Private Prisons and Interest Groups
Privately owned prisons began to emerge in the mid-1980s. These prisons emerged because of the ideological imperatives of the free market, the huge increase in the number of prisoners, and the substantial increase in imprisonment costs. (1) Proponents of privatized prisons put forward a simple case: The private sector can do it cheaper and more efficiently. Corporations such as Correction Corporation of America and Wackenhut promised design and management innovations without reducing costs or sacrificing quality of service. (1) Many interest groups comprised of correctional officers, labor works, and a few citizen groups strongly oppose the privatization of the prison system. I will identify four of these groups that oppose private prisons, describe what each has sought to accomplish, and how they have gone about it and to what extent they have been successful.
The AFSCME Corrections United (or ACU) is an affiliate of the labor group known as The American Federation of State, City, and Municipal Employees. This group is composed of 60,000 correction officers and 20,000 correction employees. They've joined forces in a labor union to fight for better pay and benefits, for safe work places, and to uphold the standard of professionalism in their field. (2) AFSCME Corrections United claims that private prisons threaten public and worker safety and rip off taxpayers. They have launched a nationwide campaign to urge legislators to keep prisons in public hands and to educate the public on the dangers of private prisons. This group has used such methods as conducting media campaigns, letter writing campaigns, trying to pass legislation, lobbying government officials, and engaging in appropriate ...
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Smith, Phil. "Private Prisons: Profits of Crime." Covert Action Quarterly Fall 1993
Should prisons in the United States be for profit? How do for profit prisons benefit the United States? Would inmates rather be in private or public correctional centers? What kind of affects does this have on taxpayers? What are the pros and cons of profit prisons? These are many of the questions that are brought up when discussing for profit prison systems. There are different perspectives that can be taken when it comes to talking about for profit prisons. This paper will discuss some of the ways that the United States has started to become for profit and why it has happened. Finally, this paper will give an opinion of whether or not for profit prisons should be dominant over public facilities.
Private prisons are correctional institutions ran by for-profit corporations. They claim to cost less than prisons ran by the state, while offering the same level of service. In fact, the Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest for-profit prison corporations, states that their business strategy is to provide quality corrections service while offering a better value to their government partners at the same time making a profit (CCA 2010). However, opponents of private prisons say they do not save states money because of their hidden cost. At any rate, more than a few states have found private prisons to be advantageous. For one reason, many states are facing massive deficits and are l...
... law, government supervisors and to the public through the political system available. (Austin and Coventry, 2001). The private prisons are also answerable to the insurers, investors, competitors and the stockholders. Competition from other competitors therefore acts as a better mechanism for control which is not experienced by public prisons. The problem of funding and allocating space efficiently in the prisons would decrease if there were better markets that sell, buy and rent the prison cells. The private prisons are based in such a way that they have introduced factories behind the bars allowing them to reduce their costs and allowing the inmates to earn some money and pay in their own way and give back to the community where they resided. The public prisons do this to some extent which however cannot match that of the private prisons. (Silverman and Ira, 2001).
The United States is a nation with the largest prison population and crime rates in the world. When the governmental controlled facilities were in a deficit where they lacked funds and space could not house the inmates, private prisons were developed. Along with the solution of private of prisons, the controversy concerning the funding of health care, recovery and other expenses have been one of the fundamental concerns for the American Justice System. Both the private and public facilities came together and join a partnership where the government facility agreed to bear the expenses of healthcare and other medical exams, and the private facility would find spaces and funds to house inmates. However, to continuously gain profit, the sentencing
Muhlhausen, D. B., Dyer, C. C., McDonough, J. R., Nadlemann, E., & Walters, R. (2006). Do prisons protect public safety? In C. Hanrahan (Ed.), Opposing Viewpoints: America’s prisons (pp. 16-48). Detroit: Bonnie Szumski.
There are many citizen concerns, including the premise that private prison companies lobby governments to increase punishments and penalties to fill their facilities. Mr. Geoffrey Segal writes “It is unlikely that private prison firms are going to sway policy in favor of greater incarceration when such polices are obviously already very popular with the general population” in his online article published also on The Reason on November of 2002, Mr. Segal is the director of privatization and government reform at Reason Foundation. witha B.A in political science from Arizona State University, and a Master of Public Policy from Pepperdine University. The prison system as an industry, according to Randy Gragg privately owned prisons are starting to flourish again, Mr. Gragg is the editor-in-chief of Portland monthly, he wrote the article “A High-Security, Low-Risk Investment: Private Prisons Make Crime Pay” for Harper’s magazine on August 1996 Mr. Gragg is a Harvard University graduate of the school of design, and the national art journalism fellow at Columbia University. The
The system of the Prison Industrial Complex operates within the law. The law allows private companies to infiltrate the prison, while keeping prisoners in a subjugated position. The law, under the Eight Amendment obligates prison officials to provide prisoners with “adequate” medical care. This principle applies regardless of whether the medical care provided is by governmental employees or by private medical staff under contract with the government (Project, 2012). If prisoners believe they are being denied their constitutio...
