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Foundation Briefs December 2014 PF Brief

Resolved: For-profit prisons in the United States should be banned.

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Table of Contents Table of Contents .................................................................................................................................................... 1!

A note .................................................................................................................................................................. 7!Definitions............................................................................................................................................................... 8!

Private prison as a service contractor. DAT ............................................................................................... 8!History..................................................................................................................................................................... 9!

Backgrounder on the public-private shift. DAT ......................................................................................... 9!Current incarceration demographic data. DAT ......................................................................................... 10!

Topic Analysis One ............................................................................................................................................... 11!Topic Analysis Two .............................................................................................................................................. 15!

Pro Evidence ......................................................................................................................................................... 24!Private Prisons’ Conditions Encourage Recidivism ......................................................................................... 25!

Basic rehabilitation services are often unavailable. DAT ......................................................................... 25!Strategies to prevent recidivism. DAT ...................................................................................................... 26!

Private prison are sorely lacking rehabilitation curriculum. DAT ............................................................ 27!Private Prisons and Shocking Truths on their Conditions. PSM .............................................................. 28!

Gang Rules Private Prisons. PSM ............................................................................................................. 29!The Perverse Incentives of Private Prisons and Inmate Behavior. PSM .................................................. 30!

Poor Incentives Neglect Rehabilitation, Encourage Recidivism AMS .................................................... 31!The impacts of public prisons’ superior training programs. DAT ............................................................ 32!

The economic impacts of discouraging recidivism. DAT ........................................................................ 33!Corporations fully admit their profits depend on recidivism. DAT .......................................................... 34!

Private prisons internally lengthen sentence times. ...................................................................................... 35!Private prisons are encouraged to increase sentence times on a per-inmate basis. DAT ......................... 35!Profit-driven practices can deter inmates from getting paroled. DAT ...................................................... 36!

Private Prisons are Legally Unrestrained .......................................................................................................... 37!Federal prisoners cannot bring civil rights suits against private prisons. DAT ........................................ 37!

Family Blames Private Prison for Death of Inmate. PSM ........................................................................ 38!Private contractors aren’t held accountable by the government or market forces. DAT .......................... 39!

Private prisons’ inmates have unacceptably narrow constitutional rights. DAT ...................................... 40!Case study: Eighth Amendment violations in private prisons. DAT ........................................................ 41!

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Public prison officials have more legal leeway on whistleblowing. DAT ............................................... 42!Overreliance on Private Contractors is Dangerous ........................................................................................... 43!

Too many agencies are reliant on the same contractor. DAT ................................................................... 43!States use private system more rapidly than federal system. ASF ........................................................... 44!

The Federal Government relies more on private prisons than State systems. ASF .................................. 44!Gladiator School and Idaho Correctional Centers Contracts. PSM .......................................................... 45!

Prison Privatization and Criticisms of Profiteering from Asylum Reforms. PSM ................................... 46!Private Prisons and Patronage by Governments. PSM ............................................................................. 47!

Outsourcing of Prison Health Care to Private Companies. PSM .............................................................. 48!Quotas Hurt Inmates and Taxpayers ................................................................................................................. 49!

Lockup Quotas AMS ................................................................................................................................ 49!Occupancy Requirements Hurt Economies AMS ..................................................................................... 50!

Private Prisons Oppose the Public Interest ....................................................................................................... 51!Private contractors have a vested interest in retaining their own importance. DAT ................................ 51!

Private Prison Contracts and Mass Incarcerations. PSM .......................................................................... 52!Criticism of Corrections Corporation of America. PSM .......................................................................... 53!

Prison Industry and Big Businesses or New Form of Slavery. PSM ........................................................ 54!Profitability of Halfway Houses and Prisons. PSM .................................................................................. 56!

Larger Inmate Prison is Boon to Private Prisons. PSM ............................................................................ 57!Jailing Americans for Profit. PSM ............................................................................................................ 58!

Prisons are the Problem Not the Solution and Criticisms by ACLU. PSM .............................................. 60!Wrongful Imprisonment in California AMS ............................................................................................. 61!

Private Prison Industry Opposes Taxpayer Interests AMS ....................................................................... 61!Economic Strain of CCA AMS................................................................................................................. 62!

Growth of Private Prisons Despite Critics ........................................................................................................ 63!Growth of Private Prisons Despite Criticisms. PSM ................................................................................ 63!

Private Prisons Underperform Against Public Prisons ..................................................................................... 64!

