The Ethics of Prison Privatization

2385 Words5 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: prison overcrowding and its effects

How true is Christie’s warning that an increasingly privatized penal service threatens the ethics and effectiveness of the criminal justice system?

More aspects of the penal system are now privatized, and are set to increase. This includes the privatization of such services as prisons, electronic tags, catering companies, probation work or prison escort services. David Taylor-Smith, head of the world’s biggest security firm, G4S says he expects private companies will be running large parts of the UK’s police service within five years (Taylor and Travis, 2012). Nils Christie’s text (2000) “Crime Control as Industry” draws upon increasing prison populations in the US. However reflecting upon that the prison population in England and Wales has increased from 41,800 prisoners to over 86,000 in 14 years (Ministry of Justice, 2013, 1) Christie also looks upon other countries that face similar problems and how this and modern crime control represents a move 'towards gulags, western type’ (Christie, 2000, 15). He describes the criminal justice system today as a “Pain Delivery” service (Christie, 2000, 143) and argues that it is regulated by the amount of pain they choose to inflict on society and not by the actual number of crimes committed. Christie also identifies changes in capitalist societies and their social organisation, this he says is due to factors such as a larger readiness to report incidents to the police and social controls have declined producing a greater ‘supply’ of criminal acts (Jones & Newburn, 2002, 175)

However the main force behind this is crime control becoming a commodity, as represented by the expanding privatization market. Christie argues that crime control is now a product and privatization of the penal ...

... middle of paper ...

....org.uk/PressPolicy/News/vw/1/ItemID/179 (Accessed 29th November 2013)

Prison Reform Trust (2012) Bromley Briefings Prison Factfile http://www.prisonreformtrust.org.uk/Portals/0/Documents/FactfileJune2012.pdf FINISH

Pudelek, Jenna (2013), HM Prison Peterborough social impact bond has led to a fall in reconvictions, official figures show. http://www.thirdsector.co.uk/news/1186265/ (Accessed 16th December 2013.)

Tanner, Will (2013) Reform Ideas No 1 the case for private prisons. London: Reform

Taylor, Matthew and Travis, Alan (2012), G4S chief predicts mass police privatisation. http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jun/20/g4s-chief-mass-police-privatisation (Accessed 29th November 2013)

Urbina, Ian (2007), Despite Red Flags About Judges, a Kickback Scheme Flourished, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/us/28judges.html?_r=2& (Accessed 15th December 2013)

Show More
Related

  • The Over-representation of Black People in UK Prisons

    2691 Words  | 6 Pages

    The Justice Gap (2012) [online] “Privatising prisons a step too far”, Available at: http://thejusticegap.com/News/privatising-prisons-a-step-too-far/ [last accessed on 10th November]

    Read More

  • Private Prisons Negativly Impact State and Local Governments

    3178 Words  | 7 Pages

    Urbina, Ian. "Despite Red Flags About Judges, A Kickback Scheme Flourished." The New York Times 28 Mar. 2009: A1. Print.

    Read More

  • America’s Prisons and Their Effects On Society

    1532 Words  | 4 Pages

    Trachtenberg, B. (2009, February). Incarceration policy strikes out: Exploding prison population compromises the U.S. justice system. ABA Journal, 66.

    Read More

  • Debating Justice: Punishment versus Rehabilitation

    1269 Words  | 3 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Juvenile Offenders Recidivism and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

    2841 Words  | 6 Pages

    Throughout history, it has become very clear that the tough on crime model just does not work. As stated by Drago & Galbiati et al. In their article: Prison Conditions and Recidivism, although it is...

    Read More

  • The Privatization of Prison Healthcare

    1596 Words  | 4 Pages

    There are over 2.3 million persons within the” Prison Industrial Complex”. The “Prison Industrial Complex" is used to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry (Herzing, 2005). The interest of industry within the state prisons of Illinois has led to the selling of inmate healthcare rights to many private companies. The privatization of healthcare within the prison industrial complex is unconstitutional and perpetuates unethical treatment of persons who are incarcerated. These private companies are not being held accountable for the lack of treatment and negligence of providing services within state prisons.

    Read More

  • Race to Incarcerate

    1569 Words  | 4 Pages

    Mass incarceration has caused the prison’s populations to increase dramatically. The reason for this increase in population is because of the sentencing policies that put a lot of men and women in prison for an unjust amount of time. The prison population has be caused by periods of high crime rates, by the medias assembly line approach to the production of news stories that bend the truth of the crimes, and by political figures preying on citizens fear. For example, this fear can be seen in “Richard Nixon’s famous campaign call for “law and order” spoke to those fears, hostilities, and racist underpinnings” (Mauer pg. 52). This causes law enforcement to focus on crimes that involve violent crimes/offenders. Such as, gang members, drive by shootings, drug dealers, and serial killers. Instead of our law agencies focusing their attention on the fundamental causes of crime. Such as, why these crimes are committed, the family, and preventive services. These agencies choose to fight crime by establishing a “War On Drugs” and with “Get Tough” sentencing policies. These policies include “three strikes laws, mandatory minimum sentences, and juvenile waives laws which allows kids to be trialed as adults.

