Prison Privatization Essay

Introduction

In recent years, prison privatization has emerged as a prime example of the contentious division, or lack thereof, between public duty and private enterprise. Despite this, the practice has seen implementation all around the world, from the United Kingdom and Australia to most obviously in the United States, and even in Canada (Feeley, 2002). Levels of success vary, especially in the case of Canada, where efforts to privatize ended as quickly as they began with a return to government control (Gran & Henry, 2007). It is argued that the issue is foremost one of principle, with governments having to consider giving a public duty over to the private domain (Genders, 2002). Yet beyond this abstraction, there is a world of practicalities

In this paper, the privatization of whole prisons will be focused upon. Since the first of such private prisons opened in Texas in 1984, prison privatization has become a more and more attractive option to the United States as the War on Drugs has caused overcrowding (Jing, 2010; Hallett, 2002). Rising prison populations there as well as across the world, coupled with a push for austerity measures in response to an increasingly strained economic climate, make private prisons look even more desirable (Armstrong & MacKenzie, 2003). They ease the strain on public prison overcrowding and advertise lower construction and operational costs, and in exchange generate a profit through their prisoners, as “the state pays private prison companies a per diem rate for each prisoner” (Kyle, 2013, p.

Research done in Oklahoma, a state with one of the highest rates of prison privatization, between 1997 and 2001 suggests that inmates released from private prisons are at a higher risk of recidivism (Spivak & Sharp, 2008). Recidivism was measured as, generally, a “return to prison,” and results were controlled for all factors not related to the sector of the prisons involved, like “prior incarceration; offense type; probation, parole, or discharge release” (Spivak & Sharp, 2008, p. 487-491). These results are not isolated, as they can be supplemented by a similar and more recent study done between 2007 and 2008 in Minnesota, where higher rates of recidivism were also found in all models tested using various definitions of recidivism and various controls (Duwe & Clark, 2013). The way recidivism is measured in these studies, as a return to prison, means another person the private prison gets to charge the government for. The more people private prisons can get to come back, the more profit they make, though at the expense of the government. This can be seen as a measure of performance or efficiency on the part of a private prison, but considering governmental priorities to keep prison populations under control, this proves quite inefficient. But it is important to note that the impact of recidivism does reach far beyond just cost; recidivism contributes to a lifetime of