My Own Private Pinta: Private Versus Public Punishment
Private prisons in the United States extend back to the American Revolution, when Great Britain used moored merchant ships as holds for revolutionary prisoners. Subcontracting of certain services within the prison, such as food and medical service, vocational training, and transportation, has always been a component of prison economics. It was not until the 1980s, however, that a cultural shift emerged around prisons as just another prospective private enterprise. This shift was hastened by the sharp increase in incarceration statistics as a result of the War on Drugs and a general public antipathy to funding construction of new facilities. From the first private prison established in 1984, there are now approximately 264 federal and state facilities, located primarily in the south and west (Schmalleger & Smykla, 2007), with an inmate population of about 1,612,395 (Mason, 2012, p. 1). The argument for the privatization of prisons echoed a larger discussion around deregulation and the supposed inherent efficiency of the free market: in short, it was proposed that private companies could provide a better quality of service for a lower cost than a public entity. However, meta-analysis has proven inconclusive regarding benefits, at best, and, at worst, has raised some very serious concerns over the validity of such a model.
The argument for privatization was primarily pecuniary: private companies wouldn’t have to deal with bureaucratic hindrances for approval for new facilities, both in the voting booth and in the procurement and design process. In the agility of providing new beds, the private sector does seem to have an unequivocal benefit: a firm built a 350-bed facility in Houston in 5½ months for a cost of $14,000/bed, as contrasted to the INS’ estimates of 2½ years and $26,000/bed (Cripe, 1997, p.384). Private companies were also believed to provide operational costs savings, primarily through efficiency, but also through different approaches to labor and purchasing. Concerns over possible quality issues were dismissed. Conceptually, the ability to oversee privately run operations and ensure quality control was an easy contractual clause: the private prisons were required to maintain certain measurable levels of service and outcomes, or they would be penalized, initially through fines and then through contract cancellation.
Indeed, early studies seemed to validate the value of privately run corrections. In a 1992 article in The Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, an analysis of three New Mexico facilities declared that “the private prison outperformed its governmental counterparts on nearly every dimension” (Logan, 1992). Logan looks at eight factors of prison quality, derived from his own work, relying upon surveys and other “empirical” documentation, such as internal logs and discipline records, and compared 595 points. On this basis, Logan asserts that in this prison group, the private prison received double the amount of favorable marks, one-third to one-fifth negative marks, and comparable marks equal to those at the state facility, but over twice as high as the federal prison. In short, the “quality of confinement” in the private facility was markedly better. The 1980s and 1990s were replete with declaratory analyses which supported the cost-savings of private prisons, and moreover claimed that the influence of private facilities had additionally resulted in lower public sector costs (Savas, 1982 and Segal & Moore, 2002b). Texas, the largest consumer of private prisons, reported a 14-15% cost savings with private facilities (Sloane, 1996, p. 3). A snapshot of the data in the 1990s told a success story through articles like “For Privately Run Prisons, New Evidence of Success” in The New York Times (Butterfield, 1995): the paradigm of private industry and the free market had won in this arena.
However, at the end of the 1990s, the story began to unravel. In 1999, a series of high profile escapes from private facilities (Camp & Gaes, 2001, p. 6) garnered a lot of scrutiny on their ability to maintain security. Indeed, even today, private prisons have a 49% higher incidence of guard assaults and a 65% higher incidence of inmate on inmate violence than public facilities (Austin & Conventry, 2001). As another security data point, private facilities also have a notably higher drug hit rate in random testing (Camp & Gaes, 2001, p. 12). More recent and egregious performance issues have included facilities with a fourfold incidence of staff on inmate sexual assaults, the running of a “gladiator” environment, inhumane conditions and lack of emergency medical care (Mason, 2012, p. 11). These facts are particularly striking when one considers the private sector’s “cherry-picking” of low-risk, minimum and medium security prisoners, including women and juveniles (Oppel, Jr, 2011). Many critics point to statistics like these as evidence that not only is privatization not better, its whole foundation is based on hidden costs, murky numbers, bad assumptions and bad practices: for one, some correlate the lower salaries and benefits, as well as a lack of ongoing, comprehensive staff training, as a way to lower operational expenses at a proverbial higher cost (Austin & Conventry, 2001).
