Corruption exists in every society and America is no exception. From Watergate drama scandals to GM brakes, scandals and corruption serve to enrage and invigorate the people. But today, there exists an institution that is brilliantly and wholly corrupt and pervasive in our society, flying under our radars and in the back of the media. Private prisons. America is home to the largest prison population in the world, both in number and per capita. It’s easy not to care about prisoners--after all they are, by definition, convicted criminals. This is one of the reasons why private prisons, amongst the 2 million prisoners in the U.S., have gone relatively unnoticed and unchanged. But even though they’re not this month’s hottest topic, private prisons are a topic that our federal government needs to address. Not only are these prisons violating moral standards by mistreating their prisoners in favor of profit, they are a significantly contributing factor in our country’s prison population and government corruption. Private prisons are a serious issue that the government and people of the United States need to become informed about and hopefully ban from our prison system.
The first, and most prominent, issue regarding private prisons is corruption. To help and keep private prisons unexposed and running smoothly, three major private prison companies, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), The GEO Group (GEO) and the Management and Training Corporation, have spent a combined $45 million on lobbying in the past decade. They are also aided by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate run non-profit organization that introduce over 1,000 bills every year, with one in five enacted into law. As a result, the government has enacted increasingly harsher immigration and incarceration policies, skyrocketing prison populations by 159,200 from 2000 to 2008. The CCA is currently getting $5.1 billion from immigration incarceration alone, a stark contrast to the $760 million in 2004. Private prisons also In 2009, two Pennsylvania judges
Another facet of the corruption in private prisons is the way they treat their prisoners. In order to make more money, private prison corporations cut corners on staffing, medical care and basic training. As a result, prisoners take the suffering so companies can make money. One woman in Arizona had her c-section treated with table sugar. Last year, an examination of the CCA found that they had fabricated 4,800 hours of work from employees over seven months. Violence in Idaho’s first private was found to be four times the rate of all of the state’s other seven prisons combined. There are videos of prisoners being beaten unconscious in front of several guards. One prisoner was forced to defecate in containers other than toilets, due to a lack of toilets in cells.
Proponents of private prisons claim that they bring savings to the people, that these problems are not only not happening, but that any problem in private prisons can be fixed through reform. Sadly, the problem has moved past the point of reform or regulation. Private prisons often are monitored on a daily basis and randomly inspected, according to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, and are responsible for upholding various standards required by health, building, and fire inspectors. If prisons are already heavily regulated, why are all of these atrocities still happening? If all it takes to stop the terrible conditions is a few bills, then why hasn’t it stopped yet? Not only has this problem become bigger than regulations, the so-called economic benefits are non-existent as well. A comprehensive study done by the U.S. Bureau of Justice concluded that these savings “have simply not materialized”, and a University of Arizona meta-analysis found that the assertion that private prisons save money is “mixed at best”, and some studies even found that states actually lost money.
It is the job of the government to enforce the laws and punishments on its citizens. This is so the justice system remains fair, much like the reason why every citizen has the right to a trial by a jury of their peers; if people were judged by an entity with an agenda, then the trial and ruling would not be fair or morally correct. The government is made of people, and as a result, its goal is to maintain the welfare of its citizens, because the people in the government are also citizens. Like what happens in the courtroom, the enforcement of punishment is also a part of the justice system. Therefore, the regulation and ownership of jails and prisons is a responsibility that should be solely delegated to the government, to ensure that they remain as humane and just as possible.
When we look at the atrocities happening in these private prison: the corruption, the violence, and the general treatment of our fellow human beings, it is clear that this ideal is not happening. Corporations do have an agenda: to make the most money. What we have to understand is that for corporations, money will always come first. This doesn’t make corporations inherently bad or evil--this agenda is a necessary component in free enterprise--but what that agenda does do is make them unfit to uphold and maintain prisons as institutions of justice rather than institutions of profit. It’s time to take a look at the facts, and make an informed decisions about the future of the prison system. The banning of private prisons will be a step towards a more just society and decide the fate of over 2 million Americans.
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