Private Prison Market Failure

Yolanda Valentin a 21-year-old prisoner, born as Daniel Valentine, looks and sounds much like a woman if it wasn’t for her sex assignment. After being placed in a cell with two male inmates, Valentin was repeatedly abused. She informed correctional officers of the continued, brutal sexual violence her cellmate was putting her through. The prison system did not respond to her. After all, from their point of view Valentin should have opted for solitary confinement to protect herself from the general population of male inmates. In solitary she would have sat quietly, by herself, for 24 hours in a cell made explicitly for violent prisoners. Valentin, a transsexual inmate in transition, asks herself constantly: “A lot of times I wake up, and I look around at my surroundings, and I see all these men. I think, ‘What am I doing here?’”(Baus).

The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) is an organization which over the past few decades has grown tremendously in the United States. This political cartoon showcases how our societies are transitioning from dependence on the Public Education system to the dependence on the Prison Industrial Complex and how the people who are funding these corporate businesses are less focused on bettering of the community but are primarily money hungry. My close analysis of this image reveals how the prison industrial complex negatively affects our communities yet is beneficial to the people and corporations who operate them.

At the expense of the young, to the detriment of the poor, and on the backs of the immigrants is the means by which the private prison companies have constructed a business that trades freedoms for profit but more concerning is to what ends these freedoms are being exchanged. The advancement of the private prison system has changed the face of the prison industry as we know it. Because little attention has been given in the media to the private prison industry, they have been able to expand their influence and their revenue by means the average American would consider unscrupulous. Private prisons came about to act as the solution to a problem facing federal prisons, overcrowding, which was created due to the war on drugs, but in acting as a solution to one problem they created another one that could be more problematic than the one it intended to fix. Proponents of private, for profit, prisons claim that it is a better alternative than federal prisons because they can provide the same service for less and save taxpayers money in the process. They also contend that the service they provide would help to stimulate the economy. However, privatization of America’s prison systems will contribute to an increase in the incarceration rate and unfairly target certain demographics of the population, which could lead to psychological trauma affecting the people of those demography’s that it

More people have been locked up in the United States than any other country. In the article “Prison Industrial Complex Economics”, it states, “the United States has approximately 6.5 million people under the criminal justice supervision. Incarcerated rate has grown from 176 in 1973 up to 700 in the year of 2000” (Waquant). Incarceration is a big business that feeds into drug violence, corrupted guards, and racism in criminal justice system, taxpayer cost, and racism in the criminal system and through privatization of prisons.

Whenever you imagine prison, you think up ideas and violent images that you have seen in the movies or on TV.   Outdated clichés consisting of men eating stale bread and drinking dirty water are only a small fraction of the number of horrible, yet “just” occurrences which are stereotypical of everyday life in prison.   Perhaps it could be a combination of your upbringing, horrific ideas about the punishment which our nation inflicts on those who violate its’ more serious laws that keeps people frightened just enough to lead a law-abiding life. Despite it’s success in keeping dangerous offenders off the streets, the American prison system fails in fulfilling its original design of restoring criminals to being productive members of society, it is also extremely expensive and wastes our precious tax dollars.

Today, the private prison industry is big and extremely profitable. The industry is dominated by two large companies, Corrections Corporations of America (CCA) and the GEO group. The annual combined revenues for both companies amount to over $3 billion while their top executives get compensation of over $3 million each. However, the way these companies operate is wholly unethical.

In 2001, Emerging issues on privatized prisons found many striking statistics concerning the privatization of prisons. It is estimated that worldwide there were 184 privately operated correctional facilities. Within the United States, a total of 158 private correctional facilities are operating. A substantial portion of the worlds privately owned correctional facilities are in

According to Alex Tabarrok, privately managed facilities can have cost savings of 15-25% on prison edification and 15% on administrative expenses. Likewise, private prisons generate competition and exert pressure towards public prisons. They encourage public prisons to also innovate and lower costs. Other studies (Lundahl et al. 2009, page 392) argue, “prison privatization provides neither a clear advantage nor disadvantage compared with publicly managed prisons.”

