The Evil behind For-Profit Prisons
Corruption and the United States justice system has gone hand-in-hand since we defeated the British. For instance, justice based on racial prejudice has always been a problem in the United States. There's also a different level of justice based on a person's financial situation. Although white people have usually fared better, poor white people have a very different story than those who can afford an expensive attorney. Today green privilege is the most important. A defendant's wealth affects not only the verdict but also the sentence if found guilty and the kind of prison time they will serve. It's not surprising that in the 1980s
members of the United States government decided it would be a good idea to let corporations take over some of our prisons.
Exploitation of prison labor has also gone hand in hand with US justice. We will never know the extent of deals made between private companies and prisons for massive cheap labor. The “chain gangs” were the number one example. A “Chain Gang” was a group of prisoners chained together to perform manual or physically challenging work as a form of punishment. Such punishment might include repairing buildings, building roads or clearing land. Chain gangs were founded in Australia (they were used in the Penal colonies) but also became popular in the southern United States.
In addition, prisoners often have to buy toiletries and other necessary items with high markups that enrich companies. It would take a lot more than one article to list all the corruption that exists in state and federal prisons, because it gets worse. Private prisons got their start in the 1980s as a response to the need to house more inmates due to the “war on drugs” and the ”tough-on-crime” policies that gave longer sentences regardless of the situations.
In 1983 the Corrections Corporation of America (Corecivic) was founded by T. Don Huttel, Dr. R Crantz, and Thomas Beasley. This was the very first private prison company. Corecivic is also the largest private prison company in the United States. The idea behind Corecivic was to make billions from the US government in exchange for providing inmates with food, healthcare, and clothing. It received a specific dollar amount per inmate which gave these companies a financial incentive to get as many inmates as possible. Many government officials were happy because they could pass their responsibilities off to these private companies.
Right away these prisons were met with controversy. Snowflake liberals pointed out the obvious conflict of interest in outsourcing our judicial responsibility to for-profit corporations. The only argument for the prisons was that it would save taxpayer money, so who cares about morality? Even when it became clear that if these prisons could cut costs per inmate that would only increase their profit margin. From the beginning, it was proven that for-profit prisons only increased the number of inmates. A paper published in the Journal of Labor Economics by Washington State University showed that private prisons have increased their population to around 90,000 inmates today. Private prison companies receive from $60 to $150 per inmate per day. It is not in their financial interest to rehabilitate offenders. They want to keep the inmates coming back.
Private prison companies spend far less on Rehabilitation programs. Why should they? Rehabilitating a prisoner increases the likelihood that they won't return and that's the last thing these companies want. Since the 1980’s The American Federation of State, City, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) has opposed for-profit prisons. They have stated that “Private prisons are inherently corrupt enterprises that have no place in a fair and well-managed criminal justice system.” At a 1984 AFSCME meeting In San Francisco, the delegates committed to “Combat the contracting out of correctional, parole, and probation services and to force federal, state, and local governments to maintain the responsibilities for the incarceration and Rehabilitation of those individuals who violate the loss of society.”
According to the US Department of Justice study covering federal prisons, violent attacks by inmates on correction staff were 163% higher in private prisons than in public prisons and inmates-on-inmate assaults were nearly 30% higher. One guard named Laura Barnes (AFSCME #42) Began her career working for Corecivic. She said “Private institutions failed to take safety seriously endangering correctional officers, staff, and inmates alike. “In the private prison setting, safety didn't come first,” she says “My radio for example didn't work in half the units and we weren't issued OC pepper spray or safety vest. We didn't have things to protect us. In the public sector we get those things, we get upgraded radios, pepper spray, it's a safer environment.”
In 2016 during the Obama Administration, the US Department of Justice declared its intention to phase out private prisons. In a memo to the acting director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Sally Yates, Than deputy general, wrote That she was “eager To undertake this effort given that private prisons simply do not provide the same level of Correctional services, programs, and resources they do not save substantially on cost and they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.” When Yates talks about cost she isn't even including the cost to taxpayers when convicts reoffend. The only positives of the for-profit prison argument is that they make a few corporations a lot of money.
Since there are no good arguments for private prisons, the for-profit industries spend millions of dollars on Republican politicians because that's the only chance they have. Currently, 8% of US prisons are privately run, but the for-profit lobby has been trying to get that number up. It's not just political corruption, sometimes it is illegal and gray area kickbacks. For example, core Civic offered a $30 million cash payment to the state of Montana in exchange for renewing the state's prison contract over the next 10 years. Montana has the second-highest percentage of inmates in for-profit prisons at 40%.
Although for-profit prisons were in decline under the Obama Administration they found an ally in the Trump administration. Jeff Sessions overturned the ban on private prisons within months of Trump taking office in the federal system. After the end of Trump's term, Biden reinstated the ban on private prisons in the federal system. In reality, our justice system affects everyone in the United States regardless of whether they have personally been involved in the system. Although our public prison system is far from perfect at least there are groups of people concerned about rehabilitating prisoners and treating them humanely as well as protecting the staff.
Just like any other business corporations are only concerned with maximizing profit. it shows in our disastrous healthcare system and it shows in the lower standard provided by private prisons. Although the Biden Administration has done a great job on the federal level the for-profit industry is still successful in Republican red states. and that's only on the criminal level. In the next article, I will discuss the for-profit prison Industries moving into immigrant detention centers.