Race, Ethnicity, Class, and Crime in the Media Fall 2020

For this last media blog post, I listened to an episode of a podcast called Criminal Injustice and it was episode #75: Punishment for Profit. In this episode the host, David A. Harris, focuses on private prisons and the fact that they can make money off of how many inmates they have at a given time. This episode has a guest, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, and she is a senior counsel at the Brennan Center’s Justice Program and she wrote a book where she dives into the world of private prisons and interviews inmates and staff alike.

The appeal of private prisons became especially prominent in the 1980s when it was made known that corporations of private prisons said that they could carry out the public function of incarceration and do so as safely as public institutions, but for less of a cost. Eisen found that private prisons actually cost more money than public prisons, and they tend to have more issues with contraband and the use of force of the prison guards. Even though they cost more money than public prisons, private prisons make money by cutting the programming for inmates, and not employing enough correctional officers. The less correctional officers a prison has, the less they have to pay their employees salaries and pensions. Eisen had some inmates in private prisons tell her that they wanted to go back to a public prison because they had more robust job training programs, and programs in general. The Obama Administration was looking to end the use of federal private prisons, but this was reversed by the Trump Administration. Since this reversal, the stock in private prisons has skyrocketed.

Contracts with the government and the corporations that own private prisons are strange, and it’s definitely something that I didn’t know. These corporations will have the government make full rate payments as if the prison is at 80-90% capacity, even if the prison is only half full. This blew my mind because I don’t understand how this is possible, and how the government has been allowing this for such a long time. If these private prisons get this extra money from the government, why do they not use it for programs to help rehabilitate and treat offenders, or employ an adequate amount of correctional officers? Eisen also found that private prisons would rather pay fines imposed upon them than hire more correctional officers because it is cheaper in the end. Private prisons will employ a monitor for the prison to make sure that they are following the guidelines and that everything is running smoothly, but most of the time they aren’t even employed there full-time. Many monitors who aren’t full-time will show up at the prison unannounced and walk around the facility to check on everything, but Eisen said that that is all some of them do. After they take their walk, they’ll leave because technically they did their job.

What some people also don’t realize is that ICE detention centers can also be privatized. In fact, 62% of immigration detention centers in the US are private. In many of these detention centers, most individuals haven’t been charged with an actual crime and are waiting for their hearings. Private prisons are for-profit prisons. Private prisons are paid to house inmates, even though most facilities and programs are inadequate and pale in comparison to public prisons. Private prisons are just one problem within the Criminal Justice System that deserves to be reevaluated.

References

Harris, D. A. (Host). (2018, February 6). #75: Punishment for profit. Criminal Injustice [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.criminalinjusticepodcast.com/blog/2018/2/6/75-punishment-for-profit?rq=mall%20incarceration