Are Government Prisons More Corrupt Than Private Prisons

Are Private Prisons More Corrupt Than Government Prisons?

Introduction

Capitalism is the beautiful system of America's economy as the country gives opportunities for money-making in every situation. For many years, Prisons in the United States have been using private companies for services such as vocational training, transporting prisoners, and medical care. But in the 1980s, public prisons became overcrowded due to increased cases of drug offenders and incarceration. From this case, private companies saw an opportunity for growth and profit, thus establishing the first private prison in 1984, run by Corrections Corporation of America. After successfully establishing the first private prison, others followed suit, starting to operate in several states across the U.S. But the existence of two types of prisons has brought significant discussion on which is more corrupt than the other. For instance, one can view private prisons as immoral since they make money for the corporation that owns the facility. Therefore, this paper aims to look at general statistics on which prison between the private and public is best for our society.

The most Corrupt Between Private and Government Prison

Anyone who wants to know the importance of prisons to society can take time to analyze both private and government Prisons. With approximately 2.2 million people behind bars in America, there have been increasing correction facilities to solve the highest number of incarcerations. Although the approximate population behind the bar might look low, there are vastly more people under some correctional control. An increase in the number of prisoners between the 1980s and 2012 led to the decision by the government to partner with the private corporation to help the issue of inmates overcrowding. It was due to overcrowding of prisoners in government prisons that made the U.S partnered with private prison corporations to mitigate the highest number of prisoners in the country. Although the issue of privatization of prison facilities has been controversial and continually changing the aspect of U.S criminal justice policy. The number of inmates has been increasing in private prisons since their establishment in the 1980s. For instance, by 2014, they were a significant increase in the number of inmates in private prisons to about 131,300, compared to the early statistical data when the facility was first established. With this kind of increase, it is clear the facility was well established to ensure that it met the needs of the inmates. Despite the increase in the number of non-governmental prisons in America, little is known regarding the public opinion towards the facility. It is clear that researchers have been taking their vital time to get the opinion from both the policymakers and the state on the effect of private prisons on society. Since the private facility is controlled and owned by individuals contracted by the government, they took time to gain fame. The need for this facility was known in President Reagan's regime, which saw the government prisons becoming overcrowded with drugs and incarceration prisoners, thus the need for enough space. The government embraced the use of private federal custody because they were cheaper and thus cost-effective to operate and run (McElreath et al. 2017). Given that government use them as an option to reduce overcrowding in the public prisons, they always decide on the prisons they need. This is always meant to ensure that the prisoners they take are cost-effective for them to maintain and run the facility profitably. Unlike public prisons, private prisons lack transparency and accountability because they always make the prisoners' information private and records private.

Also, you need to look at ethical factors to tell which of the two prisons is more corrupt than the other. But to understand the difference between the two and how they are important they are best to society; it is good to analyze how the researchers have studied prison privatization dynamics. Prior to the 1980s, private prisons never existed in the United States, indicating that the corporation running the business should thank the Reagan administration War on Drugs. Based on the research, the corporation running this private institution claims to be saving the government money by using what they receive for the betterment of the prisoners, but this is not true because compared to a government facility, the bottom-line focus of the facility is to make profits. To show how corrupt private facilities are compared to the public, they always lower their operating cost by hiring fewer employees and training them less. For instance, the employees in private federal custody earn $5,000 less than their government counterparts and 58 fewer training hours than those in government prisons. From this view, one can conclude that even though the facility played a vital role in reducing the overcrowding within the public prisons, it still enhanced corruption in the sector. The incompetence within the private facility has made the private facility record higher employer turnover and decreased security (Cabral & Saussier, 2013). For instance, in the report released in 2016 from the Department of Justice Department, private prisons had at least a 28 percent higher rate of inmate-on-inmate assault than public prisons. It is also significant that the researchers in their studies focused their findings on the training and hiring of staff, a factor that significantly distinguishes the two. Compared to government prisons, private prisons are always interested in making profits rather than serving the rights of the public. Although public opinion was not gathered concerning these two types of prisons, much opposition that private prisons face is due to the concept that they are profit-oriented, whose motives are focused on making money and not correcting inmates, thus undermining their capacity to provide secure and safe services to the inmates. From these factors, it is true that the decision by the government to privatize prisons was not a noble idea because it contributed to the highest cases of corruption. The extent to which private prisons can be operated more cheaper than the government prison indicates how the facility is not only interested in making returns on investment and not providing essential services to the public.

The decision by the government to partner with the private corporation was shocking because the act might have shown that public and prison corruption are virtually indistinguishable. Although the public most of the time views the government as the most corrupt sector, the private sector also operates in the same way this has been the case in public prisons established in the United States. According to a principle-based perspective, professionalism and corruption are two vital factors assigned to the public's conduct regarding matters of betrayal and trust (Enns & Ramirez, 2018). In most instances, people view public places as corrupt because of a lack of professionalism among the employees but do not know this is the same case among the private employees. It is from this view that citizens, in most instances, use public services because of different reasons, such as lack of choice, among other factors. But relating these factors with the case of the two prisons, there is a wide difference because private prisons have dominated corruption in the American court than public facilities (Schwartz & Surge, 2004). For instance, private prison always exploits our corrupt political system to make them pass legislation in their favor. For instance, the private prison corporation has been picking candidates who are likely to win the election and donating enough money to them to win the election. After that, they can negotiate with them to make laws that favor the facility. The corruption cases related to the private prisons indicate that this facility is more corrupt than the government because it uses the public earned money to influence legislation that is not ethically based on their work (Wasserman Mitchell, 2015). Although the public has privatized most of their essential institutions, it is good to enhance policies that will be effective to minimize the cases of corruption. It is an article of faith in American capitalism that most private enterprises are always cheaper. Thus, it is more important to be used in running public entities than in the public sector. What makes private sectors cheap is their motivational desire to make profits. Therefore, it is true from the researchers' view that even though the private prison had a significant implication in helping the government reduce the increased population of inmates in prison, it was more corrupt than the government prison.

