It is important to note that the purpose of prisons and the correctional system is to ensure that a person changes his or her behavior in order to avoid committing crimes after release. The theme is that imprisonment is a major part of the correction. It protects society from dangerous individuals and creates an incentive for a criminal to avoid doing the acts that led to sentencing in the first place. When it comes to the corrections system, the main central issue is privatization and its subsequent performance, as well as cost incentives. Private prisons are a social issue because they affect many people in society, and they have detrimental effects on the justice system. The findings indicate that private prisons are problematic because they have an incentive to grow, lack transparency, and disproportionately detain people of color.
Firstly, for-profit private prisons have a market incentive to grow, increase revenue, and detain more criminals. Gotsch and Basti state that the direction or movement of prison privatization is to grow and increase its capacity (5). This is a problematic incentive to have for an organization that is supposed to engage in correctional measures. The success of private prisons is not measured by their effectiveness at preventing future crimes post-correction but rather by the number of criminals detained in them.
Secondly, transparency and availability of information are significant challenges, which makes studying the effectiveness of private prisons a problem. Johnston and Holt state that for-profit private prisons are rather inaccessible fortresses with no transparency on what practices are taking place within them (516). The limited amount of data available from private correctional institutions makes the evaluative assessment challenging.
If there is nothing to conceal from the public eye, then private prisons would be incentivized to be more open and transparent for marketing purposes (Johnston and Holt 516). However, the opposite is true since the already limited data provide evidence to indicate that such prisons engage in excessive violence from prison guards, in-prison inmate violence, and inhumane conditions.
Thirdly, private prisons tend to disproportionately target minority groups, exemplified by their demographic data of the prison populations. Burkhardt states that minority groups comprise the majority of detainees in for-profit private prisons compared to public ones (24). In addition, the fact that the majority of detained individuals are the ones serving shorter sentences supports the point made above about the incentives.
Privatization needs a sustainable influx of prisoners to generate profit with minimal costs associated with their maintenance. As a result, private prisons will be more profitable if they spend less on each prisoner and have a higher turnover rate due to short sentences to increase the price per detainee. Ultimately, this disproportionality has serious implications in regard to the equity of punishment since minorities tend to be allocated to private prisons at a higher rate than white offenders.
In sum, one can agree with the scholars’ conclusions that private prisons and their effectiveness in correctional measures show that they are problematic. The key reasons include the fact that they have an incentive to grow, lack transparency and basic services, and disproportionately detain people of color. The private prison concept should be regulated with stricter laws focused on transparency, which would be the first major step in eliminating these issues. In addition, public prisons should be expanded in order to rely less on private alternatives.
Works Cited
Burkhardt, Brett C. “Who Is in Private Prisons? Demographic Profiles of Prisoners and Workers in American Private Prisons.” International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice, vol. 51, 2017, pp. 24-33. Web.
Gotsch, Kara, and Vinay Basti. Capitalizing On Mass Incarceration U.S. Growth in Private Prisons. The Sentencing Project. 2018. Web.
Johnston, Jocelyn M., and Stephen B. Holt. “Examining The Influence of Representative Bureaucracy in Public and Private Prisons.” Policy Studies Journal, vol. 49, no. 2, 2019, pp. 516-561. Web.