Growth and Quality of U.S. Private Prisons: Evidence from a National Survey* (original) (raw)
Related papers
1997
This report addresses issues surrounding the growth in the private sector's operation of adult, secure facilities for sentenced inmates in the United States. It is also an analysis of private sector standards in staff training, policy and procedure devoted to inmate security and custody, and some of the important indicators of the quality of private prison operations. This report fulfills a mandate from the U.S. Congress (pursuant to Public Law 105-277, Sec. 111). Private sector firms have responded to the need for prison beds created by the rapid growth in the jail and prison populations in recent years. This growth has generated tremendous opportunities for entrepreneurs to build, own, and operate prisons. The two largest firms, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and Wackenhut Corrections Corporation (WCC) arose in the 1980s and rapidly expanded to provide care to more inmates in the United States than most State systems. The private sector housed 69,188 inmates in 94 prisons on July 31, 1999. Private prisons held 5.3 percent of the 1.3 million inmates under the jurisdiction of State and Federal Governments at this time. This marked a significant increase from the end of 1997, when there were 91 contracts that covered 37,651 inmates in 84 private prisons. CCA held 37,244 inmates in 45 prisons in 1999-53.8 percent of the total number of inmates in private prisons. WCC incarcerated another 19,001 inmates in 26 prisons-27.4 percent of the total number of privately held inmates. CCA was responsible for more inmates than those held in all but seven States and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). An additional nine State systems had more inmates than the total reported for WCC, or 16 States altogether plus the Bureau of Prisons. Together, CCA and WCC held 56,245 inmates, or 81.3 percent of the inmates held in secure, adult, private prisons. Along with the opportunities generated by the rapid influx of prisoners into the private sector, the private companies also experienced the challenges of operating rapidly expanding correctional systems. In particular, the private companies had to recruit, train, and maintain adequate numbers of correctional staff to operate their prisons.-iv-Some evidence suggests that the private sector prison providers had problems in maintaining adequately trained and experienced staff and that there were critical lapses in appropriate security practices. Both major companies, CCA and WCC, had inmates escape from their adult prisons in 1999. CCA had three escape incidents in 1999 during which four inmates were able to breach the perimeter and escape from secure facilities. CCA, and its subsidiary TransCor, also experienced escapes when inmates were being transported, either for medical treatment or to a prison. There were four such incidents in which five inmates escaped. WCC had two separate incidents in 1999 where one inmate in each incident was able to successfully escape from inside of a secure prison. One of the WCC escapes was particularly relevant for the BOP, an inmate escaped from the Taft Correctional Institution (TCI), which is operated by WCC for the BOP. Correctional Services Corporation (CSC) had significant problems with the McKinley County Detention Center it operated in New Mexico. There were two separate escape incidents in which nine inmates were able to escape from inside of the facility. (CSC has since lost the contract to operate this facility.) The Management & Training Company (MTC) also had one escape in 1999 in which three inmates were able to escape from inside of a secure prison. Private sector companies also experienced serious group disturbances in 1999, most of which could be viewed as riots. CCA (five incidents), WCC (three incidents), and CSC (one incident) experienced group disturbances in which chemical agents had to be used to control inmates, and/or injuries resulted to staff members, and/or significant property damage occurred. In the most tragic of these incidents, a correctional officer was killed at the Guadalupe County Correctional Facility, which was operated by WCC for the State of New Mexico. Research Plan for the Analysis The U.S. Congress (Public Law 105-277, Sec. 111, Fiscal Year 1999 Omnibus Appropriations Bill) required that the Director of the BOP initiate a study that "evaluates the growth and development of the private prison industry during the past 15 years, training qualifications of personnel at private prisons, and the security procedures of such facilities, and compares the general standards and conditions between private prisons and Federal prisons." To fulfill this requirement, the Bureau of Prisons' Office of Research and Evaluation (ORE), in conjunction with subject matter experts within the BOP and the National Institute of Corrections (NIC), developed a research plan with three major components: (1) a census of secure private prisons for sentenced, adult inmates, (2) a survey of Government employees responsible for administering the private prison contracts within agencies that utilized private prison bed space,-v-and (3) site visits to selected private institutions. This report covers the census and survey. A later report will discuss the findings of the site visits. Census The census identified 94 different institutions that held sentenced, adult inmates for departments of corrections in one of the 50 States, Puerto Rico, the District of Columbia, or the Federal Government. Nine of the prisons had contracted with two or more jurisdictions to hold inmates, meaning that, at the time of the census, there were 103 different contracts to hold adult inmates in private prisons. 