Private Prisons and Interest Groups
Privately owned prisons began to emerge in the mid-1980s. These prisons emerged because of the ideological imperatives of the free market, the huge increase in the number of prisoners, and the substantial increase in imprisonment costs. (1) Proponents of privatized prisons put forward a simple case: The private sector can do it cheaper and more efficiently. Corporations such as Correction Corporation of America and Wackenhut promised design and management innovations without reducing costs or sacrificing quality of service. (1) Many interest groups comprised of correctional officers, labor works, and a few citizen groups strongly oppose the privatization of the prison system. I will identify four of these groups that oppose private prisons, describe what each has sought to accomplish, and how they have gone about it and to what extent they have been successful.
The AFSCME Corrections United (or ACU) is an affiliate of the labor group known as The American Federation of State, City, and Municipal Employees. This group is composed of 60,000 correction officers and 20,000 correction employees. They've joined forces in a labor union to fight for better pay and benefits, for safe work places, and to uphold the standard of professionalism in their field. (2) AFSCME Corrections United claims that private prisons threaten public and worker safety and rip off taxpayers. They have launched a nationwide campaign to urge legislators to keep prisons in public hands and to educate the public on the dangers of private prisons. This group has used such methods as conducting media campaigns, letter writing campaigns, trying to pass legislation, lobbying government officials, and engaging in appropriate ...
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OCSEA "Many Fronts to Prison Privatization debate."
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Smith, Phil. "Private Prisons: Profits of Crime." Covert Action Quarterly Fall 1993
Unable to get official permission to interview and write about correctional officers, Ted Conover, author of the book Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing, “got in" by applying for a correctional officer position. After training, he and his fellow rookies, known as "newjacks," were randomly assigned to Sing Sing, one of the country's most famous -- and infamous -- prisons. Sing Sing, a maximum-security male prison, was built in 1828 by prisoners themselves, kept at their task by frequent use of the whip. Today, the chaos, the backbiting, the rundown building and equipment, the disrespect and the relentless stress that Conover experienced in his year at Sing Sing show, quite well, how the increase of prisons in the U.S. brutalizes more than just the prisoners. Some of the individuals in Conover's entering "class" of corrections trainees had always wanted to work in law enforcement. Others were ex-military, looking for a civilian job that they thought would reward structure and discipline. But most came looking for a steady job with good benefits. To get it, they were desperate enough to commute hours each way, or even to live apart from their families during the work week. Their job consists of long days locking and unlocking cells, moving prisoners to and from various locations while the prisoners beg, hassle and abuse them. Sometimes, the prisoners' requests are simple, but against the rules: an extra shower, some contraband cigarettes. Other times, they are appropriate, but unbelievably complicated: it can take months to get information about property lost in the transfer from one prison to another. Meanwhile, the orders officers give are ignored. Discipline -- even among the officers themselves -- is non-existent. And with the money and benefits of this "good" job come nightmares and family stress, daily uncertainty about one's job and duties, and pent-up frustration that, every so often, explodes in violence -- instigated by staff as well as by prisoners.
Lance has been actively coordinating political action for prison reform since 2007. He is President of the AFSCME, a union for correctional employees throughout the state of Texas. The AFSCME has national representation with 1.6 million members; Lance represents about 5000 Texas correctional workers, about one-eighth of Texas’s total correctional staff, which includes non-correctional employees like parole, victim services, etc. There are roughly 26,000 Correctional Officers in Texas, but whether the state is staffed to that capacity is open to debate. There are typically officer shortages, give or take 3000 at any given time. Today, Texas faces the most severe shortages of correctional staff they have seen. I asked Lance why he thought the Texas Prisons were in such storage for Correctional ...
Muhlhausen, D. B., Dyer, C. C., McDonough, J. R., Nadlemann, E., & Walters, R. (2006). Do prisons protect public safety? In C. Hanrahan (Ed.), Opposing Viewpoints: America’s prisons (pp. 16-48). Detroit: Bonnie Szumski.
The way correction officers are treated in prison is dreadful. “A corrections officer was seriously burned Monday morning in an attack by an inmate at the Green Bay Correctional Institution” (Roberts, 2016). This topic interest me because most of my life my brother has described the working conditions of correction officers in prison. I remember him telling me how one officer had his finger bitten off by an inmate. Correction officers are the guards who work in prison to enforce prisoners, so that inmates do not find themselves constantly in trouble. In addition, the officers ensure inmates’ safety. Despite the fact that the officers want to secure the inmate 's safety, people are unaware of the hardships officers face every day. A great deal of the rigorous challenges guards go through are never mentioned on the news or make it to newspapers. Correction officers are rarely mentioned within society, even though they are a huge part of the law enforcement. There is a
Private prisons are correctional institutions ran by for-profit corporations. They claim to cost less than prisons ran by the state, while offering the same level of service. In fact, the Corrections Corporation of America, one of the largest for-profit prison corporations, states that their business strategy is to provide quality corrections service while offering a better value to their government partners at the same time making a profit (CCA 2010). However, opponents of private prisons say they do not save states money because of their hidden cost. At any rate, more than a few states have found private prisons to be advantageous. For one reason, many states are facing massive deficits and are l...
