Private Prisons Essay

In the US alone there are 2,220,300 people detained in prisons. Of those detainees 6.8 percent of them are held in private prisons, While that number does not seem as drastic when compared to the number of inmates in public and state run penitentiaries, if more people were aware of the conditions that are thrust upon inmates in private prison systems, then they would feel incredibly sorry when they knew of the poor treatment and abuse that they deal with everyday. Private prisons should be outlawed by the US justice department because of their corrupt values and their inadequate training of CO’s. The main argument that those who are in favor of private prisons make is that they are cheaper to the taxpayers than regular prisons. “Researchers compared eight different studies, half of which found private prisons to be more cost-efficient,”(Ryan1)” In the article “The benefits of private prisons,” Ryan states that more prisons should be privately run because they are cost

Shane Bauer in his Mother Jones article, “My four months as a private prison guard,” gives a detailed account of how unfit they are as he describes his time when he went undercover in a private prison in Winnfield Louisiana. His horrifying accounts tell of his training, which only took three days as opposed to the usual year for other CO’s, and his actual times guarding the prison. When he talks about the faulty training, he recalls that the guards dont care for the prisoners safety, just as long as the CO’s dont get injured. “The next raise you get is not going to be much more than the one you got last time. The only thing that's important to us is that we go home at the end of the day. Period. So if them fools want to cut each other, well, happy cutting." (Bauer