Private Prisons Essay

Cody Mason, a program associate at the Sentencing Project, prepared a report on private prisons in America. She reports that to reduce the cost, private prisons have failed to provide services that are necessary to maintain safety in prisons (Cody Mason, 2012, p. 2). Private prisons have strained the personnel and program aspects of incarceration which are very expensive by receiving petite funding all with the idea of saving on cost. She also reports that private prisons attempt to control cost by regular providing lower staff benefits, salary and salary advances than publicly run facilities. Because of the high employee turnover, the new staff is also under-trained as compared to state and federal run prisons. This mainly degrades the amount

In 2010, Idaho Correctional Center, run by CCA was accused of treating inmates like gladiators after footage from the prison showed guards standing by and just watching a man beat another into a comma. The facility was also accused of using hard violence against prisoners just to get their cooperation. Back in 2009, Linda Lingle, who was Hawaii’s governor at the time, spearheaded plans to recover over 150 female prisoners that had been held in Otter Creek Correctional Center Kentucky, a CCA-run correctional facility. This had been after high reports of sexual abuse in the facility which was about four times the level reported in a state-run counterpart in the previous year. To conclude this section, in Feb 2007, an African man was left dying for more than 13 hours from a head injury in Elizabeth Detention Center, a CCA-run facility in New Jersey (Cody Mason, 2012, p. 11). A study conducted by a professor at George Washington University showed that private prisons had a 50% higher incident rate of inmate on staff and 66% higher incident rate of inmate on inmate assaults than federal