The Corruption Within Private Prisons

by Elliana Polyak

Public prisons, or state-operated institutions, are entirely owned and run by the government and are mainly funded through tax dollars. Federal prisons outsource a lot of their spending to other companies. For example, private companies are often hired to run food services and maintenance. This is one way of cutting costs. Public prisons are the traditional system. They are currently facing issues of overcrowding and understaffing. Public prisons, state are entirely owned and run by the government and are mainly funded through tax dollars. Federal prisons outsource a lot of their spending to other companies. For example, private companies are often hired to run food services and maintenance. This is one way of cutting costs. Privately owned prisons are run by a business or company. They are bought by private firms from the government (either local, federal or state), and become accountable for maintaining them. The government is responsible for providing prisoners, and the prison works like a business and makes a profit. The prisons are owned by the firm who are responsible for everyday maintenance and staffing. In turn, the government pays the prison for the inmates’ daily costs. There have been studies showing that private prisons have more escapes, higher staff-turnover, fewer work assignments and more violence. But there are reports that public prisons have the same issues as well. Private prisons are sometimes considered immoral since they make money for the corporation that owns the prisons and thus incentivize imprisonment through monetization. Federal prisons are overcrowded and need better maintenance. Comparing the two to find a winner is difficult due to the fact that each operates entirely differently and with its own set of rules. Basically, our criminal justice system needs major reform.

For all the ink spilled on private prisons over the last thirty years, little good information is available on what are surely some of the most important questions: when it comes to cost and quality, are private prisons better or worse than public prisons?

Prior to the 1980s, private prisons didn’t exist in the United States. But thanks to the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs, which led to harsher sentencing policies and higher rates of incarceration, the inmate population skyrocketed beyond the capacity of the nation’s existing prisons, a fact that corporations were quick to take advantage of. In 1984, the country’s first for-profit prison was established in Tennessee, and over the next six years, it was joined by 66 more. Although private prisons account for a small overall percentage of America’s incarcerated population, they have grown at a disproportionate rate, with an astounding 1600 percent increase in their populations from 1990 to 2005. 

The corporations running these private institutions claim they save government money and use what money they receive for the betterment of the prisoner, but their true focus is on protecting their own bottom lines. In order to lower operating costs, these facilities cut corners, hiring fewer employees and paying and training them less. Private prison employees earn an average of over $5,000 less than their government-employed counterparts and receive 58 fewer hours of training. This leads to higher employee turnover and decreased security in the prisons. A 2016 report from the Justice Department found that private prisons had a 28 percent higher rate of inmate-on-inmate assaults and more than twice as many inmate-on-staff assaults, as well as twice as many illicit weapons than comparable federal facilities. The report also found that the Bureau of Prison’s monitors tasked with making sure private prisons comply with federal policy regularly failed to ensure inmates were receiving medical care. This lack of adequate security and healthcare endangered the lives of inmates who are not in a position to be able to do anything.

Despite all these cost-cutting measures, it’s unclear whether private prisons actually save the government any money. In-depth research from Arizona found that inmates in the state’s for-profit prisons rarely cost less than those in state-run prisons, and in some cases cost as much as $1,600 more per year. Any money saved by corporate-run prisons only benefits the corporations themselves, and these corporations are willing to go to extreme and horrifying lengths to preserve these profits. One particularly notorious example of this is the 2009 “Kids for Cash” scandal, in which two judges in Pennsylvania were revealed to have been accepting money from the owner of two private juvenile detention centers in return for sentencing juvenile offenders to time in those centers. Children were sentenced to time in detention centers for offenses like shoplifting DVDs or failing to appear at hearings they were never notified of. 

The existence and expansion of private prisons are by no means the only things wrong with our criminal justice system, a system marked by racism, corruption, and inhumane treatment. Yet there is something particularly alarming about the idea of a company working to put more people in prison for the express purpose profiting off them.