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Privatizing Prison Administration
Description of the Financing System.
Description of How the Current System Works. The financial costs associated with maintaining America's prison system are staggering. Just to stay even with an inmate population that grows by 50,000 to 80,000 a year, approximately, 1,000 new jails and prisons have been built since 1980, and about one new 1,000 bed facility must be added every week for the next ten years (Mccormick 2000). The cost of imprisoning adult offenders ranges from $25,000 to $70,000 a year, and the total costs associated with constructing each new prison cell has soared to $100,000; as a result, the annual budget for constructing and maintaining prisons has jumped in the last two decades from $7 billion to almost $40 billion dollars (Schlosser 1999).
According to Stephen Donziger (1997), "prisons are the largest public works program in America, providing housing, food, (and only sometimes) education, mental health services, and drug treatment" (24). Since 1980, the costs associated with crime control have increased at twice the rate of defense spending, and spending on corrections on the state level has increased faster than...
Despite these enormous investments, prisons in America remain highly overcrowded and dangerous places; in 1995, 40 states, two territories, and the District of Columbia remained under court orders to address overcrowding in their systems (Mccormick 2000).
Primary Fiscal Instruments Used for Raising Revenues. Over the past 20 years, no other area of state government expenditures has increased as rapidly as prisons and jails (Irwin, Schiraldi & Ziedenberg 2000). All of the states and the federal government operate prison systems, each of which is funded in a different manner, including a broad mix of revenue bonds, sales taxes, various grants and others; however, the inherent costs associated with such operation have experienced enormous increases in recent years (Mccormick 2000). According to Irwin et al.:
State inmates cost an average of $19,801.25 to incarcerate per year; therefore, in 1998, it cost $12.7 billion to incarcerate 639,280 nonviolent state prisoners;
Federal prisoners cost an average of $23,476.80 per year to imprison; the total costs for locking up 106,090 nonviolent federal prisoners in 1998 was…
Works Cited
Campbell, Allison, Andrew Coyle and Rodney Neufeld (Eds.). Capitalist Punishment: Prison
Privatization & Human Rights. Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2003.
Mccormick, Patrick T. (2000). Just Punishment and America's Prison Experiment. Theological Studies, 61(3):508.
Schlosser, Kathryn Casa. (July 2, 1999). Prisons: The New Growth Industry. National Catholic Reporter, 16.
The Bureau in Brief. (2004). Federal Bureau of Prisons. Available: http://www.bop.gov/ipapg/ipabib.html.
The need for less restrictive parole policies could help relieve prison overcrowding (Kunselman & Johnson, 2004). According to Hughes (2007), "On any given day, a large number of the admissions to America's prisons come from individuals who have failed to comply with the conditions of their parole or probation supervision. For years, the revocation and incarceration rate of probationers and parolees has had a significant impact on the growth of
In addition, prison managers must deal with the mundane as well as the human equation, because much of their jobs are in the paperwork, union rules, state statutes, and other regulations that are required in the prison system. Management in the prison is a unique challenge, because of the many responsibilities that come with it. It is clear, just as business management and leadership are evolving, that prison management
Research Theory: Prison Industrial ComplexPrison Industrial Complex (PIC) is the term frequently used for the mass imprisonment the United States has been using over the past few decades for the control of crime and the fulfillment of personal interests of industries offering surveillance, economic and political solutions in the same matter. The recent mass incarceration of the US has dragged its people to prisons leading to an uprise in crimes
Prisons For all intents and purposes the modern history of penology -- which is to say, the science and the theory of imprisonment and the state apparatus of the penitentiary -- begins with the late 18th century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. In Bentham's day (corresponding roughly to the time of the American and French Revolutions) there was no idea of a penitentiary per se: there was instead His Majesty's Penal Colony
Privatization of Prison Privatization Privatization of the prisons stands out as an objective by the government to change or extend its obligation in running prisons. Change in this operation calls for state policy changes where the government contracts private operators in elements relating to construction, design and security of prisons. In some states, some private companies undertake full ownership of the prisons inviting the government to evaluate the facility and offer to
This gave the immediate need to contract the prison facilities. Literature review Extant literature has been dedicated to the topic of privatization of the rather publicly run correctional facilities in America. These literatures have been mixed and contain mixed views of proponent for privatization and its opponents alike. The literatures therefore have expressed favors of the system as well as critical of it. There also exists another category expressing pure criticism.