Statistical Data on Performance of Private Prisons in Britain. PSM ........................................................ 64!Exploring the Purported Cost Efficiency of Private Prisons. PSM .......................................................... 65!

Failed Instances of Private Prisons ................................................................................................................... 66!Failing Private Prisons in England. PSM .................................................................................................. 66!

No More Privatization of Ohio Prisons. PSM .......................................................................................... 67!CCA Profits from California Taxpayers, Hurts California AMS ............................................................. 68!

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Youth Service's International Fails AMS ................................................................................................. 69!Prisons Strive to Cut Costs at Inmates' Expense AMS ............................................................................. 70!

Florida's Private Prisons Scandal AMS .................................................................................................... 70!Money Spent on Lobbying for Private Prisons ................................................................................................. 71!

Prison Economics and Immigration Laws. PSM ...................................................................................... 71!Private Prison Spend Millions on Lobbying to Increase Prison Population. PSM ................................... 72!

Private Prisons Lobby for Harsher Sentences. PSM ................................................................................. 73!Prison for Profit May Indicate More Time Behind Bars. PSM ................................................................ 74!

Corruption in Private Prisons AMS .......................................................................................................... 75!Private Prisons Sway Lobbyists AMS ...................................................................................................... 75!

Private prison companies use economic leverage in smaller elections. DAT .......................................... 76!Private Prisons Hurt Non-Citizens .................................................................................................................... 77!

Prisons designed to hold non-citizens (CARs) are sub-par. ASF ............................................................. 77!Public prisons have stricter regulation, leading to worse conditions in CARs. ASF ................................ 78!

The BOP renews sup-par contracts. ASF ................................................................................................. 79!Undertrained personnel are a liability in private detention centers. DAT ................................................ 80!

Private Prisons Block Need for Systematic Reform ......................................................................................... 81!Private Prisons Block Need for Systematic Change AMS ....................................................................... 81!

The financial costs of continued mass incarceration. DAT ...................................................................... 82!The opportunity cost of investing in private prisons. DAT ...................................................................... 83!

Private prison quotas run counter to federal incarceration-easing initiatives. DAT ................................. 84!States are already implementing cost-effective measures. DAT .............................................................. 85!

Investing in more prisons is counterproductive, legally and economically. DAT .................................... 86!Horrifying Conditions in Private Prisons .......................................................................................................... 87!

James Slattery's Corrupt Private System AMS ......................................................................................... 87!Private Prisons Have Worse Conditions AMS ......................................................................................... 88!Private Prisons Hurt Youth AMS ............................................................................................................. 88!

Scandals in Youth Prisons AMS ............................................................................................................... 89!Dockery v. Epps Case Documents Poor Conditions of Private Prison AMS ........................................... 89!

Human Rights Violations .................................................................................................................................. 90!Private contractors’ operational paradigms push human rights under the rug. DAT ............................... 90!

Private prisons skirt basic services for their inmates. DAT ...................................................................... 91!Private prison operations are contingent on limiting freedom. DAT ........................................................ 92!

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Basic medical care in private prisons isn’t legally guaranteed. DAT ....................................................... 93!Con Evidence ........................................................................................................................................................ 94!

Private Prisons Don’t Provide Worse Services ................................................................................................. 95!Recidivism data has yet to link private management with increased relapses. DAT ............................... 95!

Research is unlikely to prove private prisons empirically worse. DAT ................................................... 96!The Case for Private Prisons by CCA Employee. PSM ........................................................................... 97!

Private Prisons are Cost Effective. PSM ................................................................................................... 98!Private Prisons are More Cost-Efficiently Run. PSM .............................................................................. 99!

Private Prisons are Cheaper for Taxpayers. PSM ................................................................................... 100!Experts from Temple University say Prison Privatization Provide Real Benefits. PSM ....................... 102!

All Prisons Should Have Competitive Neutrality ........................................................................................... 104!Adding public management to private competitions improves quality. DAT ........................................ 104!

With competitive neutrality, there is effectively no public-private divide. DAT ................................... 105!Private prisons are not definitively more or less cost-effective. DAT .................................................... 106!

Overhead operating costs need to be determined on a case-by-case basis. DAT ................................... 107!The best solution is Success-Oriented Funding. DAT ............................................................................ 108!

Private Prisons Have Untapped Innovation Potential ..................................................................................... 109!Private prison contracts can be used to efficiently reform the American prison system. DAT .............. 109!

Private prisons are a superior setting for rehabilitation. DAT ................................................................ 110!Private Prisons Succeed in Private Operations. PSM ............................................................................. 111!

