Prison Privatization: History, Ethics, and Policy Debate

Background and History of U.S. Prisons

Until the late eighteenth century, prisons in the United States emphasized the punitive approach to incarcerating criminals that had been common throughout Britain and other European nations from which the first American colonists set sail. William Penn had introduced a system intended to focus more on correcting criminal behavior, partly through the use of imposed silence — to aid self-reflection — and separate, isolated confinement of each prisoner (Gaines, Kaune, et al., 2006).

Many states followed the model preferred in New York, which emphasized punishment over rehabilitation and used an aggregate housing system in which prisoners shared common areas for much of their routine activities. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, criminologists debated these two fundamentally different concepts of penal incarceration, with completely different approaches implemented in different states (Schmalleger, 2007). Some of the penal institutions with the most brutal reputations included the harsh Southern state facilities that imposed forced hard labor through the infamous chain gangs; their use at some prisons continued well into the early twentieth century.

At Elmira State Prison in the upstate Adirondack region of New York, a new system was developed for grading prisoners by the relative risks associated with them, based on their criminal histories and their conduct while in custody. Prisoners considered to represent a high risk of harming themselves, other prisoners, or staff members were held under maximum security, while those whose records and conduct suggested less risk were managed under more relaxed medium-security and minimum-security protocols (Gaines, Kaune, et al., 2006).

Part of that system developed at Elmira included using the grading framework as an incentive to motivate greater compliance among prisoners. By rewarding cooperative behavior with the relative comforts and privileges available to minimum-security prisoners, the three-tiered system conceived at Elmira helped maintain compliance and safety. Today, the vast majority of correctional facilities make use of the three-tier classification system, either by dedicating entire facilities to prisoners of one specific level or by employing internally separate units or housing wings, transferring prisoners among them as appropriate based on their conduct while incarcerated (Nagin, 1998).

In the last few decades of the twentieth century, legislative changes such as drug reform laws and "zero-tolerance" policing strategies dramatically increased the American prison population. In large part, this was linked to the emerging belief that imprisoning ever-larger numbers of criminals would produce corresponding drops in crime rates (Dershowitz, 2002). That concept has been substantially discredited both statistically and in principle, and community policing is now far more common than the zero-tolerance model.

The Rise of Private Prisons

Nevertheless, the legislative reforms enacted alongside the federal government's "war on drugs" policies have continued to increase prison populations to the extent that, in many states, the financial resources required to run state prisons strain the state budget — making prison privatization an attractive alternative. Moreover, in a sense, the prison system in the U.S. had already been partially privatized, insofar as government-run prisons were already contracting out to the private sector for labor, goods, and materials essential to correctional facility operations.

In some states, virtually every subcomponent allowed by law to be filled by non-state workers has been preferred over government employees, primarily for cost savings. Other states completely prohibit private-sector operation of any prison, correctional facility, or any of the services directly associated with their operation (Schmalleger, 2007). With two historical exceptions, all correctional facilities in the U.S. have traditionally been government run.

San Quentin Prison in California originally opened as a private for-profit institution in 1852, but was converted to full state authority within its first decade of operation. Similarly, the entire Texas prison system was privately run for almost two decades during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era (Gaines, Kaune, et al., 2006). The first modern for-profit prison facility opened in 1984 in Tennessee, but the idea of for-profit prison operations remained controversial and inspired criticism along several different lines of argument.

Private prisons now operate in more than half of U.S. states and currently house approximately 20 percent of the nation's prisoners. The primary objectives of prison privatization are to lower the cost of prison operations, allow competitive bidding, and eliminate regulatory compliance issues that generate considerable red tape — both in the actual operational costs of government-run correctional programs and in all the associated costs of government procurement regulation for constructing new correctional facilities (Schmalleger, 2007).

In theory, since private prisons employ private-sector workers who are not subject to state employment wages and benefits, they can provide comparable service at a reduced cost — partly because they pay lower wages and offer fewer benefits than government employment. According to several studies and analyses, however, that hypothesis has been disproven. In addition to failing to reduce costs as much as expected, privately run correctional facilities experience significantly higher rates of prisoner escape, escape attempts, violence against prison staff, and prisoner-on-prisoner violence compared to state-run programs (Gaines, Kaune, et al., 2006).

Conclusion

Nagin, D. S. (1998). Criminal deterrence research at the outset of the twenty-first century.

Schmalleger, F. (2007). Criminal justice today: An introductory text for the 21st century. Prentice Hall.