Increasing numbers of prisoners, increasing costs, and increasing security and administration failures have placed a burden on state and federal correctional facilities to improve performance while lowering costs. According to Travis C. Pratt and Jeff Maahs, in Are private prisons more cost-effective than public prisons?, these pressures have “allowed the movement to privatize correctional institutions to gain considerable momentum” (358). Pratt and Maahs (358) find the evidence regarding whether private prisons are more cost-effective than public institutions to be inconclusive.
This article represents the authors’ findings of a meta-analysis of 33 cost-effectiveness evaluations of private and public prisons culled from two dozen independent studies. The authors’ thesis is that private prisons are no more cost-effective than public prisons. Rather, the authors argue in favor of other factors as having an impact on a prison’s daily per diem cost, such as the facility’s economy of scale, age, and security-level (Pratt and Maahs 358).
The argument behind the momentum toward prison privatization stems from the overriding misperception that privatization of prisons will be more cost-effective than public prisons. Pratt and Maahs (359) contend that policy-makers have been forced to examine prison privatization based on two facts about the contemporary public prison system: 1) the perception of the deteriorating conditions of public prisons, and 2) prison crowding.
Pratt and Maahs argue that part of the reason why privatization is thought of as a more cost-effective method of incarceration than public prisons has to do with the theory used in formulating such kinds of public policy. They outline public choice theory which is founded on economics and political science, an analytical framework that “emphasizes the role of market-driven competition in policy development” (Pratt and Maahs 359). In light of this t...