Claims
They treat prisoners badly.
They lobby for more inmates.
Violence is worse.
A lot of people have called for ending private prisons and just some basic numbers show a case.
49% more staff assaults in private prisons.
65% more inmate assaults.
Do that and the gross profit for the industry is 374 million.
That’s a case to getting rid of them, but looking closer, it gets tougher.
Only 8.1% of prisoners in the US are in private prisons.
Hearing that number, it’s hard to imagine all the problems are in the 8% of private prisons and the 92% of prisoners in government locations are okay.
This makes a case to look a little less at private prisons and more on why they exist.
First thing is they aren’t the cause of over incarceration, but a product of it.
Private prisons didn’t grow until the late 80s & 90s as a product of the war on drugs. They had a surge in inmates, couldn’t build new prisons and outsourced them to new locations.
It is true that places with private prisons see more people go to jail, with an average of 178 new prisoners per million people. That though doesn’t work, when realizing areas to expand private prisons tend to be increasing inmates before that anyway.
Next up is sentencing, where areas with private prisons see 23 days longer on sentences on average after introduction. That’s bad, but likely judges giving more time, due to them having less overcrowding.
It doesn’t seem like private prisons are directly creating more inmates, but just a product of bad policies that started decades earlier.
Second, issues with who goes there and where.
The three biggest private prison states are Arizona, Montana & New Mexico, all breaking 20% of the prison population.
The reason for that though is less on the prisons making money, but the states making money.
A large percentage of inmates in private prisons come from out of states and places like Arizona make money off California shipping inmates. They get contracts with the private prisons and states are actually paid for this.
That creates a pretty huge issue where prisoners don’t have access to full legal support. They could realistically be shipped from California to Arizona and have no lawyer, the oversight isn’t held well by California and Arizona isn’t even fully responsible.
After that, the issue is the inmates going there.
These states aren’t shipping over the cleanest inmates and people more prone to violence with longer sentences are getting sent in.
For the statistics on high private prison problems, it’s more of a result of who were sent in versus just management.
Third issue, funding.
$45,000 a year is the average cost of a private prison inmate.
$50,000 is the cost of a public prison.
A lot of people criticize private prisons for being underfunded due to profits, but they are just underfunded.
The industry as a whole generates 374 million a year in profit.
The revenue is 4 billion dollars.
The margin itself is under 10% and while it’s tough to imagine anyone profiting off this, the state cuts are actually a little larger.
The profit & state cuts mean inmates in private prisons get 20% less total funding.
So, should private prisons be abolished?
Yes, I think it’s immoral to profit on storing people.
But no, getting rid of them will fix little to nothing.
The only way to really fix prisons is compassion.
Italy & Brazil offered inmates deals to get reduced prison sentences if they read books and write two page essays on them.
The result was violence went down, literacy improved and even people breaking the law after prison dropped.
The UK tried to ban books for inmates and violence in prisons went up.
That’s one really small example of ways to fix things.
Banning solitary confinement
Letting people leave early for job offers.
Ending jail time for non violent crimes.
Hell, just letting inmates watch porn would probably solve a problem or two.
It’s such a bad system and really sad how many people who started at the bottom landed a 10 year sentence over a minor crime and had their lives ended.