    Read More

  • Persuasive Essay On Mass Incarceration

    1168 Words  | 3 Pages

    Today, half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes. Over half of federal prisoners are serving time for drug crimes. Mass incarceration seems to be extremely expensive and a waste of money. It is believed to be a massive failure. Increased punishments and jailing have been declining in effectiveness for more than thirty years. Violent crime rates fell by more than fifty percent between 1991 and 2013, while property crime declined by forty-six percent, according to FBI statistics. Yet between 1990 and 2009, the prison population in the U.S. more than doubled, jumping from 771,243 to over 1.6 million (Nadia Prupis, 2015). While jailing may have at first had a positive result on the crime rate, it has reached a point of being less and less worth all the effort. Income growth and an aging population each had a greater effect on the decline in national crime rates than jailing. Mass incarceration and tough-on-crime policies have had huge social and money-related consequences--from its eighty billion dollars per-year price tag to its many societal costs, including an increased risk of recidivism due to barbarous conditions in prison and a lack of after-release reintegration opportunities. The government needs to rethink their strategy and their policies that are bad

    Read More

  • Private Prisons: Profitability and Controversial Strategies

    730 Words  | 2 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Why The Police Want Prison Reform Essay

    1038 Words  | 3 Pages

    The incarceration rates have been growing rapidly in the United States. This is a problem that has been ongoing for many years, has recently caught a lot of attention by well-known law enforcement departments across the United States. A piece wrote by the New York Times, Editorial Board “Why the Police Want Prison Reform” published October 22, 2015. In this article, more than 130 of the top law enforcement officers have come together to stop the prison crisis. With the reform that just passed in October more than 6,000 prisoners who have been serving time have been released. The controversial topic has been presented by the New York Times article, “Why the Police Want Prison Reform”, the author who is not listed build their credibility with

    Read More

  • The Public-Private Prison Debate

    2337 Words  | 5 Pages

    California is suffering from a crisis in the prison system. Its facilities are operating at double capacity and " grossly deficient medical care" is the cause of at least one inmate death per week (Wood, 2008, para. 2). Because of this need for reform, the federal government is stepping in to direct the state prison’s operating procedure. Although the financial choices of each state should be free from federal control, the federal government is still known to put pressure on states to make decisions, especially when lawsuits arise. An example of federal legislation commanding state behavior is busing. The states felt that they should have the autonomy to decide whether racial integration was right for them. The federal government, however, decided in Brown v Board of Education that segregation was unconstitutional, and thus the state governments were forced to comply. In a federal system of government, each level holds its own powers, but one must prevail in cases of disagreement. In America, the federal sector is the "supreme Law of the Land" (U.S. Constitution). For this reason, although California suffers from a $16 billion budget deficit, the federal pressures have forced yet another $7 billion in spending to ensure "upgraded healthcare facilities for prison inmates" (Wood, 2008, para. 1).

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Lockdown By Evans D Hopkins

    731 Words  | 2 Pages

    Many changes are made inside the justice system, but very few have damaged the integrity of the system and the futures of citizens and prisoners. Although the story seems to focus more on lockdown, Hopkins clearly identifies the damaging change from rehabilitation in prisons to a strategy of locking up and containing the prisoners. To the writer, and furthermore the reader, the adjustment represented a failure to value lives. “More than 600,000- about 3 times what it was when I entered prison, sixteen years ago. In the resulting expansion of the nation’s prison systems, authorities have tended to dispense with much of the rehabilitative programming once prevalent in America’s penal institutions” (Hopkins 157). The new blueprint to lock every offender in prison for extended sentencing leads to an influx in incarcerated people. With each new person

    Read More

  • The Ethical Treatment of Prisoners

    2597 Words  | 6 Pages

    Fenwick states…’Prison conditions have steadily deteriorated, while at the same time, prison populations have dramatically increased throughout the Western world, in many cases leading to unsustainable overcrowding. This has led, in turn, to further deterioration in conditions. These structural circumstances coincide with the rise and spread of the economic strategies associated with globalization, including reduction of state budgets and privatization of state functions. Not surprisingly, elements of the private sector seized on the opportunity for profit presented by this “crime-control/ fiscal-crisis contradiction.” (Fenwick, C. 2005).p.258.

    Read More

  • Prison Rehabilitation

    1186 Words  | 3 Pages

    With the substantial increase in prison population and various changes that plague correctional institutions, government agencies are finding that what was once considered a difficult task to provide educational programs, inmate security and rehabilitation programs are now impossible to accomplish. From state to state each correctional organization is coupled with financial problems that have depleted the resources to assist in providing the quality of care in which the judicial system demands from these state and federal prisons. Judges, victims, and prosecuting attorneys entrust that once an offender is turned over to the correctional system, that the offender will receive the punishment in which was imposed by the court, be given services that aid in the rehabilitation to those offenders that one day will be released back into society, and to act as a deterrent to other criminals contemplating criminal acts that could result in their incarceration. Has our nations correctional system finally reached it’s critical collapse, and as a result placed or American citizens in harm’s way to what could result in a plethora of early releases of inmates to reduce the large prison populations in which independent facilities are no longer able to manage? Could these problems ultimately result in a drastic increase in person and property crimes in which even our own law enforcement be ineffective in controlling these colossal increases of crime against society?

    Read More

  • Imprisonment is Ineffective as Punishment

    1773 Words  | 4 Pages

    Sue Rex, A. and Robinson, G. (2004) Alternative to Prison Options For an Insecure Society. Uk: Willan Publishing.

    Read More

More about The Ethics of Prison Privatization

Open Document