A non-governmental organization runs a private prison in agreement with the authorities at one level or another instead of a public institution run by a specialized agency. Prisoners are sent there by the ordinary court verdict, by the usual procedure, and in some countries and some states of the United States are held by government regulations. They should be distinguished from medieval private prisons, which were truly private – prisoners were sent there at the behest of the feudal lord, and they were treated as he saw fit.
The main source of income for private prisons is the maintenance of prisoners at prices lower than those stipulated by the US government but in compliance with all the necessary standards for the maintenance of prisoners. In addition, profit is generated due to the work of the prisoners themselves in various industries. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the functioning of modern private and public prisons.
In private prisons, there are government inspectors who are paid from the state budget and have the task of monitoring compliance with the contractual rules of detention in all aspects. In turn, the organization responsible for the regime, the safety of prisoners, and the prison in general receives for each convict an appropriate payment from the state, daily or monthly, which compensates for the prison costs and allows owners to make a profit.
Economy and efficiency have always been the main arguments in favor of private prisons. For example, Community Education Centers receive $70 a day for each inmate, which is half what the government spends on keeping inmates in its prisons (Harding, 2018). But there is a trick here: private companies usually find themselves accepting seriously ill prisoners and even sending sick prisoners back to the state system, citing contractual restrictions. Expenditures on health care, after the basic maintenance, constitute the most significant expense item.
A study by the Arizona State in the spring of 2011 found that five out of eight private prisons in the state generally do not accept prisoners “with disabilities and endurance” and patients with severe and chronic diseases (Eisen, 2017). No prison accepts people with mental health problems. In addition, violent prisoners were seven times more likely to end up in state-run prisons, and those responsible for felonies were three times more likely.
In other words, private prisons try to select the healthiest and easiest prisoners to handle, which allows them to spend less on health care and thus perform well. Even so, according to the same study, in some cases, the cost per prisoner in a private medium-security prison in 2009 was $1,679 a year higher than in a similar state-run prison (Pfaff, 2017). Thus, there is a significant need to change the approach for private prisons.
Private prisons in the United States are characterized by high levels of abuse, but little accountability. Such an approach might seem strange, but the abuse itself is nothing more than a means of optimizing a business, and therefore a tool for increasing profits. To be profitable, a private prison must become untouchable. Most of the abuses and shortcomings not only allow to an increase in profits but also transfer them into a gray area, where taxes have long become an anachronism. Therefore, the exact amount of profit from the operation of private prisons in the United States is already difficult to establish.
All of this is happening against the backdrop of poor progress in reforming prisoners. For example, prisoners attack each other in private prisons 28% more often than in public ones. The number of attacks on guards is twice as high (Huebner, & Frost, 2018). Against this background, expired food, lack of opportunities for sports, inoperative toilets, and showers are systematically recorded in prisons. Human rights activists are trying to fight all of the above. Under their pressure, for example, pension funds from Canada refused to invest in US prisons. For the same reason, some US banks have also banned lending to operators. However, in general, business for prisoners in America is flourishing because private prisons have become the basis of US public policy, at least in its internal part.
There are also more fundamental objections to the concept as such. In addition to legal ambiguity, there is an inherent conflict of interest, namely, between the need to make a profit, which requires a strict attitude to costs and savings, and social responsibility, i.e., the need to follow modern principles of state punishment. They include respecting prisoners’ rights, keeping them inhumane conditions, striving to correct criminals, and finally, preventing repeated violations of the law.
References
Eisen. L. (2017). Inside private prisons: An American dilemma in the age of mass incarceration. Columbia University Press.
Harding, R. (2018). Private Prisons and Public Accountability. Taylor & Francis.
Huebner, B., & Frost, N. (2018). Handbook on the consequences of sentencing and punishment decisions. Taylor & Francis.
Pfaff, J. (2017). Locked in: The true causes of mass incarceration – and how to achieve real reform. Basic Books.