Are Private Prisons a Problem?
The topic of privatization of prisons has been discussed for decades. It is still impossible to find the unanimity among scholars, professionals, politicians and other people closely related to the topic. The implementation of private prisons is a challenge to society as imprisonment and execution of punishment is traditionally viewed as a matter of solely governmental concern and its exclusive privilege. It is often hard for people to accept the introduction of new concepts and forms of activity. However, privatization of prisons should not also be viewed as something unconditionally positive and beneficial for the country. Every single implementation, reform, or change has both pros and cons. In order to be considered effective and beneficial to society, pros should outweigh the cons. As obvious as it looks at first, this notion is still an important one to conduct correct assessment and comparison of benefits and limitations are very hard to do properly. The basic tool for assessing the pros and cons of any phenomena is producing and gathering the statistical information along with its interpretation, ending with making a proper conclusion. Each of these steps is essential to be done correctly in terms of being objective and meeting the standards of scientific methodology. Here the example of such assessment on the topic of private prisons shall be presented and discussed from both positive and negative perspective.
The original reason behind the emergence of idea about private prisons is decreasing the rates of state prisons’ overpopulation and cutting the expenses on maintaining the growing number of inmates, caused by the “war on drugs” which took place in the 1980’s in United States of America. Costs-savings and higher efficiency of private prisons constitute the main benefits those provide to the state. The way private prisons plan to save costs relates to cutting down the operation expenses by using the mostly the nonunion labor and thus manage the wages more effectively. This alone is promised to decrease costs of maintaining the prison facility up to 20% (Cheung, Amy 1). Operational efficiency is the key measure for saving money of taxpayers and private prisons are designed in the way that allows them to operate at a higher quality comparing them to those run publicly. Private prisons are also capable of keeping the population of prisons at a right level. If government prisons become overcrowded, the conditions for inmates get worse and worse, exposing them to threats to their health, safety and human dignity. Not only overcrowding produces the unhealthy social and physical environment, it also requires more resources to be directed to prison for its maintenance such as food, water, electricity, heating and others. Moreover, more prisoners require more wardens to watch them. Concentrating of greater human resource in one facility makes its functioning less efficient as there is a need of putting even more people in the same building at the same time which is not convenient for either of sides. Private prisons can …
