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Author: Richard Harding Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351308025 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
Private prisons have become an integral part of the penal system in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. There already are over 100 such prisons in these countries, and with the number of prisoners continuing to increase rapidly, the trend toward privatization seems irreversible. In this context, Richard Harding addresses the following issues: the contributions, positive or negative, that private prisons make to providing custody for offenders; whether or not private prisons stimulate improvement within the public prison system; and the difficulties with the regulation and accountability of private prisons.This book sets out to explore the contribution of private prisons to custodial practices, standards, and objectives. Many experts believe that, properly regulated and fully accountable, private prisons could lead to improvement within the public prison system, which has long been degenerate and demoralized. Harding sees the total prison system as a single entity, with two components: public and private. He relies upon extensive fieldwork and draws upon published literature as well as in-house documentation, discussions with public and private authorities, and a range of government documents.Key issues covered in Private Prisons and Public Accountability are: overcrowding, program delivery, prisoners' rights, quality of staff, and financial control. This volume will be a significant addition to the criminal justice literature, but it will also appeal to sociologists, policymakers, and scholars interested in the privatization of various institutions in our society.
Author: Richard Harding Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1351308025 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 309
Book Description
Private prisons have become an integral part of the penal system in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia. There already are over 100 such prisons in these countries, and with the number of prisoners continuing to increase rapidly, the trend toward privatization seems irreversible. In this context, Richard Harding addresses the following issues: the contributions, positive or negative, that private prisons make to providing custody for offenders; whether or not private prisons stimulate improvement within the public prison system; and the difficulties with the regulation and accountability of private prisons.This book sets out to explore the contribution of private prisons to custodial practices, standards, and objectives. Many experts believe that, properly regulated and fully accountable, private prisons could lead to improvement within the public prison system, which has long been degenerate and demoralized. Harding sees the total prison system as a single entity, with two components: public and private. He relies upon extensive fieldwork and draws upon published literature as well as in-house documentation, discussions with public and private authorities, and a range of government documents.Key issues covered in Private Prisons and Public Accountability are: overcrowding, program delivery, prisoners' rights, quality of staff, and financial control. This volume will be a significant addition to the criminal justice literature, but it will also appeal to sociologists, policymakers, and scholars interested in the privatization of various institutions in our society.
Author: Gerald G. Gaes Publisher: Rowman Altamira ISBN: 9780759105874 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 248
Book Description
Gaes and his distinguished co-authors offer a comprehensive analysis of public vs. private management of prisons, a competition that originated with the introduction of private facilities into the criminal justice system in the 1980s. The authors measure prison performance with the technique of multi-level modeling for simultaneous measurement of the individual and the institution. Their work points the way to improved penal policy and accountability, and will be a valuable resource for public administrators, policy analysts, corrections personnel and criminologists. Visit our website for sample chapters!
Author: James Austin Publisher: ISBN: Category : Corrections Languages : en Pages : 83
Book Description
This report discusses the findings of a nationwide study on the use of private prisons in the United States. The number of these prisons grew enormously between 1987 and 1998, with proponents suggesting that allowing facilities to be operated by the private sector could result in cost reductions of 20%. The study examined the historical factors that gave rise to the higher incarceration rates, fueling the privatization movement, and the role played by the private sector in the prison system. It outlines the arguments, both in support of and opposition to, privatized prisons, reviews current literature on the subject, and examines issues that will have an impact on future privatizations. The report concludes that, rather than the projected 20-percent savings, the average saving from privatization was only about 1 percent, and most of that was achieved through lower labor costs. Nevertheless, there were indications that the mere prospect of privatization had a positive effect on prison administration, making it more responsive to reform.
Author: Martin P. Sellers Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press ISBN: 9780838634929 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 148
Book Description
The purpose of The History and Politics of Private Prisons in America is to examine the history of the movement, establish how politics affects it, and provide practitioners, politicians, academics, and students with alternative thinking about the value of privatizing prison management. In the first two chapters, author Martin P. Sellers provides a brief history of incarceration and surveys the current privatization movement in the United States, identifying its roots in economics, politics, and administration. Chapter 3 identifies the many political, economic, social, and administrative arguments against privatization and attempts to explain how these arguments developed. In chapter 4, Sellers analyzes three private prisons, comparing them to three public prisons, to determine which group is more efficient at providing prison services, particularly health and education services.