Private Prisons Implement Beneficial Changes AMS ............................................................................ 112!Better Service of Private Prisons AMS ................................................................................................... 112!

Private Prisons Outscore Public AMS .................................................................................................... 113!Private prisons can still enhance savings by penetrating union-dominated markets. DAT .................... 114!

Private Prison Benefits from Lower Costs and Higher Efficiency AMS ............................................... 115!Private Prisons Reduce Operational Costs AMS .................................................................................... 116!

Private Prisons are More Efficient .................................................................................................................. 117!

Private Prison Benefits from Lower Costs and Higher Efficiency AMS ............................................... 117!Case study: Texas prison savings contracts. DAT .................................................................................. 118!

An economic projection of cost savings. DAT ....................................................................................... 119!Private prisons often provide superior services at lower prices. DAT ................................................... 120!

Private Incarceration is Safer .......................................................................................................................... 122!Private prisons have a higher rate of accreditation. DAT ....................................................................... 122!

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Public and Private Prisons Have Identical Deficiencies ................................................................................. 123!Neither public nor private prisons meet democratic standards. DAT ..................................................... 123!

The systemic problems of public and private prisons are identical. DAT .............................................. 124!Pro Counters........................................................................................................................................................ 125!

Private Prisons Are More Costly .................................................................................................................... 126!Private prisons rely on the same funding mechanisms and encourage further spending. DAT ............. 126!

Private Prisons Dispute Criticisms on Efficiency. PSM ......................................................................... 127!Private corporations face costly lawsuits which suck taxpayer money. DAT ........................................ 128!

Private prison contracts can financially wreck rural communities. DAT ............................................... 129!Prison development fails to boost local economies. DAT ...................................................................... 130!

The promised savings from private prisons are empty. DAT ................................................................. 131!Market competition doesn’t make private prisons more efficient. DAT ................................................ 132!

Private Prisons Make Prison System Worse ................................................................................................... 133!California's Private Prisons AMS ........................................................................................................... 133!

System Needs Reform AMS ................................................................................................................... 134!Needless Prisoners AMS ......................................................................................................................... 134!

Working in private prisons is demoralizing for prison staff. DAT ......................................................... 135!The turnover rate at private prisons is too high to maintain security in the system. DAT ..................... 136!

Prison contracts incentivize recidivism and mass incarceration. DAT ................................................... 137!Corrupt Collaboration ..................................................................................................................................... 138!

CCA Prisons Maintain Relevance through Congressional Influence AMS ........................................... 138!Union and Private Prisons Alliance AMS .............................................................................................. 139!

Private prisons undermine the democratic principles of the criminal justice system. DAT ................... 140!Faulty Reporting on Private Prison System .................................................................................................... 141!

Reality of Private Prisons Exposed AMS ............................................................................................... 141!Public Prisons Staff are not Paid Large Salaries ............................................................................................. 142!

Costs in Prison System not a Result of Prison Staffing Salaries AMS ................................................... 142!

Private prison staff are relatively underpaid and inexperienced, with disastrous results. DAT ............. 143!Private Prison Accreditation Is Meaningless .................................................................................................. 144!

Even if a prison is accredited, it doesn’t necessarily follow procedures. DAT ...................................... 144!Con Counters ...................................................................................................................................................... 145!

Private Prisons Do Not Promote Overcrowding ............................................................................................. 146!Private Prisons Do Not Cause Incarceration AMS ................................................................................. 146!

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2011 Case Declares Need for Private Prisons AMS ............................................................................... 146!The Economic Savings Are Indisputable ........................................................................................................ 147!

A decade’s worth of studies have a unanimous conclusion. DAT ......................................................... 147!Case study: Rural economic benefits from private prisons. DAT .......................................................... 148!

Private Prison Conditions Aren’t Worse ........................................................................................................ 149!Overcrowding isn’t an issue. DAT ......................................................................................................... 149!

The state ties the hands of private contractor. DAT ............................................................................... 150!Prisons’ Problems Trace Back to the Justice System ..................................................................................... 151!

American incarceration rates are too high for prisons to keep up. DAT ................................................ 151!The state fails to set minimum standards for private prisons. DAT ....................................................... 152!

Private Prisons and Legal Constraints ............................................................................................................ 153!Public and private prisoners alike have identical legal protections. DAT .............................................. 153!

Private prisons’ lobbies do not dictate prison legislation. DAT ............................................................. 154!Contentions ......................................................................................................................................................... 155!

