Research Paper on Prison Privatization

Introduction

The modern prison privatization phenomena emerged in the mode 1980 in the united states of America after which I spread to other territories such as Australia and the United Kingdom. Australia has seven, the United Kingdom has 11, and the United States has over 100 private prisons spread across eleven states (Roth, 2004). Prisons occupy a special place in our society because they limit or deprive one of their liberty and places limits on self-determination. These restrictions are sanctioned by the government and supported by the community to maintain safety through punishments. Freedom is not curtailed easily; prison should be the last resort that is meant to deter, punish, rehabilitate and protect. Even then, as a last resort, there should be strict measures that safeguard and ensures fair and humane treatments that are both legal and ethical.

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Models of Privatization

A public prison is one that is wholly owned by the government. The government provides the prison buildings, the administration, the staff and they oversee all of the prisoners and everything that goes on in prison. However, even with a public prison services such as cleaning services, food service and maintenance are outsources from private companies. With a private jail, many burdens are lifted off the government. All the business that goes onto running a prison, the government only supplies the prisoners and oversees the prison. Private jails rely heavily on high imprisonment rates to create revenue. These corporations claim that they attain profit through competition, higher effectiveness, and lower operational costs. Nevertheless, according to research these results to know of very few cost saving but instead the private prison corporations have been alleged to influence criminal justice rule to produce stricter immigration and sentencing laws.

The first step in prison privatization is problem recognition by several groups that includes prisoner, administrator, guards, and politicians. Each of the group perceives the problem with their interest. The second stage is the assumption of power by private companies. These private companies had made their way into the prisons through providing routine services such as food and cleaning. The third stage is the transformation of the idea into a model, an operational program growth (Killingbeck, 2005). These private companies slowly but gradually attained the operational contract from the local, states and federal level. The counties were the easiest to offer the licensees due to the enormous pressure to find solutions.

The Evolution of Prison Privatization

For several decades, governments have outsourced the management of prison populations. Australian has enthusiastically adopted this trend, and it has a higher proportion of inmates in privately owned prisons than any other country. In the United States, the policy to privatize prisons rose in response to the crisis in the country's penal system that came into the limelight in the 1980s. The number of prisoners had increased primarily due to strict laws and order policies. Prison overcrowding becomes a significant issue, and most of the older prisons living conditions deteriorated. The congestion and the deterioration of the terms of living were against the US constitution thus state governments remedy was needed in such situations. In Australia, the first private prison opened in Queensland at the beginning of 1990. Overall 17% of prisoners in Australia helps in private jails making it the largest population.

For-profit prison privatization has existed since the 16th century, however; this initiative began to enjoy modern incarceration in the 1980s. The trend exploded when the government was tight with the budget due to the explosion of prison overcrowding and promised low-cost, detention and quality services. Eleven nations spread across North and South America, Europe, Africa and Asia are dealing with certain levels of prison privatization. While the United States records the uppermost amount of privately owned prisons, Scotland, Australia, Wales, England and New Zealand contain the highest proportions of inmates in private jails. Immigrant detention is the most targeted sector for private prisons primarily in the United States. The United Kingdom had 73 percent of its immigrant prisoners held in private prisons. According to research, the profit motives of these prisons often end up resulting in inadequate services and unsafe conditions.

The Growth and Use of Privatization in Australia and Abroad

Australia has more people in prison now that it had at any point in history, according to 2015 national statistics the rates stood at 196 prisoners per 100000 people. The annual net cost of the Australian prison systems stood at $3.4 billion. As the result of this growth and pressures form interested sectors, the government continues to find means to provide prisons service that are supposed to be fiscally and socially accountable (Roberts, Baker, & Andrew, 2016). Six thousand prisoners are managed by three private contractors in Australia namely GEO group, G4S, and Serco. These companies absorb a considerable amount of taxpayer's money, and very few researchers have comprehensively researched them due to the limited amount of transparency.

