more low-cost inmates and send high-cost back to state-run prisons. This is counterproductive to the cost benefit analysis of the Private Prisons and contradicts the original selling point of the CCA and other private prisons; "to mitigate the cost of running prisons".[103] In practice these companies have not been shown to definitively reduce costs and have created several unintended outcomes. The supposed benefit of outsourcing correctional services takes root in the liberal economic idea that having multiple companies compete to provide a service would naturally make the companies innovate and find ways to increase their efficiency to win more contracts than the others. Few companies ever got involved in the business. In the United States CoreCivic, GEO Group Incorporated, and Management and Training Corporation house all the privately held federal inmates and most state inmates across the United States. (United States, Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General,1 ) Naturally, this means there is little competition within the industry.
When comparing the quality of the services that private prisons provide versus their public counterparts a 2016 report from the Office of the Inspector General found that private facilities underperformed their public counterparts in several key safety areas. 14 private prisons were surveyed in this study and compared to 14 federally operated facilities of the same security level in this study. Privately run facilities were found to have higher rates of inmate on inmate and inmate on staff assaults per capita.[104] Twice as many weapons and eight times as many contraband phones were confiscated per capita at private facilities versus their public counterparts.[104]
Determining the quality per dollar spent by private prisons is a difficult proposition. At a surface level the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) reports that private prisons expended an average of $22,488 annually per capita from 2011-2014 while BOP institutions expended $24,426.[104] This may seem like a clear indication of savings but there is a critical lack of information about how the money supplied to private institutions is being spent each month. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) which oversees both federal and private prisons in the United States does not receive cost information broken out by function or department for private institutions, leaving them no way to compare the expenditures made in key cost-saving areas such as food and medical care. Without this data federal overseers cannot adequately evaluate the efficiency of the programs offered at private institutions. Several Research studies have indicated that the cost savings indicated in these reports may come from lower wages, lower staffing levels and reduced employee training at these private facilities.[105] Another consideration when examining these cost savings is the disparity in the inmates housed at private facilities versus those that are publicly funded. Private institutions often have a laundry list of internal rules about the kinds of prisoners they will house. These rules are designed to prevent private companies from taking on prisoners that will be particularly costly to house. Christopher Petrella a researcher at the University of California investigated some of the rules set forth by CoreCivic in their contract with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Based on their agreement CoreCivic could refuse the intake of prisoners over a multitude of health issues such as HIV of Hepatitis C positive status as well as mental health concerns.[106] This is indicative of a greater trend across the United States. Private prisons tend to house prisoner that carry lower risk levels and require fewer services than their public counterparts making direct comparisons of savings unreliable.
According to a 2020 study of private prisons in Mississippi, "private prison inmates serve 90 additional days... The delayed release erodes half of the cost savings offered by private contracting and is linked to the greater likelihood of conduct violations in private prisons."[107]
Costs
Proponents of privately run prisons contend that cost-savings and efficiency of operation place private prisons at an advantage over public prisons and support the argument for privatization, but some research casts doubt on the validity of these arguments, as evidence has shown that private prisons are neither demonstrably more cost-effective, nor more efficient than public prisons.[70] An evaluation of 24 different studies on cost-effectiveness revealed that, at best, results of the question are inconclusive and, at worst, there is no difference in cost-effectiveness.[108]
A study by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the cost-savings promised by private prisons "have simply not materialized".[109][failed verification] Some research has concluded that for-profit prisons cost more than public prisons.[110] Furthermore, cost estimates from privatization advocates may be misleading, because private facilities often refuse to accept inmates that cost the most to house. A 2001 study concluded that a pattern of sending less expensive inmates to privately run facilities artificially inflated cost savings.[111] A 2005 study found that Arizona's public facilities were seven times more likely to house violent offenders and three times more likely to house those convicted of more serious offenses.[112] A 2011 report by the American Civil Liberties Union point out that private prisons are more costly, more violent and less accountable than public prisons, and are actually a major contributor to increased mass incarceration.[113] This is most apparent in Louisiana, which has the highest incarceration rate in the world and houses the majority of its inmates in for-profit facilities.[114] Marie Gottschalk, professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that the prison industry "engages in a lot of cherry-picking and cost-shifting to maintain the illusion that the private sector does it better for less." In fact, she notes that studies generally show that private facilities are more dangerous for both correctional officers and inmates than their public counterparts as a result of cost-cutting measures, such as spending less on training for correctional officers (and paying them lower wages) and providing only the most basic medical care for inmates.[105]
A 2014 study by a doctoral candidate at UC Berkeley shows that minorities make up a greater percentage of inmates at private prisons than in their public counterparts, largely because minorities are cheaper to incarcerate. According to the study, for-profit prison operators, in particular CCA and GEO Group, accumulate these low-cost inmates "through explicit and implicit exemptions written into contracts between these private prison management companies and state departments of correction".[115]
Recidivism rates, how many prisoners are re-arrested after release, are not usually considered to measure performance. A study in 2005 found that out of half of the federal prisoners released that year, 49.3% were arrested again later on.[116] Pennsylvania became one of the first states to offer a financial incentive to corrections facilities that were privately operated and could lower their recidivism rates in 2013. In order for these facilities to gain a 1% bonus, they had to lower rates to 10% below the baseline. Together, all 40 of these facilities in the state had an average of 16.4% reduction in their recidivism rates.[102]
Inadequacies including being understaffed
Evidence suggests that lower staffing levels and training at private facilities may lead to increases in the incidence of violence and escapes. A nationwide study found that assaults on guards by inmates were 49 percent more frequent in private prisons than in government-run prisons. The same study revealed that assaults on fellow inmates were 65 percent more frequent in private prisons.[117]
An example of private prisons' inadequate staff training leading to jail violence was reported by two Bloomberg News journalists, Margaret Newkirk and William Selway in Mississippi regarding the now-closed Walnut Grove Correctional Facility (WGCF). According to the journalists, the ratio of staff to prisoners in this prison was only 1 to 120. In a bloody riot in this prison, six inmates were rushed to the hospital, including one with permanent brain damage. During the riot, the staff of the prison did not respond but waited until the melee ended, because prisoners outnumbered staff by a ratio of 60–1. The lack of well-trained staff does not only lead to violence but also corruption. According to a former WGCF prisoner, the corrections officers were also responsible for smuggling operations within the prison. To make more money, some provided prisoners with contraband, including drugs, cellphones and weapons.[118] Law enforcement investigations led to the exposure of a far wider web of corruption.