The Best Prison for Society

Having analyzed the two types of prisons, it is significant that both institutions are important to the American government even though the private prisons were a liability as they depended on the government for resources. But also, from the significant investigation I have done about the two prisons, it is clear that the best for society is government prisons because compared to private, it is significant that the facility cares about people's needs and does not make returns (Perrone & Pratt, 2003). The reason government prison is best for society than private is that it has minimal corruption cases. For instance, apart from the facility's overcrowding, it has been important to ensure that the rights of every inmate are not affected. Unlike public prisons, the private sector's main concern was to make money, which contributed to the increased length of sentence among the inmates, which affected their rights. The increased length of the private prisons, especially among nonviolent crimes, indicated that the private prisons were more concerned with making money rather than ensuring that inmates' rights were looked at effectively (Souryal, 2009). From this case, I found two reasons private prisons were not best for society compared to that government prisons. For instance, private prison was not crucial to society because it was established with the aim of doing business and not as a correctional facility; thus, it is not the best prison system for our society because it violates their rights for the sake of making revenue. Another point of view that, in my opinion, private prison is not best for society compared to the government is that the facility is profit-motivated; thus, it does provide quality and safety services to the people. In more recent research, the comparison between the two prisons in terms of quality has shown some significant factors that make the facility different, thus making the researchers from a different article I have analyzed view the decision by the government to privatize prisons as corrupt oriented as they were neither beneficial nor detrimental

Another thing that makes private prisons not best for society compared to the government-private is that all its resources and activities are government-sponsored. The government's decision to sponsor private facilities based on the number of inmates and lengths of their sentences contributed to private prisons not being viewed as the best place for society. It is from this factor that private prisons recorded the highest cases of corruption compared to public prisons (Dryburgh, 2009). Although one of the article's research has indicated that President Trump was vocal during his campaign to support private prisons, one can take this to be personal interest because president Obama's administration aimed to abolish the institutions because they seemed to be infective to the public. The Trump's support for private prisons was based on the view that due to the increased number of inmates in the country, it was not possible to do without the privatization, an indication that, indeed, the facility was not important, but for the sake of maintaining the high number of inmates in the country it was important for President Trump to support privatization of prisons. It is clear from the analysis of private prisons that they are one of the leading corrupt facilities because most of the corporate owners have taken them as profit-making endeavors (Camp & Gaes, 2002). For example, in 2009, one of the most well-known corruption incidents was "kids for Cash," where judges in Pennsylvania accepted money from a private corporation owner in exchange for sending kids to his prison at twice the state average cost in order to line the wallets of the prison owner. From this case, one can say that private prison was not concerned about the lives of people but rather making a profit. But after significant analysis of the two, it is clear that the discussion on private and public prisons will continue to exist until America get the best way of handling the increased number of inmates in the country. 

References

Cabral, S., & Saussier, S. (2013). Organizing Prisons through Public-Private Partnerships: a cross-country investigation. BAR-Brazilian Administration Review, 10(1), 100-120.

Camp, S. D., & Gaes, G. G. (2002). Growth and quality of U.S. private prisons: Evidence from a national survey. Criminology & Public Policy, 1(3), 427-450.

Dryburgh, M. M. (2009). Personal and policy implications of whistle-blowing: The case of Corcoran State Prison. Public Integrity, 11(2), 155-170.

Enns, P. K., & Ramirez, M. D. (2018). Privatizing punishment: Testing theories of public support for private prison and immigration detention facilities. Criminology, 56(3), 546-573.

McElreath, D. H., Doss, D. A., Jensen, C., Wigginton, M., Mallory, S., McElreath, L. S., ... & Flaschka, W. (2017). The Mississippi Hustle: Corrupting the financial principal-agency relationship at the Mississippi Department of Corrections. Crime, Law and Social Change, 68(1), 17-27.

Perrone, D., & Pratt, T. C. (2003). Comparing the quality of confinement and cost-effectiveness of public versus private prisons: What we know, why we do not know more, and where to go from here. The Prison Journal, 83(3), 301-322.

Schwartz, M. D., & Nurge, D. M. (2004). Capitalist punishment: Ethics and private prisons. Critical Criminology, 12(2), 133-156.

Souryal, S. S. (2009). Deterring corruption by prison personnel: A principle-based perspective. The Prison Journal, 89(1), 21-45.

Wasserman Mitchell, E. (2015). Deferred Corporate Prosecution as Corrupt Regime: The Case for Prison. Case Legal Studies Research Paper, (2015-06).