Privatization In Corrections

Correction facilities being ran privately instead of being run by the government is a growing concept that has been meet with both praise and skeptisism. Pratt and Maahs, describe privatization in corrections as a growth industry state “Rooted primarily in the political and economic context of the 1980s. The movement to privatize public services has received increasing support in response to taxpayer demands that government provide more services with fewer resources. Advocates of correctional privatization often argue from a ‘public choice’ theoretical perspective… holding that private entities can provide correctional services at a lower cost than governmental agencies. At best, however, the empirical evidence for this claim-
“Thus, measures of health care, safety, sanitation, nutrition, and other aspects of basic living conditions are relevant. Furthermore, confinement must meet a constitutional standard of fairness and due process, so it is not just the effectiveness and efficiency, but also the procedural justice with which confinement is imposed that is important.” Logan goes on to describe confinement as” much more than just warehousing” (Logan 1990) The goal of confinement should be, instead, to promote the rehabilitation of prisoners and ensure that they are housed in decent and humane conditions. No one is advocating for luxury living for inmates but if occupational skills, education, and safe living are not provided inmates will not rehabilitate. Logan is among observers of privatization who contend “it is reasonable and realistic to expect quality from commercially contracted prisons.” This author, citing the example of privatization in New Mexico, maintains that privatization can promote factors necessary for effective prison management. These factors include a well-designed facility, greater operational and administrative flexibility, decentralized authority, higher morale, enthusiasm, and sense of ownership among the staff, greater experience and leadership among the top administrators, and ‘by the book’ governance of inmates”
The Louisiana experiment would indicate that privatization can work and that inmates can be housed in private facilities at less cost to the taxpayer and can be housed under more humane conditions. Even studies that dispute these claims do not necessarily maintain that public correctional facilities are by their very nature more cost-effective. Pratt and Maahs, for example, cite findings showing that “for both mixed level and maximum security prisons, the private institutions had a lower daily per diem cost,“ while, “in minimum and medium security institutions, however, the public facilities fared slightly better” (1999 Pratt and Maahs). Concluding that, in both cases, “none of the differences in costs was statistically significant,” these authors maintain that “overall, the results indicate that regardless of the owner of the facility, it is the economy of scale achieved by the prisons, its age, and its security level that largely determine its daily per diem cost”. Thus, while the literature makes strong arguments for privatization it also makes as many that claim it not to really bear a significant difference at all. Division is mainly between studies that find significant advantages to privatization and those that find no significant differences between