Profiting from Punishment: The Dangers of Privatizing Imprisonment
In an unbelievable act of hubris, the for-profit prison company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), recently wrote to 48 state governments with an offer they must refuse. CCA wants to take over the public prison systems in exchange for a 20-year contract PLUS a guarantee that the prisons be at least 90% full. In the country with the highest incarceration rate in the world, a nation desperately in need of reform in the criminal justice system, this corporation wants it written into law that they will have a pipeline of bodies to fill their cells and their pockets for at least two decades. Unfortunately, we have too many states where the Republican legislators making the decisions are only too eager to sell off public resources to private industry. When for-profit prison corporations get involved directly in funding politicians, they donate to Republicans 80% of the time.
Despite the fact that the United States has only 5% of the world’s population, we hold approximately 25% of its prisoners. Between 1970 and 2005, particularly with the advent of the War on Drugs, the population of people incarcerated in the U.S. has grown by 700%, despite decreases in crime. Instead of moving toward a reduction in the number of incarcerated individuals, we have companies like CCA and the GEO Group, Inc. lobbying to guarantee that the criminal justice system stays just as it is for at least the next 20 years. In fact, according to the ACLU, CCA actually identified reforms to drug enforcement or sentencing laws as a potential threat to their business in their 2010 annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
For-profit corporations have already significantly infiltrated the criminal justice system with a stunning 1600% increase in the number of prisoners housed in private prisons since 1990. The result is the top two private prison corporations making almost $3 billion a year of taxpayer dollars as profit. These corporations came on the scene in the 1980s with promises of lower costs to taxpayers. The evidence on whether there is actual cost savings is mixed, but if there is any savings it is done through providing substandard services and reducing wages, resulting in the loss of middle class jobs. Most recently, an in-depth report by American Friends Service Committee concluded that private jails/prisons were actually costing the state of Arizona more than public facilities while also having safety and accountability issues. Furthermore, the for-profit industry steers states away from truly cost-saving efforts such as reducing overall incarceration rates. Instead of actions like reforming drug laws, utilizing probation or parole, and instituting sentencing reductions, the private prison industry lobbies to keep these potential cost saving strategies off the table.
Until 2010, CCA was a member of the American Legislative Executive Committee (ALEC), the secretive, corporate-run group busily attempting to manipulate laws across the country, and through this organization has written draft legislation for lawmakers in numerous states, but particularly in Arizona. In this way, the for-profit incarceration company, despite its protests to the contrary, had a behind-the-scenes hand in writing the SB 1070, “Papers Please,” immigration law. The result is a steady stream of detainees for CCA which holds the contract for immigrant detention centers. But, outside of Arizona, ALEC has also been busy nationwide writing legislation to ensure harsher sentencing across the board while reducing opportunities for probation and parole even for low-risk prisoners. This is the perverse incentive built into the very nature of private prisons to maximize the number of people who will become incarcerated and make sure they stay that way.
Read more: http://www.politicususa.com/profiting-from-punishment-the-dangers-of-privatizing-imprisonment/
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