Bureaucratic corruption scandals
At the Walnut Grove C.F., intense corruption was involved in the construction and operation of, and subcontracting for medical, commissary and other services. After exposure of the rape of a female transitional center prisoner by the mayor, who also served as a warden, a bribery scheme was uncovered. It had paid millions to the corrupt Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps and his conduits. Ten additional officials and consultants, including three former state legislators (two Republicans and one Democrat), were indicted in the Department of Justice's Operation Mississippi Hustle prosecution.
Prior to the Mississippi investigations and prosecutions, a similar investigation began in 2003, dubbed
Judicial corruption scandal
In the
Lobbying
“From 1999-2010, the Sentencing Project found that Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) spent on average, $1.4 million per year on lobbying at the federal level and employed a yearly average of seventy lobbyists at the state level.”[124]
The influence of the for-profit prison industry on the government has been described as the prison–industrial complex.[125][126][127][128]
ALEC has been a major force behind both privatizing state prison space and keeping prisons filled. It puts forward bills providing for mandatory minimum sentences and three-strikes sentencing requirements. About 40 states passed versions of ALEC's Truth in Sentencing model bill, which requires prisoners convicted of violent crimes to serve most of their sentences without chance of parole.[131]
According to Cooper, Heldman, Ackerman, and Farrar-Meyers (2016), ALEC has been known to push for the expansion of the private prison industry by promoting greater use of private prisons, goods, and services; promoting greater use of prison labor; and increasing the size of prison populations. ALEC has had a hand in not only broadening the definition of existing crimes, but also in the creation of new crimes. ALEC is known for developing policies that may threaten civil liberties by increasing the probabilities of incarceration and lengthy sentences (Cooper et al., 2016).
According to a 2010 report by
CCA and GEO have both engaged in state initiatives to increase sentences for offenders and to
OpenSecrets reported that private prison corporations donated a record breaking 1.6 million in federally disclosed contributions in the 2018 midterm elections.[141]
Opposition
Many organizations have called for a moratorium on construction of private prisons, or for their outright abolition.
As of 2013, there has been a modest pushback against the private prison industry, with protests forcing GEO Group to withdraw its $6 million offer for naming rights of
In the final quarter of 2013, Scopia Capital Management, DSM North America, and Amica Mutual Insurance divested around $60 million from CCA and GEO Group.[147] In a Color of Change press release, DSM North America President Hugh Welsh said:
In accordance with the principles of the UN Global Compact, with respect to the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights, the pension fund has divested from the for-profit prison industry. Investment in private prisons and support for the industry is financially unsound, and divestment was the right thing to do for our clients, shareholders, and the country as a whole.[147]
Attempts to limit privatization and increase oversight
Some U.S. states have imposed bans, population limits, and strict operational guidelines on private prisons:
- Banning privatization of state and local facilities—Illinois in 1990 (Private Correctional Facility Moratorium Act), and New York in 2000, enacted laws that ban the privatization of prisons, correctional facilities and any services related to their operation. Louisiana enacted a moratorium on private prisons in 2001. In September 2019, the California legislature passed a bill that would prohibit private prison companies from operating in the state; however, ICE later extended a contract to continue the use of private prisons into the future due to it being exempt from state laws as it is a federal agency pursuant to the Supremacy Clause and due to the fact that Congress has not banned the use of private prisons.[148][149]
- Banning speculative private prison construction—For-profit prison companies have built new prisons before they were awarded privatization contracts in order to lure state contract approval. In 2001, Wisconsin's joint budget committee recommended language to ban all future speculative prison construction in the state. Such anticipatory building dates back to at least 1997, when California Department of Corrections; a CCA official was quoted as saying, "If we build it, they will come".[150]
- Banning exportation and importation of prisoners—To ensure that the state retains control over the quality and security of correctional facilities, North Dakota passed a bill in 2001 that banned the export of Class A and AA felons outside the state. Similarly, Oregon allowed an existing exportation law to sunset in 2001, effectively banning the export of prisoners. Several states have considered banning the importation of prisoners to private facilities.
