Issue of Prison Privatization

The purpose of this research is to examine the issues surrounding prison privatization in the modern period. The plan of the research will be to set forth the context in which the practice of running prisons for profit has arisen from the 1980s to the current period and then to discuss such related matters as corporate takeovers of prison systems and key implications of the sharing of public- and private-sector jurisdiction over incarceration of criminals.

The modern American penal system took shape because of reformist efforts of Philadelphia Quakers: "Before there were prisons, serious crimes were almost always redressed by corporal or capital punishment. . . . Jails existed, but primarily for pretrial detention. The closest thing to the modern prison was the workhouse a place of hard labor almost exclusively for minor offenders, derelicts, and vagrants" (Pray, 1987, p. 92). Philadelphia's Walnut Street Prison, established in 1790, was America's first prison as the term is commonly understood today and became the model for prisons throughout the country and around the world. Pray explains that conditions at Walnut deteriorated between 1790 and 1820. Solitary confinement on one hand and confinement of all prisoners in common and ill-maintained living spaces on the other produced squalid, overcrowded conditions. Accordingly, reformist efforts became directed at improvement of standards and practices affecting prisoners' nutritional, disciplinary, and hygienic well-being.

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rivately funded construction and management of maximum-security prisons went down to defeat, one in Pennsylvania by Buckingham Security Co. in 1984, and another by Corrections Corp. of America in Tennessee in 1985. But management of "relatively high-security facilities," such as juvenile detention centers in Pennsylvania and Florida, has been turned over to private concerns (Brakel, 1989, p. 20). Nadel (1995, p. 26) suggests that privatization is a critical feature of economic planning and prison administration in the current period, partly as a feature of public-sector cost cutting and partly as a feature of demand and capacity. He notes that the number of prisoners held in American jails and prisons reached approximately one million in the mid-1990s and is expected to increase as time goes on, and he says that prison administration costs more than $31 billion a year. This view argues that the anticipated strain on budgets essentially obliges local governments to consider the cost-related benefits of public-private partnerships in the matter of corrections management. Undoubtedly, the size of the American prison-management industry, which increased dramatically in the 1980s and persists into the 1990s. Shichor (1993, p. 113)

Category: Government - I