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Prison Privatization Case Study

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Policy background The involvement of the private sector in prisons is not a new issue. Both the federal as well as the state governments have overtime been contracting out certain services to the private firms. The services that are offered by the private firms for instance include vocational training, food preparation, medical services as well as the transportation of the inmates. The 1980s ushered in the new era of privatization of prisons (Price, 2006). With a significant prison population that resulted from the war on drugs, the prison overcrowding as well as the raising cost became a huge problem to both the federal and state governments. In trying to respond to the expanding criminal justice and system, most of the private business showed interest and an opportunity to expand their businesses. Overtime, this saw the prisons moving from simple contracting especially on services to the contracting of the complete management as well as the operation of the entire prison. …show more content…

In respect to the jurisdiction, the state, local or even the federal government are then charged some fee which could be a monthly rate per prisoner. Modern private business began emerging as well as establishing itself publicly in the 1980s. This was after the ‘Corrections Corporations of America’ got a contract to oversee a prison facility in the county of Hamilton in Tennessee (Selman and Leighton, 2010). This was the first time that any of the government in the nation had contracted a complete operation of a prison facility to a private operator. In the recent years there are there is a significant number of the correctional facilities managed by the private sector in the

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