Author: Gary W. Bowman Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 1000949176 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 146
Book Description
With more than one million people behind bars, the United States imprisons a larger share of its population than any other industrialized nation. This has precipitated a serious overcrowding problem with federal and state prisons currently operating well beyond capacity. Conventional efforts appear unable to cope with the increasing shortage of beds or with inadequate rehabilitation services. A bold solution is required; increasingly it is being seen to reside in the private sector. This timely volume explores the issues of private versus public financing, construction, and management of medium-and high-security prisons.Private prisons are not a new concept in the United States. They have existed in several forms since the eighteenth century. The opening chapters evaluate historical cases of prisons for profit, examining the concerns of labor, abuses of inmates, and the source and resolution of disputes between private and public sectors. These chapters argue that the experience gained through privatization does not justify current opposition from civil libertarians or labor unions.Chapters dealing with the modern contracting out of complete management and limited services document the growing trend toward privatization and instances of public/private partnership in prison industries.The assembled evidence indicates clearly that privately run prisons have shown significant cost savings and good quality of provision for prisoners while still being profitable. However, the authors caution that these promising results must be reinforced by public safeguards in the contracting stage and monitoring to assure good service and security. With the American prison system in disarray, the public interest demands that government look beyond the public or private identity of those who wish to provide correctional services and focus instead on who can provide the best services at a given cost. It is essential to state that correctional services should attain several objectives and not merely cost minimization. The analysis and recommendations presented here will aid in the task. Privatizing Correctional Institutions will be of interest to law-enforcement officials, public policy analysts, penologists, and criminologists.
Author: Lauren-Brooke Eisen Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231542313 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 476
Book Description
When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration—to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen’s work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America. From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America’s largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.
Author: Alexander Volokh Publisher: ISBN: Category : Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Private prisons are on the rise. Privately operated juvenile facilities -- mostly community-based group homes or halfway houses -- and federal adult halfway houses have been common in the United States since the 1960s. In 1979, private firms began contracting with the Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain illegal immigrants pending hearings or deportation. Private, large-scale investment in the construction and management of conventional prisons and jails dates from the mid-1980s. Prison privatization has been driven not only by the growing support among lawmakers and the public for private provision of traditional government services, but also by exploding prison populations resulting from stricter drug and immigration laws and changes in sentencing procedures. By the end of 2000, there were 87,369 state and federal prisoners in private detention facilities in the United States -- 6.3% of all state and federal prisoners, and 22.7% more than in 1999. Of these, 15,524 were federal prisoners (10.7% of all federal prisoners) and 71,845 were state prisoners (5.8% of all state prisoners). The use of private facilities is concentrated in the South and the West. Texas and Oklahoma have the greatest numbers of inmates in private facilities; only six states -- Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Wisconsin, which combined account for approximately one-fifth of all state inmates -- house over 20% of their prison population in private facilities. Privatization has been less widespread in local jails than in state prisons -- only about 2% of jail beds are private -- but jail privatization has been called the “next frontier” of privatization. Comparative studies on the cost and quality of private and public prisons give reason to be cautiously pleased with private prison performance. The empirical evidence is consistent with economic theory, which predicts that with privatization, costs will fall and quality (however defined) may rise. The idealist could ascribe the satisfactory performance of private prisons to the power of market incentives; the cynic could point out that given public prisons' bleak history and patchy present, private prisons perform satisfactorily compared to a rather low baseline. Each would be right. Public prisons are not the most accountable of government systems; in fact, under certain circumstances, private prisons may be more accountable. In the qualified immunity context, recent Supreme Court decisions such as Richardson v. McKnight and Correctional Services Corp. v. Malesko have held private prisons to at least as high a standard of constitutional protection as public prisons. Judges' and juries' greater skepticism of private agencies than of government may also make private prisons more accountable; moreover, government oversight of private prisons may be less deferential than government oversight of its own operations. In addition, private prisons have substantially greater market accountability because they are concerned with winning new contracts and renewing old ones, and with avoiding both adverse publicity and drops in stock price. The continued promise of private prisons requires three concurrent innovations. First, evaluators must develop a rich set of performance measures, and prison data must be gathered and publicized. Second, the government must implement performance-based contracts that tie compensation to actual results. Finally, the government should maximize the efficiency gains from privatization and minimize opportunities for capture by institutionalizing competition between public correctional departments and private prison firms and making contract monitoring independent of both the public and the private sectors.
Author: Charles H. Logan Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA ISBN: 0195063538 Category : Corrections Languages : en Pages : 329
Book Description
Offers information on private prisons, provided by Charles H. Logan. Includes statistics on prison performance measures and public versus private prison quality, a bibliography on private prisons, and studies and reports on topics such as privatizing the prison system, increasing the privatization of prisons, and a comparison of the quality of confinement in public and private prisons.
Author: Richard Harding
Author: Richard Harding
Author: Gerald G. Gaes
Author: James Austin
Author: Martin P. Sellers
Author: Gary W. Bowman
Author: University of Sydney. Institute of Criminology. Public Seminar
Author: Lauren-Brooke Eisen
Author: Florida. Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability
Author: Alexander Volokh
Author: Charles H. Logan