Gresham M. Sykes describes the society of captives from the inmates’ point of view. Sykes acknowledges the fact that his observations are generalizations but he feels that most inmates can agree on feelings of deprivation and frustration. As he sketches the development of physical punishment towards psychological punishment, Sykes follows that both have an enormous effect on the inmate and do not differ greatly in their cruelty.
There are many citizen concerns, including the premise that private prison companies lobby governments to increase punishments and penalties to fill their facilities. Mr. Geoffrey Segal writes “It is unlikely that private prison firms are going to sway policy in favor of greater incarceration when such polices are obviously already very popular with the general population” in his online article published also on The Reason on November of 2002, Mr. Segal is the director of privatization and government reform at Reason Foundation. witha B.A in political science from Arizona State University, and a Master of Public Policy from Pepperdine University. The prison system as an industry, according to Randy Gragg privately owned prisons are starting to flourish again, Mr. Gragg is the editor-in-chief of Portland monthly, he wrote the article “A High-Security, Low-Risk Investment: Private Prisons Make Crime Pay” for Harper’s magazine on August 1996 Mr. Gragg is a Harvard University graduate of the school of design, and the national art journalism fellow at Columbia University. The
25 September 1998 Smith, Phil, "Private Prisons Benefit" The Berne Collection. 1 December 1998 *Shakur, Assata, "Letter from Assata Shakur on the prison industrial complex" 25 October 1999. Schlosser, Eric, "The Prison Industrial Complex" The Atlantic Monthly. December 1998 Vol.
There are over 2.3 million persons within the” Prison Industrial Complex”. The “Prison Industrial Complex" is used to describe the overlapping interests of government and industry (Herzing, 2005). The interest of industry within the state prisons of Illinois has led to the selling of inmate healthcare rights to many private companies. The privatization of healthcare within the prison industrial complex is unconstitutional and perpetuates unethical treatment of persons who are incarcerated. These private companies are not being held accountable for the lack of treatment and negligence of providing services within state prisons.
According to Mark Early, president of the Prison Fellowship International, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report shows that there are 19 states that have prisons operating at 100 percent capacity and another 20 are falling right behind them. There is no wonder why the overcrowding of prisons is being discussed everywhere. Not to mention how serious this predicament is and how serious it can get. Many of the United States citizens don’t understand why this is such a serious matter due to the fact that some of them believe it’s not their problem. Therefore they just don’t care about it. Also, some Americans may say that they don’t care about what could happen to the inmates due to repercussions of overcrowding, because it’s their own fault. In order to cure this growing problem people have to start caring about what’s going on, even if it’s to people who might deserve it.
Should prisons in the United States be for profit? How do for profit prisons benefit the United States? Would inmates rather be in private or public correctional centers? What kind of affects does this have on taxpayers? What are the pros and cons of profit prisons? These are many of the questions that are brought up when discussing for profit prison systems. There are different perspectives that can be taken when it comes to talking about for profit prisons. This paper will discuss some of the ways that the United States has started to become for profit and why it has happened. Finally, this paper will give an opinion of whether or not for profit prisons should be dominant over public facilities.
A private prison or for-profit prison, jail, or detention center is a place in which individuals are physically confined or interned by a third party that is contracted by a government agency. Private prison companies typically have contractual agreements with the governments that commit prisoners and then pay a per diem or monthly rate for each prisoner confined in that private facility. Private prisons have been part of the system for quite some years now, specifically for involvement in corrections. Private for-profit prison management started rising in the 1980s, they represented a qualitative shift in the relation between corrections and private business. The question is there really a difference between private and public facilities, since the two are suppose to be different when it comes t cost and efficiency, also are the private facilities being run as a correctional facility at all?
Don Hutto, Tom Besley, and Dr. Robert Crants “wanted to invent an approach that benefited others and they wanted to do so while working in the govenement institution they valued. “(CCA 2013) The trio created the first private prison, brining “cost savings, technology and design innovations to government.” (CCA 2013) Corrections Corporation of America started in 1980, they industrialized the prison industry, they were able to “build, operate, design, finance, tailor solutions based on precise needs, population, budget, policies, and procedures of correctional facilities.”(CCA 2013) Not only did they industrialize the industry they specialized in the prison
Shelden, R. G. (1999). The Prison Industrial Complex. Retrieved November 16, 2013, from www.populist.com: http://www.populist.com/99.11.prison.html
The first issue that I would like to address is the overcrowding issues in prisons. In my opinion, overcrowding issues are the biggest issues in our correctional system that concerns every citizen. Running a prison required money, resources and manpower, with overcrowding issues, the government would have no choice but to increase the number of correctional facilities, privatized prisons and increasing manpower. According to (Levitt, 1996), “The incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled in the last two decades. At year-end 1994 the United States prison population exceeded one million. Annual government outlays on prisons are roughly $40 billion per year. The rate of imprisonment in the United States is three to four times greater than most European countries.” (p.1). Overcrowding issues are not only affect prisons but the society as a whole as well. The reason is simply because prison population directly refl...