In 2013, there were 133,000 prisoners housed in private prisons in the US - 19.1% of all federal prisoners, and 6.8 percent of all state prisoners. Most are housed in facilities owned by three companies: CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America), GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut,) and Management and Training Corporation. Together these, three companies spent over 1.6 million dollars in lobbying in fiscal year 2017-2018 - with GEO Group spending nearly one million by itself.
Private prisons have been vilified by many for their tendency to hire under-trained staff, deny medical treatment, fail to implement effective security measures (leading to escapes and violence,) and much more. All of this is available to the discerning reader with access to any one of several popular Internet search engines, so I will not repeat them here, with one exception: Here's a link to reporter Shane Bauer's article about his four months undercover working at a private prison in Louisiana.
Another popular criticism of private prisons is the belief that they have somehow caused the current over-incarceration culture of America. Robby Suave addresses this much better than I can, in this article for Reason, but his basic argument (copy & pasted directly from his subtitle) is that private prisons are a symptom. Mass incarceration is the disease - one that, suggests Robert Pfaff, has surprisingly little to do with the War on Drugs, and lot more to do with prosecutorial power creep, as described in this article in The New Yorker.
But do private prisons actually save any money? That's the standard justification for privatization - the private company can do it for less. What about quality? Do private prisons do a better job of being prisons (whatever that means?) Do they, for example, have less recidivism than public prisons? The answer, according to Sasha Volokh for the Washington Post, is a resounding "maybe." There simply aren't enough good studies, and the ones that do exist often contradict each other. We simply don't know if private prisons are any better or worse than public prisons at any metric, except health care, which is so bad at private prisons that Arizona simply won't send prisoners with known health problems to any private prison.
Libertarians, with our inherent distrust of all things government, often cheerlead privatization of traditionally government institutions. Government, not being responsive to market forces, is almost always more inefficient and wasteful, and provides lower quality service, than a private company which has to compete for customers with other private companies.
But that last bit is the key. The private company isn't more efficient by virtue of not being government controlled; it is more efficient because if it is not, it will lose market share to its competition, as dissatisfied customers take their business - and their money - elsewhere.
The current private prison model has, for its customers, the government. And so every failing of a government-run operation will be transferred to the private operation, because while in both cases the government is paying for the service, it is not subject to any dissatisfaction that may result from bad service. It is not your Senator whose fingers and toes will be amputated from gangrene because his diabetes was untreated; it is not your Representative who will miscarry on a dirty floor, her cries for help ignored because the facility isn't equipped to deal with pregnancies, who will later discover that the body of her child was discarded with the dirty linen; your Assemblyman need have no fear of being abandoned in a cell with a violent rapist to be attacked for hours, his screams unheard and all emergency call buttons disabled.
To be sure, these problems are not exclusive to private prisons. In fact, I have given three true stories, one of which I head first hand from a witness - the first from a private prison, the second from a county jail, the third from a state prison.
But for Libertarians whose first instinct is that privatization is the cure for all ills, consider that the private prison is still a monopoly operated by charter from the government. They are private in name only, as there can be no competition - just as with any other government monopoly. (Don't believe me? Fine. Start your own private prison and start locking up criminals without that government contract and see just how far you get.)
So should Libertarians support private prisons? By all indications they aren't really that private - they benefit from not being subject to open records laws (part of the reason we don't really know if they're more violent or have more complaints,) and while those in public prisons are subject to an often obscure and seemingly arbitrary grievance procedure, those in private prisons often have no recourse at all except a lawsuit - which a typical prisoner can't hope to pay for. They are held to a lower standard than federal or most state prisons, they have little to no accountability or transparency, and there is no way for those affected by their service to refuse it.
For these reasons, I reject the current private prison model as widely practiced in the United States, and I urge all other Libertarians to reject it as well.
But does that mean that the concept of a privatized prison, in general, is inherently bad? I don't think so. A business will naturally operate in such a way as to optimize their earnings and minimize their costs. While our current model bases earnings on the number of prisoners held, and considers everything else to be a cost, it doesn't have to be that way.
Profit motive is, however, a powerful tool. It is neither good nor evil, but can be used to good or evil ends. What if we could incentivize rehabilitation, instead of recidivism? Remember that the goal of a system of justice is to protect the life, liberty, and property of the people - including the people in the system. What if we can make a profit, not from locking more people in cages, but by reducing crime?
Consider a private prison whose earnings are based on lowering recidivism. As released prisoners stay out of trouble, the prison receives payments. They do not receive these payments when prisoners reoffend. The company will seek to optimize their earnings: They will look for the most cost-effective tools that can be proven to reduce recidivism. (Compare this to current rehabilitation programs, which (from the point of view of someone who's participated in them) are designed to receive government grants and sound good as a doctoral dissertation. Programs are created, used for a few years, discarded, with little to no tracking information about their effectiveness.)
Is such a thing even possible?
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