- Requiring standards comparable to state prisons—New Mexico enacted legislation that transfers supervision of private prisons to the state Secretary of Corrections, ensuring that private prisons meet the same standards as public facilities. In 2001, Nebraska legislation that requires private prisons to meet public prison standards was overwhelmingly approved by the legislature, but pocket-vetoed by the governor.[citation needed] Oklahoma passed a law in 2005 that requires private prisons to have emergency plans in place and mandates state notification of any safety incidents.
The Federal
- Terminating federal contracts. On August 18, 2016, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates announced that the Department of Homeland Security intends to continue to hold some suspected illegal aliens in private prisons.[154]
Media coverage in the United States
Documentary
- Kids for cash scandal was featured in Capitalism: A Love Story, the 2009 documentary by Michael Moore.[155]
- A full-length documentary covering the kids for cash scandal entitled Kids for Cash was released in February 2014.[156]
- mass incarceration of blacks and Latinos, primarily, in the United States. The name refers to the Thirteenth Amendmentwhich abolished slavery, yet allows for involuntary servitude as a punishment for crime.
Drama
- Kids for Cash scandal has also led to several portrayals in fictional works. Both the Crush" and an episode of The Good Wife featured corrupt judges sending children to private detention centers. An episode of Cold Case titled "Jurisprudence" is loosely based on this event.[157][158][159]
- Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black portrays the transformation of the prison from federally owned to a privately owned prison for-profit.
- An episode of Elementary focuses on private prisons competing with each other in New Jersey to win a bid for another prison.
- An episode of Boston Legal sees a 15-year-old former inmate suing a private prison over an alleged rape by one of its corrections officers.[160]
See also
- Convict lease
- Correctional Services Corporation
- Critical Resistance
- Angela Davis
- East Mississippi Correctional Facility
- Prison abolition movement
- Prison–industrial complex
- Private probation
- Privatization
- Public–private partnership
- WackenhutCorp.
- Walnut Grove Correctional Facility
- Winn Correctional Center
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Further reading
- Austin, James; Coventry, Garry (February 2001). Emerging Issues on Privatized Prisons (PDF). Washington, D.C.: OCLC 47042765. NCJ 181249.
- Chang, Tracy F. H.; Thompkins, Douglas E. (2002). "Corporations Go to Prisons: The Expansion of Corporate Power in the Correctional Industry". S2CID 421709.
- Eisen, Lauren-Brooke (2019). Inside Private Prisons: An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration. ISBN 978-0231179713.
- ISBN 978-0674066168.
- Gunderson, Anna (2022). Captive Market: The Politics of Private Prisons in America. Oxford University Press.
- Le Vay, Julian (2015). Competition for Prison: Public or Private?. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Her Majesty's Prison Service. The book is derived from all available analysis on costs of public and private prisons.
- Selman, Donna; Leighton, Paul (2010). Punishment for Sale: Private Prisons, Big Business, and the Incarceration Binge. Issues in Crime and Justice. Guilford, Conn.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. .
External links
- How private prisons game the system. Salon. December 1, 2011.
- America's private prison system is a national disgrace. The Guardian. 13 June 2013
- The Business of Mass Incarceration. Chris Hedges, Truthdig. Jul 28, 2013.
- Prisoners of Profit: Private Prison Empire Rises Despite Startling Record Of Juvenile Abuse. Chris Kirkham, The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013
- Revolt at "Ritmo": Dire Conditions in For-Profit Texas Immigration Jail Spark Prisoner Uprising. Democracy Now! February 24, 2015.
- How for-profit prisons have become the biggest lobby no one is talking about. The Washington Post. April 28, 2015.
- Study finds private prisons keep inmates longer, without reducing future crime. University of Wisconsin–Madison News, June 10, 2015.
- We Must End For-Profit Prisons. Bernie Sanders for The Huffington Post. September 22, 2015.
- Private Prison Exec Waves Off Criminal Justice Reform, Predicts More Profits. The Intercept. December 22, 2015.
- "This Man Will Almost Certainly Die": The Secret Deaths of Dozens at Privatized Immigrant-Only Jails. Democracy Now! February 9, 2016.
- "My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard". Shane Bauer for Mother Jones, June 2016.
- Ending the Barbarity. Jacobin. August 24, 2016.
- Private prison stocks are soaring after Donald Trump's election. Business Insider. November 9, 2016.
- "Private Prisons: Who Profits?". Global Business. BBC World Service. August 19, 2017. Covers the current state of private prisons in the UK and the US.
- A Federal Judge Put Hundreds of Immigrants Behind Bars While Her Husband Invested in Private Prisons. Mother Jones, August 24, 2017.