I note that Bernie Sanders has written on for-profit prisons. That fact alone suggests it is an important issue, but an older post from 2013, The Return of the 19th Century, bygjohnsit, puts it in a wider perspective. The very idea that a state or the federal government would undertake a contractual obligation to imprison a minimum number of people each year is shocking to say the least. Several other diaries, notably those of Bob Sloan, make it clear that corporations running the private prisons are not the only ones that benefit from prison labor. I'd heard the statistic that the US has the world's highest incarceration rate, but I never realized the use of prison labor was so extensive. The growing awareness of a connection between private prisons and the size of our prison population made me wonder whether anyone is seriously arguing in favor of this sort of privatization. The results of my search are below the fold.
One of the more interesting posts I found on the web about for-profit prisons, written last year, was For-Profit Prison Industry – Dumb Investment Of The Week. It names three publicly traded companies-- Corrections Corp Of America, G4S plc, and The Geo Group, Inc.-- that operate private prisons and detention centers. These companies profited from the increased inmate population due to the war on drugs in the 80's and more recently the detention of illegal immigrants following the September 11 terrorist attacks. The investment advice going forward is less rosy:
We believe the combination of a flawed business model and rampant abuse in the private prison industry will eventually outweigh the lobbying savvy of the companies and lead to the decline of the industry.
The post goes on to examine some of the abusive practices undertaken to cut costs, and is especially critical of lockup quotas in private prison contracts and the attendant incentive to lobby for laws that will keep prisons full. Looking at cost-effectiveness studies, the post concludes that when like prisoners are compared, private prisons do not save money. Finally, it is noted that prison bed capacity has been built up for an incarceration rate in the US that is five times higher than nearly anywhere else in the civilized world. Changes in social mores and demographics are likely to make the incarceration of drug users and immigrants less popular and "radically affect private prison companies' bottom lines."
Searching the web suggests that opinion against for-profit prisons is nearly unanimous and is amply supported by statistics, reports of abuse and corruption, and the lack of persuasive evidence on cost savings. I was curious whether a Google (or DuckDuckGo) search would turn up any bloggers or pundits who think for-profit prisons are a good idea. The closest I could find with a direct search were pro and con pages, e.g. here, showing arguments on both sides.
Bearing in mind that the Heritage Foundation champions free market causes, I searched their site for "private prisons". There were three results-- follow the links there if you care to read them. The most recent paper, from 2006, discussed border security, citing a survey study from the Reason Public Policy Institute, Policy Study No. 290, January 2002, pp. 4–5, Tables 1A–1C, to show that private detention centers are more cost effective than those run by the government. The tables showed findings from a number of individual state studies. I found a similar comparative survey from the GAO from 1996. It referenced several of the same individual studies as the Reason paper, but concluded there was insufficient evidence to show that privatization would or would not result in cost savings. A similar conclusion is reached in an article on Corrections.com, Private vs. Public Facilities, Is it cost effective and safe? Corrections.com serves corrections employees and service providers.
The other two papers from the Heritage Foundation were written in the late 80's before the trend toward private prisons really took off. There the claims of cost savings and quality were based on comparisons with other functions provided by private contractors, such as janitorial services, or simple faith in the free market system.
It seems that since more states have tried private prisons and there are more studies showing they are not better or cheaper than those run by the government, the Heritage Foundation has lost interest. I guess I'm a glutton for punishment, though, as I tried a similar search on the Mises Institute website. The most relevant result was a 2008 article, Prison Nation, by Llewellyn Rockwell, chairman and CEO of the Institute. His article begins with facts about the prison population in the US-- the world's largest both overall and per capita-- and goes on to examine the reasons we have so many people locked up. As would be expected from a libertarian advocate, the war on drugs is listed as a leading contributor to the problem. Rockwell also suggests that the "moral hazard" created by our social safety net may give rise to criminal behavior. He does observe, however, that "the lobbying power of the prison industry itself" could be a substantial factor as well.
Though it does not address for-profit prisons, I was intrigued by another article on the Mises site, The American Prison State, by Daniel J. D'Amico. It also opens with a reference to the US incarceration rate, then examines the history of prisons and how effective they have been in deterring crime. The article promotes D'Amico's Mises Academy online video lecture series that interprets criminal punishment in terms of Austrian School economics. To get the perspective of a hard core libertarian academic, I decided to search further for anything D'Amico may have written more specifically about for-profit prisons.
