As a business grows it can make the choice to go public. With most businesses, exposure is the key to growth. The more people that know about the company, the more sales they can do. Instead, they need capital boosts for two other reasons. By going public , they can see a sudden influx of money that would allow them to build that second prison.
Still, there is another reason to go public for a private prison. In order to stay in business, these prisons need a constant stream of inmates coming in to replace those that have served their sentence. This means that laws have to be enforced, contracts renewed, and in some cases, laws more strictly enforced.
Corporations may lobby lawmakers for their support or otherwise advocate for stronger enforcement of laws. On the surface, a private prison seems like a great idea. The problem lies in the economics behind prisoners. One of the goals of the prison system is to rehabilitate people.
Based on a U. This makes one wonder: is prison supposed to rehabilitate the individual, or is it supposed to earn money? If the goal is to earn money, then a high prison population is the end goal. Another problem that arises is the fact that these are for-profit businesses. This means that if they can cut staff pay or benefits or services from their list, then they save money. Cutting cleaning makes the company more money but provides unhealthy and inhumane living conditions for the inmates.
Cutting costs ultimately affects the people incarcerated and diminishes the quality of their living quarters. Finally, the law needs to be structured in such a way that it allows a steady stream of new inmates. This ties back to that lobbying aspect: stricter laws mean more people in the system. More people in the system means more money for the prison. Many have argued that this is the entire reason that the war on drugs was started: another set of laws that could incarcerate thousands of people every single year.
Some lawmakers have advocated for prisoner releases to help reduce the prison population and slow the spread. Throughout the height of the pandemic, prison releases did not increase. The slight decline in prison populations amid the pandemic has been from fewer admissions and not more releases. Many of these prisons save the government money, but some actually cost more per inmate than a public facility would cost.
The capitalist mindset says any time an industry can be run privately it is better for the economy. The socialist mindset says that the government should be supplying those services. The realist says that the prison system is overcrowded as it is. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Accessed Nov. Department of Justice. The Sentencing Project. Growth in Private Prisons: Overview. Prison Policy Initiative. While operational privatization has spread to a handful of countries, the largest private prison corporations are US-based, multibillion-dollar multinational companies that are traded on stock exchanges.
As such, private prisons are the tip of a much larger criminal justice CJ —industrial complex, which describes a range of business and financial interests whose profit motive can shape criminal justice policy, including in ways that perpetuate current injustices. The CJ-industrial complex, mirroring the military-industrial complex President Eisenhower warned of, is comprised of everyone who financially profits from the police, courts, and corrections system.
In turn, it is part of a larger security-industrial complex, which includes private security, investigators, intelligence, and technology sold as a response to real and exaggerated fear of crime, hackers, terrorists, and youth. Even when considered on its own, though, the CJ-industrial complex is significant because it could also mirror the concerns Eisenhower had: that because of its size and lobbying power, the defense industry could start to make policy based too much on its own interest rather than for the public good.
Eisen provides the most recent and comprehensive overview of private prisons in the United States, based on research, visits, and interviews. Price and Morris is a three-volume encyclopedia that covers a wide range of general and niche issues. Carceral describes being an inmate in a private prison whose understaffing and turnover led to a riot.
In contrast to the larger volume of critical material on private prisons, the anthology Tabarrok is an overview of key issues written by supporters of privatization. Logan is an early favorable overview of private prisons. Bauer, Shane. New York: Penguin Press. After four weeks of training, he starts twelve- to sixteen-hour days in a violent and understaffed prison, chronicling the prison environment and his personal transformation. Carceral, K.
Prison, Inc. Edited by Thomas Bernard. New York: New York Univ. Pseudonymously written account by an inmate in a private prison reflecting on prison life leading up to a riot.
The author points to low pay, high turnover, inadequate training, and low staffing for a situation where inmates basically ran the prison. Eisen, Lauren-Brooke. Inside private prisons: An American dilemma in the age of mass incarceration. New York: Columbia Univ. Each topic contains a great deal of information representing many sides of the debate through her exhaustive literature review, reporting of on-site visits, and interviews. Hallett, Michael.
Private prisons in America: A critical race perspective. Urbana: Univ. The author examines punishment through the lens of political economy and the control of the surplus population. The unemployed, unemployable, and undeserving surplus population are disproportionately minority, while rewards for their social control go to capitalist businesses and tough on crime politicians.
Similarly, in April , current Attorney General William Barr rescinded a decision 22 that enabled eligible asylum-seekers to request bond from immigration judges. This decision effectively instituted indefinite detention 23 due to the fact that some migrants will now be held in detention for months or years before their cases are adjudicated.
Moreover, in July , DHS increased its application of expedited removal, a fast-track summary process 24 for deporting noncitizens without a hearing from an immigration judge. Last week, the Trump administration issued a final rule in a legally questionable attempt to make changes 25 to the Flores agreement, 26 a long-standing legal agreement specifying basic standards of care for minors in detention.
As interpreted, this agreement requires that minors not be held in unlicensed secure detention facilities for more than 20 days. In , the last time ICE produced such data, more than three-fourths 32 of the average daily detainee population was being held in a for-profit detention facility.
CoreCivic and the GEO Group are recipients of more than one-half of private prison industry contracts. A record number of immigrants have died in detention. Johana Medina Leon, also a transgender woman, died shortly after being released from custody.
Trump administration policies around enforcement priorities and detention practices have led to an increase in the demand for detention space, which has resulted in record-high profits for private detention facilities.
Under the Trump administration, ICE has significantly increased its enforcement operations, which has directly contributed to the rise in the migrant detainee population. In order to achieve this, ICE has consistently exceeded its budget. Congress provided funds for ICE to maintain an average of 45, people in detention per day in the latest budget, but with about 54, migrants in detention currently, the agency is overspending these funds by more than 15 percent.
This is the fourth consecutive fiscal year in which DHS has repurposed funds meant for other agency operations toward immigration enforcement.
During his campaign, then-candidate Trump expressed support for expanding the role of private prisons and espoused hard-line immigration policies. Marshals Service—for their business. A Office of Inspector General OIG report 52 on an investigation of ICE oversight of its contracted detention facilities indicates that the agency routinely waives its own standards, including those meant to ensure the health and safety of detainees.
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