Private prisons in the United States, came about in the early 1980s when the war on drugs resulted in a mass wave of inmates, which led to the lack of the prison system’s ability to hold a vast number of inmates. When the cost became too much for the government to handle, private sectors sought this as an opportunity to expand their businesses through the prison industry. Since the opening of private prisons, the number of prisons and inmates it can hold has grown over the last two decades. With the rising number of inmates, profits have also substantially grown along with the number of investors. But what eventually became a problem amongst the private prison industry was their “cost-saving” strategies, which have been in constant debate ever
...s Today. (February 1996): 28-31. Proquest. Online. Internet. 1998 Johnson, John H. “Man Who Escaped Virginia Chain Gang Back in Jail After 42 Years.” Jet. April 13, 1998: 20 “Let the Prisoners Work: Crime Doesn’t Pay, But Prison Labor Can Benefit Everyone.” Christianity Today. (February 9, 1998): 14. Proquest. Online. Internet. 1998 Paventi, Christian. “Pay Now, Pay Later: States Impose Prison Peonage.” . The Progressive. (July 1996): 26-30. Proquest. Online. Internet. 1998 Reynolds, Marylee N. “Back on the Chain Gang.” Corrections Today. (April 1996): 180-184. Proquest. Online. Internet. 1998 Reynolds, Morgan O. “The Economics of Prison Industries: The Products of Our Prison.” Vital Speeches of the Day. (November 1, 1996): 58. Proquest. Online. Internet. 1998 Selke, William L. Prisons in Crisis. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. 1993. page 8
Zito, M. (2003, December 8). Prison Privatization: Past and Present. International Foundation for Protection Officers. Retrieved from http://www.ifpo.org/articlebank/prison_privatization.html
A private prison or for-profit prison, jail, or detention center is a place in which individuals are physically confined or interned by a third party that is contracted by a government agency. Private prison companies typically have contractual agreements with the governments that commit prisoners and then pay a per diem or monthly rate for each prisoner confined in that private facility. Private prisons have been part of the system for quite some years now, specifically for involvement in corrections. Private for-profit prison management started rising in the 1980s, they represented a qualitative shift in the relation between corrections and private business. The question is there really a difference between private and public facilities, since the two are suppose to be different when it comes t cost and efficiency, also are the private facilities being run as a correctional facility at all?
Don Hutto, Tom Besley, and Dr. Robert Crants “wanted to invent an approach that benefited others and they wanted to do so while working in the govenement institution they valued. “(CCA 2013) The trio created the first private prison, brining “cost savings, technology and design innovations to government.” (CCA 2013) Corrections Corporation of America started in 1980, they industrialized the prison industry, they were able to “build, operate, design, finance, tailor solutions based on precise needs, population, budget, policies, and procedures of correctional facilities.”(CCA 2013) Not only did they industrialize the industry they specialized in the prison
Shelden, R. G. (1999). The Prison Industrial Complex. Retrieved November 16, 2013, from www.populist.com: http://www.populist.com/99.11.prison.html
O’Leary, Mary E. “Union: State prisons crammed, dangerous to staff, inmates.” New Haven Register (New Haven, CT) (August 23, 2011): NA. Opposing Viewpoints Resource Center. Gale. Ironwood High School. 26 Oct. 2011. http://find.galegroup.com
The first issue that I would like to address is the overcrowding issues in prisons. In my opinion, overcrowding issues are the biggest issues in our correctional system that concerns every citizen. Running a prison required money, resources and manpower, with overcrowding issues, the government would have no choice but to increase the number of correctional facilities, privatized prisons and increasing manpower. According to (Levitt, 1996), “The incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled in the last two decades. At year-end 1994 the United States prison population exceeded one million. Annual government outlays on prisons are roughly $40 billion per year. The rate of imprisonment in the United States is three to four times greater than most European countries.” (p.1). Overcrowding issues are not only affect prisons but the society as a whole as well. The reason is simply because prison population directly refl...