3 The rapid influx of prisoners into the private sector brought challenges and opportunities. One of the most significant challenges was the need to recruit, train, and maintain adequate numbers of correctional staff that were necessary to operate the prisons they managed. Many of the concerns about private corporations and their staff capabilities came to a head in the aftermath of the highly publicized escape of six maximum risk inmates, five of them convicted murderers, from the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center (NOCC) in July of 1998. In a detailed and rare glimpse into the operations of a private prison, John L. Clark, the Corrections Trustee for the District of Columbia, provided a detailed examination of the problems experienced by CCA at NOCC during its initial operations. In addition to the much-publicized escapes, there were two inmate murders and numerous stabbings and assaults, including assaults on staff. Among his findings, Clark documented the lack of basic security practices and the inexperience and inability of staff to handle difficult inmates (Clark 1998). Since the escapes, staffing and procedural changes were instituted at NOCC, and the institution received ACA accreditation. WCC also experienced highly publicized problems in two of the prisons it operated in New Mexico: the Lea County and Guadalupe County Correctional Facilities. The incidents at these facilities are recorded in Table 1. At the request of the Special Advisory Group composed of New Mexico State Senators, State Representatives, the State Corrections Secretary, and the State Deputy Attorney General, a group of independent consultants were asked to examine the operations in New Mexico public and private prisons in light of the problems experienced by the New Mexico Corrections Department and WCC. The correctional consultants documented their evaluation in a report submitted to the Special Advisory Group (Austin, Crane, Griego, O'Brien, and Vose 2000). Among the types of problems documented, some were attributed to the New Mexico Department of Corrections, such as lack of surveillance of gang activities and inequity in housing conditions between the public prisons and the more Spartan private prisons. Other problems were more likely to be found in the private prisons: problems with inadequate numbers of staff, inexperienced staff, insufficiently trained staff (partly caused by difficulty in scheduling access to the State training academy), and physical plant deficiencies in the facilities owned by WCC. Richard Crane argued that part of the problem in operations at the two facilities originated with the complicated contractual arrangements between the Corrections Department, the Counties of Guadalupe and Lea, and WCC. To quote Crane (2000: 54): In the end, the complex contractual arrangements, the unclear facility missions, the need for prison beds, and the involvement of too many agencies and individuals in negotiations, resulted in contracts which fall well short of industry standards and create significant security, programmatic and fiscal implications for the State (p. 54). 8 Most of the inmates, 4,741, that were reported to be low security risks were held in four different private prisons for the BOP.
Quality of prison operations in the US federal sector: A comparison with a private prison
Punishment & Society, 2002
An examination of the quality of operations at private and public prisons is essential to making informed decisions about the desirability of using private and public prisons. Previous studies have used survey data collected from staff and inmates to compare prisons based on the proportions or percentages of staff making favorable evaluations of different items. As argued here and elsewhere, the previous studies have been flawed by methodological shortcomings. An approach is demonstrated here that allows for an examination of the aggregate measurement properties of survey items as well as for making comparisons of different prisons. The data are from surveys administered to staff at 96 federal prisons and two private prisons. The results demonstrate that not all survey items can be used indiscriminately to compare prisons, and when comparisons are made, it is essential to control for individual-level and institutional-level factors that are not related to institution performance but...