But do the private prisons provide a literal cost savings? Again, the data is highly equivocal and problematic. Ongoing meta-analysis of increasing data volume seems to find that subcontractors do not perform notably better. Overall, as the ubiquitously cited U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics Report stated, promised cost savings “have simply not materialized” (2001, p. 4) and the more recent 2007 study by the University of Utah concluded that “cost savings from privatizing prisons are not guaranteed and appear minimal” (Van Vleet, 2007). Much of the controversy stems from the difficulty in analyzing non-comparable data and severe methodology flaws in past studies. For example, when evaluating the costs on a per inmate basis, there is difficulty because private prisons are allowed to reject – and do – inmates who have chronic illness or who are violent. Because the state does not have equal latitude, it is often saddled with a now disproportionate share of high cost medical care, security enhancements, and related requirements (Mason, 2012, p. 8). The 1996 General Accounting Office (GAO) Report, Private and Public Prisons, makes clear that early projected savings, such as the 14-15% cited in the Texas study, were flawed because those numbers were based on hypothetical fact patterns, didn’t standardize data for an apples-to-apples comparison, and provided no baseline of methodology or data points which could be assimilated, interpreted and extrapolated with any accuracy (p. 4). As the data analysis has improved and methodologies become more refined, the data seems to consistently show that there are few substantive differences between the costs of state or privately run facilities, categorically: that is, some private institutions may outperform some public institutions, and vice versa, but no overall pattern is definable. More, a recent Arizona study has determined that for its state to private comparisons, not only do the private facilities not cost less, in some cases, they cost more (Oppel, Jr, 2011). Distilling the pecuniary data into a single point, private facilities overall yield only a 1% savings (Van Vleet, 2009).
Of course, proponents of privatization have rebutted these studies, particularly the Arizona study, by critiquing that they are based on suppressed correlatives: that is, the conditions for comparison and evaluation have simply been (re)defined in such a way as to ensure a particular outcome. Segal’s (2008) perspective on this is made clear with his rebuttal entitled, If You Can’t Win, Change the Rules, and goes on to claim that studies which do not support privatized cost savings fail because they inflate the numbers by discounting state costs, but add the same costs to calculations for private enterprise. This same point, however, can be made on both sides, since critics of private facilities never include the substantial overhead of state/contract oversight in their costs. But, Segal’s point of view that the more recent conclusions go against “several years of study and a widely accepted methodology that consistently produced results that demonstrated the success of private prisons” (2008) appears to be in the extreme minority. Report after report, from all political spectrums and initiated within academia, government and non-profits, details the underlying lack of homogeneous methodology and conclusions.
So, the data at present does not support a conclusion that private prisons offer a strict cost savings and strongly supports a conclusion that security and several other measure of quality are much poorer in private prisons: these outcomes are true, even with the stacked deck private facilities employ. In the areas where private facilities do outperform state facilities, it seems that what is most warranted is the state’s adoption of any best practices allowed by law which may lead to an ideal and strong blend of the two systems. However, consideration of which system is best doesn’t end here.
Many critics of privatization point to the influence of profit motive on public policy and facility operations. Conceptually, public policy has a vested interest in deterring crime, rehabilitating non-violent offenders, and restoring any inmate to a productive citizenship when/if possible. Structurally, this is directly at odds with an industry designed to profit from high levels and long terms of incarceration. Therefore, one would expect to see the prison industry lobbying for Draconian enforcement legislation, mandatory sentencing, and other public policy decisions which would result in trafficking large volumes of inmates: this expectation is corroborated by the data. The industry’s lobbying arm, ALEC, develops “model policies which have included mandatory sentences, three strikes laws, and truth-in-sentencing” (Mason, 2011, p. 13) laws, and it claims credit for the introduction of 1,000 related bills every year. Just one company, CCA, has contributed $1.4 million each year since 1999 in lobbying dollars, and this does not include contributions made directly to candidates or superpacs; more, this is just one industry subcontractor. It is wholly logical to infer that operations predicated on trimming expenses at every turn in order to improve the bottom line will seek to do so through ways not in alignment with public values: there are only so many categories of expenses to cut. Therefore, which categories are appropriate? Would cuts to food, education, medical care, staff training, staff and inmate safety, heating and cooling, or any other categories serve the interest of the system?
In conclusion, the underlying presumption of cost savings by privatizing the penal system has not been consistently or unequivocally demonstrated. More, the shift to a privatized system has resulted in poor safety and security outcomes, both for staff and inmates. Lastly, the inherently incongruent motives between a profit-driven system and a restoration-driven social contract create demonstrable conflicts of interest in public policy and law enforcement. There is not, thus far, any substantial evidence to support the success or social value of privatizing these facilities.
References
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