I found that D'Amico has been quite prolific, with papers published on the Mises and a number of other libertarian leaning websites. Libertarian views are on full display in his review of Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime, a 2003 book of essays on private prisons. A recurring theme in the book is the repudiation of social contract theory. That is, libertarians don't stop at saying that private companies in the free market can operate prisons more efficiently than the government, but go on to hold that government shouldn't be involved in the business of prisons at all. Rather, since government is not competent to run prisons efficiently, it must not be competent to dictate the terms of contracts with the private firms that do run them. I'm not sure whether the free market is supposed to decide who goes to prison in the first place, but it's beyond my comprehension how that might work in practice.
Of course, libertarians assume that private companies do everything more efficiently than the government. Presented with counter examples, their standard response is to blame regulations and other government intrusions that sully the otherwise free market. The final essay from Changing the Guard carries this daft reasoning to an absurd level. D'Amico quotes the editor's introduction:
Benson argues that precisely because private prisons reduce costs, they should be avoided-- so long as they are embedded within a criminal justice system that wastes lives and resources on imprisoning people for victimless crimes.
The free market argument here seems to be that the demand for prisons has no limit because the government, for nefarious reasons, will define victimless crimes for any and all behaviors. Thus, since private prisons cost less, more people will be locked up. Note, the problem is not seen simply as lobbying by the owners of private prisons. Rather,
The modern prison system is the product of the state's own interests and motivations and is therefore not to be trusted as impartial or in accordance with the goal of justice as it is held in the minds of the citizenry.
A more recent paper by D'Amico, 4 Things You Should Know About Mass Incarceration, makes some assertions that seem provocative at first glance. Closer examination, however, reveals 4 Things that are at best trivial and at worst unsupported by the facts. Take the first item, for example. "Private prisons did not cause mass incarceration." Of course they're not the sole cause. Who would claim otherwise? It looks like the setup for a straw man argument, but it doesn't go anywhere. In fact, D'Amico acknowledges that private prisons create "corporate incentives to foster tough punishment policies."
The most factually challenged of D'Amico's four assertions is the last one, "Mass imprisonment transcends the American experience." In support of this statement, D'Amico observes that "From 1997 through 2007, prison populations grew in 68 percent of nations researched around the world." He links this observation to a report, Global Incarceration and Prison Trends, published in 2003. Leaving aside the date mismatch, the statement itself implies that prison populations actually fell or remained stable in 32 percent of the nations in question. If anything, that makes the trend seem more a uniquely American experience, especially when you consider that the incarceration rate per capita in the U.S. in the 80's was comparable to most other countries. Today, Russia is the only country that comes close to having as many people in prison per capita as the U.S. (D'Amico has also stated in the introductions to at least two of his papers that the U.S. rate of incarceration is not only the highest today, but has been so "throughout history." Of course, this doesn't square with the facts either.)
D'Amico's conclusion is particularly vacuous: "Mass incarceration is not an isolated social problem to be understood devoid of context." He accepts without question the proposition that private prisons are more efficient, but he also admits that privatization won't solve the problem, and may actually make it worse. It must be a complicated problem indeed, if free market principles provide no ready solution.
Free market think tanks and academics may offer only lukewarm support for private prisons, but stories and editorials from local papers in prison towns are decidedly more enthusiastic. Such items may be readily found in the "News" links on prison company websites. A sampling of headlines:
Clearly, the spirit of George F. Babbitt is alive and well in the small towns that host America's inmate population. I was intrigued to learn that there is actually a documentary film, Prison Town, USA, about "a small, rural town that tries to resuscitate its economy by building a prison." I haven't seen it, but I suspect it gives a more balanced view than the links above.
From my cursory research on the web, my general conclusion is that while it's not hard to find information about private, for-profit prisons, it's not a real hot button issue. Given the lack of credible evidence in favor of private prisons, and considering the source and character of the few arguments offered in their support, Bernie Sanders deserves a lot of credit for focusing attention on them.