Current status of prison privatization research on American prisons and jails
Criminology and public policy, 2019
This article is based on a previously unpublished article I wrote in which I reviewed the status of prison privatization research. In this article, I updated the previous one by adding research conducted in the past several years as well as data on jails and contract services. Research Summary: Private companies manage 8.4% of the U.S. prison population and 5.4% of the jail population. On average, the costs and quality of privatized facilities seem to be about the same as publicly operated prisons, but the lack of high-quality studies limits a strong inference. Although states with increases in prison privatization have lower public-sector costs, this may be a result of strong cost controls, not of their level of privatization. An increase in recidivism seems to occur for people placed in private facilities. This assertion is based on the findings of several studies in which regression controls are used and on only one study in which a strong counterfactual design is applied. Finally, there is no evidence that prison privatization was responsible for the dramatic growth in incarceration that peaked in 2009. Policy Implications: Because many jurisdictions will continue to use privately operated facilities, it is incumbent on them to create monitoring mechanisms to ensure highquality services and efficient use of resources. In this article, I suggest many ways in which research findings can contribute to a better assessment of prison and jail performance promoting accountability for both the private and the public sector. K E Y W O R D S jail privatization, prison and jail performance metrics, prison privatization, prison quality/cost comparisons 2 PRIVATE CORRECTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES Corporate management of prison operations is a recent historical event. CoreCivic, formerly Corrections Corporation of America, began operations in 1983 and has the largest privatization footprint. The GEO Group, originally Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, is a close second. These companies have expanded their businesses into reentry centers, transportation services, halfway houses, correctional health providers, and community supervision services. CoreCivic and GEO are publicly traded companies with December 2018 stock values in the 22to22 to 22to23 range. MTC is a later entry into the business. It was first founded as a jobs training organization operating U.S. Department of Labor Job Corps centers as early as 1966. Although other firms provide prison management services, these three are the largest and manage a large proportion of American privatized prisons and jails. 2000 to 8.5% in 2016. As a proportion of its inmate population in 2016, New Mexico had the highest share held in privately operated prisons, 43.1%, followed by Montana at 38.8%, Tennessee at 26.4%, Oklahoma at 25.3%, and Hawaii at 25.1%. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) had the largest number of privately held prisoners, including inmates held in nonsecured community halfway houses. States with large privately held inmate populations included Texas, with 13,692 inmates, but this is a substantial decline from the 20,041 privately managed prisoners Texas had in 2008. Table 1 shows that the number (137,220) and proportion (8.7%) of privately held prisoners peaked in 2012 but has remained at approximately 8.4% since that time. The growth in the number of private prison beds is symptomatic of the growth in the inmate population over that time span. The private sector's "market share" has increased from 6.5% to 8.5%. The health of the privatization industry, however, has been driven by the tremendous expansion of prison capacity over the last decade. Almost half of the growth in the number of private prison beds has been from contracts let by the BOP. To put the U.S. prison privatization proportion into context, as of 2013, Australia, Scotland, England and Wales, and New Zealand had a larger share of their prisoners held in private facilities (Mason, 2013). In 2013, for example, the United States held 8.4% of its prisoners in private prisons and Australia held 19.0%.
Inmate Recidivism as a Measure of Private Prison Performance
Crime & Delinquency, 2008
The growth of the private corrections industry has elicited interest in the comparative performance of state and private prisons. One way to measure the service quality of private prisons is to examine inmates' postrelease performance. Current empirical evidence is limited to four studies, all conducted in Florida. This analysis replicates and adds to the Florida measures in a different state and enhances previous methods. It uses data for a large cohort of Oklahoma state prison inmates released between 1997 and 2001. Controlling for known covariates, multivariate survival analysis revealed comparative rates of reincarceration for inmates in multiple exposure and comparison groups. These results are unique among prior studies on this topic; private prison inmates had a greater hazard of recidivism in all eight models tested, six of which were statistically significant. Finding no empirical support for claims of superior service from private corrections, the authors discuss policy implications and prospects for future research.
Quality of prison operations in the US federal sector
Punishment & Society, 2002
An examination of the quality of operations at private and public prisons is essential to making informed decisions about the desirability of using private and public prisons. Previous studies have used survey data collected from staff and inmates to compare prisons based on the proportions or percentages of staff making favorable evaluations of different items. As argued here and
Who is in private prisons? Demographic profiles of prisoners and workers in American private prisons
International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice
Who is in private prisons? This seemingly straightforward question has received surprisingly little attention in the United States. This paper analyzes national prison data to provide demographic profiles of prisoners and workers in private prisons in the United States and to compare them to prisoners and workers in state and federal prisons. It summarizes data on jurisdiction, sentence length, race, and citizenship of prisoners, as well as the race and gender of correctional officers. Results reveal differences between private and public prisons with respect to both prisoners and workers. Specifically, private prisons detain inmate populations that are disproportionately non-white, under federal jurisdiction, and serving short sentences; and they employ officers that are disproportionately female and black or Hispanic. These results depict the private prison sector as distinct from its public counterpart—both in terms of prisoner and staff composition. A discussion considers the implications of these findings for equity in punishment.
Prison Privatization: Driving Influences and Performance Evaluation
2015
United States conservatism and neoliberalism have created a market for prison privatization. The business of making money from incarcerated bodies is in direct conflict with the goals of the justice system. Driving economic and political forces are examined and used to explain the rising prison-industrial complex. Private prison performance is measured by recidivism, cost, inmate rights, and quality of confinement. This paper suggests that prison privatization must be reformed or abolished to improve the corrections system in the United States.