The range of prison privatization is vast, but it seems more intense and entirely privatized in some English speaking countries. Although these countries allow prisons to be privatized, it varies whether the privatization is meant for-profit or not-for-profit civil service, as well as by degree of privatization. For instance, German continued to in control of detention when the country got their first private company in 2004. France employs the public-private partnership where civil employees always stay in control of the security of the privately built services; these private facilities were required to house around 50% of all inmates in France. Particular states in Brazil have also been using this system of privatization since 1999, and approximately 1.5% of all of their prisoners are held in partially privatized facilities as of 2009. Japan opened its first private prison in 2007 however; the jail is not strictly managed since most of its activities are managed privately such as security. Chile come to be the first South American republic to hire a private prison in 2003 while Peru stated petitioning its bid in 2010. Israel Supreme Court blocked the proposal to establish private prison citing that a correctional authority with an intent of profit lead to grave and harsh destruction to humanity and the fundamental human rights of prisoners and their dignity.

The first private prison in Australia was contracted in 1990 by an American correctional corporation in Queensland and soon spread to other states. By 2011, five of eight Australian states had some degree of privatization in their prisons. Queensland has plans to have the entire state prison system privatized. The 19 percent of the Australian prisoners being held in private jails contains a 95 percent increase for the prison population of 1998 (Mason, 2013). However, during this period the number of prisons population increased by 57 percent and that of publicly owned prisons increased by 50 percent.

Advantages of Prison Privatization

Private prisons aim to achieve the goal of the correctional system at a lower cost with higher quality (Nunn, Schanzenbach, & Mumford, 2016). Some studies agreed that some private prisons are effect in cost reduction. Private prisons may provide economic benefits to the local community regarding jobs and increase spending. There three significant advantages which are allowing the government entity to avoid a substantial amount of expenditure in the construction of prisons, they produce a reduced operational cost which reduces the budget required to operate a prison, and finally, they allow quicker availability in a situation where overcrowding is a menace. Prisons mitigate daily operational cost, the salaries and benefit packages are a lot less than those in the public prisons such as the pension system which is much less expensive than the more vibrant pension system offered to federal employees. Additionally, economies of scale, procurement, and other corporate economies allow these private entities to provide a cheaper day-to-day operational cost.

More effective construction and activation program, they build and actuate prison beds more quickly and efficiently than their prison counterparts since, they do not have the burden of procurement or human resource regulations. These prisons are taxpaying entities, public owned prisons are not entitled to most of the resident taxes, and a private one is normally subjected to all of them. They also progress the local growth through procurement of goods and services needed to run the facility while in public prisons most of the procurements are controlled by the centralized state procurement.

Disadvantages of Privatization and Recommendations for Reform

Private prisons try to spend a minimal amount of cash on any prisoner to gain more profit. They minimize the levels of staffing, cost with the building structure, these cost reduction after an extended period they lead to increase in violence and lowering the overall conditions of the prisons. The most extensive problem with these prisons is that they have an incentive to create more prisoners. They are often able to influence policies in some ways, many of them have been caught lobbying and using groups like Alec to push laws that will be favorable to them in some cases by creating more prisoners. The primary goal of prison is to reform one's character as they are sent back to the society. Most public prisons have high recidivism rates however most private jails want to have a higher recidivism rate because that means they will have more business in the future because if their prisoners frequently return to prison, that means there will be more prisoners for them.

A few reforms in the private sector will see it become more productive and receive less criticism. The most overarching change is that these prisons need to be more accountable, as much as they are privately owned they deal with delicate sectors such that accountability will earn trust from the public. Their employees are paid low wages, more prone to insecurity, they are habitually required to work for more extended hours, and they are unprepared for any form of challenges. Therefore for the prisons to be more active, they should make sure necessary reforms are made that ensures the safety of the work for and the effectiveness of the whole system.

Economic, Political, and Sociological Considerations in Privatization

Privatization of prison is mostly addressed by literature as a symptom of entanglements of broader political, cultural and economic relations. Imprisonment and privatization are placed as mechanisms that are meant to achieve unstated economic goals that are mostly of personal financial gains and non-economic purposes of social stratification and controlling of surplus populations. These privately owned prisons need to consider the influence of political consultants and the emergence of prisons industrial complex (Wood, 2007). This is because these factors such as media, corporations, and politicians develop methods that turn crimes into forms of capital and therefore the government should be more vigilant in controlling the influence of these sectors on private prisons. The media creates an increased fear of crime and criminals in public and. Therefore they use this anxiety over crime to pass stricter laws.