In America, there are fundamental principles upon which our nation is built. Beliefs that all Americans naturally possess the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seem all pervasive. Today in America, equality encompasses religion, sexual orientation, race, and everything in between. These values have become so intrinsic to the modern human condition that the mind shirks from the prospect of denying them to anyone. However, it seems that certain areas of American society have become exempt from the moral imperative that is upholding these basic and fundamental rights. It has become brutally obvious that private prisons have failed to respect the humanity of their inmates, which is why the United States Federal Government should

By contrast, DHS’s immigration detention program detains around 400,000 people every year. The growth of immigration detention has been astonishing. In 1994, approximately 6,000 noncitizens were detained per day. The daily average had surpassed 20,000 individuals by 2001 and 33,000 by 2008. To manage the growing detainee population, ICE has increasingly turned to contracted facilities such as for-profit prison corporations. This growth has allowed private prison companies such as GEO Group (GEO) and CoreCivic (formerly known as CCA) to significantly profit from labor savings. Private companies are incentivized to cut medical staffing and deny care to maximize shareholder return. Maximizing that return is the primary goal. These companies have managed to accomplish their goal by forcing their detainees to work and upkeep the facilities for little to no pay, saving millions in labor costs. In the year 2012, “GEO brought in an estimated $33 to $72 million in profits.” CCA, estimated profits ranging from “$30 to $77 million, or about 25% of the company’s total profits.” To give some perspective, a facility in Adelanto California, owned and operated by GEO, would pay $109,865 annually in detainee wages at $1 a day. If GEO were to pay the state’s minimum wage, they would be spending $7,910,280 annually in labor. This gives GEO a total savings of

Similarly, since the 1980s there has been the initiation of privatization of prisons, in the United States. Today, for-profit companies operate 264 correctional facilities, housing almost 99,000 inmates (Glans, 2011). The two largest are Correction Corporations of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, which together combined for a capacity of 129,000 prisoners. According to Think progress, in 2010 Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group made over 2.9 billion in revenue (Sanchez, 2011). Equally important, these companies exert influence on public policy, in order to fashion the marketplace environment (i.e. more prisoners/African American males) required to increase its businesses. This is done through lobbying politicians, direct campaign contributions, and political networking.

The New Jim Crow introduced the privatization and profitability of prisons as it relates to communities of color. Businesses profit from communities of color in the prison system. The concept of the prison industrial complex was introduced by activists and scholars who believed that the proliferation of prisons and prisoners was more clearly linked to larger economic and political structures and ideologies than to individual criminal conduct and efforts to curb crime (Davis &Shaylor, 2001). Research and data in the area have confirmed this concept. The Work Opportunity Tax Credit (WOTC) provides employers with a tax credit of $2,400 for every work-release inmate they employ as a reward for hiring “risky target groups.” Risky targets groups

The privatization of prisons serves as a solution to economic problems. Privatization essentially allows for large corporations, such as Corrections Corporation of America and GEO Group Inc, to profit from caging humans. State governments allow corporations to buy local prisons because privatization lifts the fiscal responsibilities of the states. While privatization eliminates a financial burden from states, it comes with great compromises. For example, the Lake Erie Correctional Institute was the first prison purchased by a for-profit corporation: the CCA. When the CCA purchased the prison, the city of Conneaut, Ohio faced many hardships. Almost immediately, many long-time employees of the prison were fired. The CCA replaced experienced employees

where's that goes on the privatization of prisons. Providing a broad study between public and

arly in August, the Associated Press reported that America's three largest private prison companies, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), GEO Group, Inc and Management and Training Corp spent in the region of $45m over the past 10 years in lobbying state and federal governments. During the same period, these companies saw their profits soar as they scored more government contracts.