Cost Benefit Analysis Of Prison Privatization In The United States

1561 Words7 Pages

Mary Anne Batiz
Dr. Pittaro
Corrections
22 April 2017 Prison Privatization: Cost-Benefit Analysis Prison Privatization began around the 1980’s due to high incarceration rates creating more demand. Prison privatization is when prisons or jails are privately owned, rather than owned by the state or federal government. In the 1980’s, at the rate of overcrowding, the government could no longer supply the extra prisons needed for the incoming offenders. The CCA, Corrections Corporation of America, saw this as a business opportunity. They decided they would build a prison and contract it to the government basically. The CCA was only the first company, now there are many companies and many private prisons all over the country. (“A Brief”) There …show more content…

Good time is when a prisoner continuously behaves well and is given time off of his or her sentence. However, for CCA, the largest private prison company, it was found that prisoners lost good time eight times as much as those in public prisons. Furthermore, in one of their prisons it was found that for any infraction, regardless the gravity, an inmate was automatically added 30 days. What does that mean? More money for CCA. This falls into the ethical issues because it makes it seem as though when someone enters a private prison, the odds are much likelier that they’ll have a longer stay than a public one. Time is something one can never get back, and private prisons are purposely wasting inmates’ lives just for financial gain (Pelaez). Prison privatization may also have affected sentencing. Prison privatization was supposed to be a solution to mass incarceration, not promote it. However, since privatization, three strike laws have been enacted. Three-strike laws are not not the same in every state but it’s the same concept overall. Any person that commits more than 2 offenses, usually a felony but not always, automatically gets a harsher sentence. This harsher sentence is usually some form of a life sentence. This is extremely beneficial to private prisons because that is a huge increase in money. More time, more