When the U.S. Justice Department announced its plan to phase out the use of private prisons, it confirmed what critics have long known and many states are just beginning to comprehend: It doesn’t pay to put this vital government function into the hands of profit-making ventures.
Private prisons “compare poorly” to those operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons, the Justice Department said in a recent memo. “They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and … they do not maintain the same level of safety and security.”
Less safe, less effective and questionable savings.
That’s hardly a winning slogan for an industry. But there’s a solid body of research to back up the Justice Department’s assertion.
For-profit prisons began to appear in the 1980s as the drug war and harsh sentencing laws were starting to drive a dramatic, and unprecedented, rise in the nation’s incarceration rate and overall prison population. Riding a wave of ideologically based privatization efforts, prison companies convinced many public officials that they could operate prisons more cheaply than the government without compromising results.
The promises have proved illusory.
Even after decades of study, there’s scant evidence that privatized prisons save money. University of Utah researchers analyzed 12 studies comparing public and private prisons and concluded the cost differences were negligible. Some studies suggest private operators actually increase costs by lobbying for longer prison sentences that, in turn, lead to more profits. Human beings became commodities as a result.
Because for-profit prison companies exist solely to generate profits, they must find ways to cut costs below even the bare-bones operation of a state-run prison. That leads to more dangerous prisons and higher recidivism rates, studies show.
The Justice Department’s inspector general recently reported that privatized prisons have higher rates of both prisoner-on-prisoner and prisoner-on-staff assaults than Bureau of Prisons facilities. Other researchers have pinned the problem on lower wages that lead to less experienced, less qualified guards. One report found that the staff turnover rate at private prisons nationwide was 52.2 percent — three times the rate at a public facility.
In Idaho, a study found that prisoners were twice as likely to be assaulted at a medium-security facility under the management of Corrections Corporation of America than at similar state-operated facilities.
The quest for profits also leads to cutbacks in programs that help rehabilitate prisoners. A 2013 study by the Minnesota Department of Corrections suggests that a higher recidivism rate at privatized prisons was due to the lack of programs, like those that teach job skills and prepare prisoners for life after release, an important fact considering the vast majority of prisoners eventually return to their communities.
Finally, privatized prisons are less accountable to the public, because they generally don’t have to adhere to the same open records rules as public agencies.
Today, more than 130,000 prisoners are held in privately operated state and federal facilities. Although that’s just 6 percent of the 2.2 million people in custody, the number has grown by more than 50 percent since 2000. Florida, meanwhile, has privatized all its juvenile-residential programs.
Many public agencies use for-profit vendors, and rightly so. But incarcerating and rehabilitating a human being is not the same as delivering office paper. In the case of criminal justice, the profit motive creates incentives and values that conflict with the public interest. States should follow the lead of the Department of Justice and phase out private prisons.
Lisa Graybill is the deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s criminal-justice reform project.
