Sounding the Alarm on Prison Privatization
By: Steve Grumm
I didn’t get a chance to blog about this last week. A National Law Journal op-ed entitled “Jump off the Private Prison Bandwagon”, penned by Vivian Berger, sounds a critical note on the growing industry in which private companies contract with government to run prisons.
On March 1, a broad coalition of public interest organizations wrote to the governors of every state, urging them to decline a bid from Corrections Corp. of America to buy up public prisons and turn them into private facilities. Significantly, this proposal from the largest for-profit prison company in the country did not come without strings attached. It stipulated that the seller must have a minimum of 1,000 beds, agree to let CCA operate the institution for no less than 20 years and guarantee to keep the prison at least 90 percent occupied. In light of the mass incarceration epidemic — with 5 percent of the world’s population, our nation confines 25 percent of all prisoners — the last thing we need is to expand an industry invested in maximizing the number of inmates.
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The private institutions’ infiltration of the custody market has not produced the advantages touted by proponents and, worse, has yielded deleterious results. Various studies have failed to uncover evidence that for-profit imprisonment saves money. To the extent it does, such savings appear to come at the price of inmate well-being. Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting in Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko (2001), which declined to allow a Bivens action against a halfway house’s private operator, correctly noted: “Because a private prison corporation’s first loyalty is to its stockholders, rather than the public interest, it is no surprise that cost-cutting measures jeopardizing prisoners’ rights are more likely in private facilities than in public ones.”
Given the large numbers of nonviolent offenders presently imprisoned, and given current questions about the effect of mass incarceration on society, it’s also important to include discussion of where the incarcerated go and how they are treated.