Some Things Should Not Be Profitable
“The profit motive of privatized prisons stands in direct conflict with the purpose of corrections, which is to correct behavior – thereby reducing future crime. Unfortunately, these corporations are counting on future crime for the financial health of their business.”
– Caroline Isaacs, American Friends Service Committee, Arizona
Any activity that can be done at a profit will tend to grow. The more profitable the activity, the greater the pressure will be for it to expand.
Does anyone dispute this? This is not rocket science. It applies whether we’re talking about selling hamburgers, building condominiums, or smuggling cocaine.
It applies equally well to keeping people in prison.
I doubt that anyone would argue that it should be a societal goal to keep more of our population in prison. And yet turning the management of prisons over to for-profit companies creates tremendous pressure to do exactly that.
It’s simple, really. A company whose profits depend on the number of people incarcerated within its prisons will naturally exert its influence to put more people in prison and keep them there longer. This will include lobbying for “get tough on crime” legislation, imposing and increasing mandatory sentences. It will include pushing for anti-immigrant legislation and harsher penalties for nonviolent crimes.
More insidiously, such a company will have no incentive to implement programs that aim to rehabilitate offenders. In fact, they will have every incentive to ensure that prisoners are not rehabilitated – that they will not be paroled, and that upon their eventual release they will commit more crimes and end up back in prison. A private prison earns greater profits by increasing recidivism.
There is nothing inherently evil about the profit motive in general. But there are certain things that it should not be applied to. Running prisons is certainly one of them.
‘Just Like Selling Hamburgers’: 30 Years Of Private Prisons In The U.S. – Forbes, June 2013
Private Prisons – Report by the American Civil Liberties Union
Profiteering on Prisons – American Friends Service Committee
But similar problems occur with public prisons–at least when they are staffed by union guards. Prison guards unions routinely lobby to make more things crimes, to make it easier to convict people, for mandatory minimum sentencing, for longer sentences, etc. This is, obviously, because more people in prisons means more job security for the union members and more people hired to join the union–no matter how bad such public policy measures are for society as a whole.
This is true. Also, bail bondsmen have lobbied to prevent pre-trial release (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=122725849)
However, privatizing the ownership and/or management of prisons does nothing to eliminate the pro-imprisonment pressure from prison guard unions and bail bondsmen, and it adds another wealthier and more powerful voice to the mix.
I know for sure that at the 3 state prisons AVP goes into they have several rehabilitative programs, + education & job training.
Wonder what the for-profit prisons have.
I appreciate your bringing this issue to the fore. Our society is WAY too much of the mind to punish, not re-habilitate these real human beings in whom resides the Divine spark.
— Nancy
The case of Mark Ciavarella, a Pennsylvania judge who took millions of dollars in kickbacks from the owners of a private juvenile detention facility, is merely one of the most egregious examples of what can happen given the perverse incentives created by privately owned penal institutions.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Ciavarella