I saw this animation, which shows how much our prison population has been growing per capita over the last few decades. But crime has gone down pretty significantly, if I understand the statistics correctly.
So why have prison populations grown so much? Is this related to the private prison industry? Is this a good thing?
What are the benefits of the private prison industry as opposed to government-run prisons? What are the negatives?
Because there is economic incentive to imprison people.
Yes.
No
Massive profits with little to no oversight and little or no repercussions for misconduct and/or malfeasance. (This is a positive to the people running the prison.)
Massive expenditures with little to no oversight and little or no repercussions for misconduct and/or malfeasance. (This is a negative for the taxpayers, the inmates and society in general.)
It really is extraordinary - look at some of these charts:
And this is, of course, set against a background of crime tumbling everywhere in the developed world since the early 80s.
Two significant factors:
[ul]
[li]The three strikes laws, and [/li][li]Average length of sentence in the US[/li][/ul]
Lock 'em up for longer and the population increases.
On the industry:
Yep, my guess is that it is mostly about sentencing changes and being “tough on crime.” Mandatory minimums, longer penalties, and so on would certainly mean that the prison population can increase while crime goes down.
But I can’t the the life of me figure out how the OP thinks that privately run prisons is a factor here. Judges determine sentences, not the people who run prisons. Excepting a handful of very notable cases where judges have been corruptly sentencing people to a particular institution, how would private prisons have any relation at all to the overall prison population? I don’t get it.
Cite?
Private prisons are a symptom of high incarceration rates, not its cause. Its cause is (chiefly) the war on drugs.
The war on drugs started in the early 70s (War on drugs - Wikipedia). Look at this graph of incarceration rates:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/U.S._incarceration_rates_1925_onwards.png
Private prisons as a significant phenomenon started in the mid 80s.
"Federal and state government has a long history of contracting out specific services to private firms, including medical services, food preparation, vocational training, and inmate transportation. The 1980s, though, ushered in a new era of prison privatization. With a burgeoning prison population resulting from the War on Drugs and increased use of incarceration, prison overcrowding and rising costs became increasingly problematic for local, state, and federal governments. In response to this expanding criminal justice system, private business interests saw an opportunity for expansion, and consequently, private-sector involvement in prisons moved from the simple contracting of services to contracting for the complete management and operation of entire prisons.[9]
The modern private prison business first emerged and established itself publicly in 1984 when the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) was awarded a contract to take over a facility in Hamilton County, Tennessee. This marked the first time that any government in the country had contracted out the complete operation of a jail to a private operator"
High incarceration rates are also a reaction to the rising crime rate in the 60s/70s which gave law & order its popularity which makes it difficult electorally to be in favor of reducing sentences but advantageous to be in favor of increasing them.
Through heavy lobbying efforts judges that will lean towards more imprisonment are either chosen or elected.
That’s how I understand it. Some judges are good for business, and the ones that are good for business have a mighty industry on their side.
Not just judges-they pour money into efforts to lengthen sentences also.
[Devil’s advocate]
The people most likely to commit a crime are those who have already committed a crime in the past. Being in prison decreases a criminal’s ability to reoffend, and so causes the reduction in crime, rather than being an unrelated statistic.
[/Devil’s advocate]
There’s an interesting documentary, The House I Live In, that talks about the issue, especially as it relates to the war on drugs. If you feel like getting more angry about the situation, I mean.
So if we were all sent to prison the crime rate would be zero.
Ravenman, when you have a private interest making millions off imprisoning people, you end up with a rich lobby group to push for mandatory minimums, longer penalties and stricter immigration policy.
While a reasonable conjecture, there has also be a decrease in the crime rate in the rest of the industrialized world, which has much lower rates of incarceration than the US. That suggests that the incarceration rate is not driving the crime rate.
Ah - I get it.
But even government run prisons are big business. Ever wonder why there’s five Federal prisons in West Virginia, including several rather new ones, in a state that was once legendary for pork?
Are you saying that the five federal prisons bring in more money than the state spent to build them and spends to maintain them?
Oh no doubt it can be a job builder for politicians to score a prison build in their district. That’s just another thing to work against a rational-results oriented justice system.
I must confess to ignorance about the details of prison funding but I was under the impression that money for the building and maintenance of federal prisons comes chiefly from the federal government rather than the State, no?
If so, then the State can definitely be getting more money out of it than it put in.
I think this is correct. And these groups can use fear as their tool to carry out those goals.
