Justice or Profit?

The notion of private prisons as more efficient than public run facilties has an appealing quality to state legislatures and other law makers. But is this a true supposition or a flimsy assumption?
The argument that privatizing our prisions is an advantage to the tax payer has been disuputed by the very government that advocates for it.

According to the U.S. Government Accounting Office, the economic difference between operating a private penal facility and a public one is very small. Therefore, the very existence of private prisons raises an ethical issue:
What are the implications of basing the operation of a prison on a purely profit motivation?

Private prisons are a relatively new phenomenon. They began to appear a little more than twenty years ago, but have rapidly proliferated throughout much of the United States. Their upward surge is the result of ongoing "tough-on-crime policies" that have swollen the population of incarcerated men and women to the near two million mark. Once private prisons are built, states pay the firms to operate them—the two giants are the Wackenhut Corporation and the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). It is to the advantage of these companies, and a few others, to keep the prison beds filled. For example, CCA has been a corporate member and a major contributor to ALEC (an influential conservative think tank) and an active member of its Criminal Justice Task Force.

As a result, the task force has modeled bills which , ALEC claims credit the widespread adoption of Truth in Sentencing and Three Strikes/Habitual Offender legislation. It's no wonder, with such lobbying power, that since the inception of private prisions we have seen an explosion in prison population. In 1970, there were approximately 300,000 people in prison and jail in the U.S.; by 2000, that number had grown by over 500% to nearly two million, or 25% of the world’s prison population in a nation that holds just 5% of the world’s people. Along with that enormous growth, we have seen sharp increases in racial disparities, in the number of women and youth behind bars, and in the proportion of people behind bars for non-violent (especially drug) offenses. African-Americans now make up 47% of state and Federal prison populations, but just 12% of the general population. Latinos make up at least an additional 16% of the prison population (not all states count Latinos separately from whites).

Consequently, critics of private prisons have increasingly challenged their use. Marc Mauer, assistant director of the non-profit Sentencing Project in Washington, D.C., maintains that private prision actually create an incentive for legislators to promote prison expansion because, “with private corporations building the facilities at their own expense—legislators can bypass having to go to voters for the approval of bond issues to obtain the needed construction funds. As an added incentive for their construction and use, many rural areas struggling with high unemployment rates clamor for prisons, public or private, because they mean jobs; and local legislators are often anxious to gratify these wishes—whether or not another facility is needed”. “By the late 1990s, about forty states had passed versions of truth-in sentencing similar to ALEC's model bill. Because of truth-in-sentencing and other tough sentencing measures, state prison populations grew by half a a million inmates in the 1990s even while crime rates fell dramatically. The result: more demand for private prison companies like CCA” (Source)


Therefore it is not a coincidence that prison population has exploded since we have allowed privitazation of our criminal system. The prisons populations will continue to expand as long as we allow our legislatures to use our tax dollars to line the pockes of CCA and Wackenhut executives.
This is a system that survives because of our apathy and it feeds on ignorance and greed.

Contact Congress now, only you can stop this feeble, half-baked corrections model.