Pro Case .......................................................................................................................................................... 156!Introduction: ................................................................................................................................................ 156!

Contention One: Private Prisons Encourage Recidivism ............................................................................ 156!Contention Two: Costs ............................................................................................................................... 157!

Contention Three: For-Profit Prisons Block Need for Reform ................................................................... 157!Con Case ......................................................................................................................................................... 158!

Introduction: ................................................................................................................................................ 158!Contention 1: Private prisons aren’t deficient ............................................................................................ 158!

Contention 2: Private prisons are an asset to the criminal justice system .................................................. 159!Contention 3: Private prisons enable reform .............................................................................................. 159!

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December 2014 Note

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A note The abbreviations after our taglines (DAT, AMS, etc) are the initials of our authors.

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December 2014 Definitions

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Definitions Private prison as a service contractor. DAT

Lundahl, Brad et al. “Prison Privatization: A Meta-Analysis of Cost Effectiveness and Quality of Confinement Indicators.” Utah Criminal Justice Center. University of Utah. 26 April 2007. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://ucjc.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/861.pdf

Brad Lundahl is an associate professor at the University of Utah’s College of Social Work. Prison privatization involves a business contracting with a branch of the government to operate a prison facility. Many of the large businesses operating prisons today are publicly traded companies (Chang & Thompkins, 2002). Private companies generally charge the government a daily rate per inmate to cover investment, operating costs, and profit. Under this rate, private companies supply many or most of the services needed to operate a prison system, including guards, staff, food, program costs, medical care (partial), and other services. Private companies may also build new facilities without direct tax expenditures or public bonds (Lanza-Kaduce et al., 1999).

This is different from what is technically considered privatization, wherein a business or industry dictates the rules of their operation, in addition to building and managing the facilities.

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December 2014 History

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History Backgrounder on the public-private shift. DAT

Mitchell, Matthew. “The Pros of Privately-Housed Cons: New Evidence on the Cost Savings of Private Prisons.” heartland.org. Rio Grande Foundation. March 2003. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/12247.pdf

The Rio Grande Foundation is a New-Mexico-based research institute. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, public backlash against soft-on-crime policies delivered a generation of tougher judges to the bench. Levitt noted in 1996 that “the incarceration rate in the United States has more than tripled in the last two decades.”1 Federal and state criminal statutes—particularly those dealing with drugs—were also strengthened and law enforcement budgets redoubled. Between 1982 and 1999, the federal government increased its police expenditure by 485 percent ($35 to $40 billion dollars a year go to the War on Drugs alone).2 Over the same period, states increased their police expenditures by 239 percent.3 Both trends out-paced inflation and overall growth in government spending by a wide margin.

The inevitable result was an explosion in the prison population. Between 1980 and 1999, the U.S. prison population grew fifteen times faster than the population at large.4 By 1986, “all but seven states were operating their prisons in excess of 95 percent capacity.”5

The overcrowded prisons begat quality lapses. In 1983, “Only about one-fifth of all state and federal prisons were accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Corrections.”6 More seriously, courts began to intervene, asserting that states’ old and crowded facilities violated the Constitution.

When in the early 1980s Tennessee’s entire correctional system was found unconstitutional, the state considered contracting with a private firm. The firm, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), had been incorporated in 1983 to contract with the Federal Immigration and Naturalization Service to detain illegal immigrants pending hearings or deportation.7 Tennessee refused CCA’s offer. But not long after, prison privatization began in earnest.

In 1985, Florida’s Bay County contracted with CCA to operate its jail. The next year, CCA contracted with Santa Fe County, New Mexico to run its jail. By 1987, there were about 3,000 people held in private prisons nationwide. This represented little over one half of one percent of the entire prison population.8 By 2001, the private prison population had soared to over 91,000 inmates. Despite such rapid growth, only about seven percent of all prisoners were in private custody in 2001.

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December 2014 History

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Current incarceration demographic data. DAT Blakely, Curtis, and Vic Bumphus. “Private and Public Sector Prisons--A Comparison of

Select Characteristics.” United States Courts. Federal Probation, Vol. 68 #1. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/federalcourts/pps/fedprob/2004-06/prisons.html

Curtis Blakely is a Truman State University justice systems professor.

Private prisons generally house younger, healthier, less risky populations. Keep this in mind when trying to make apples to apples comparisons between the public and private sectors.

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December 2014 Topic Analysis

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Topic Analysis One

Resolution: For-profit prisons in the United States should be banned.

Background

Post American Revolution: After the American Revolution, Great Britain officials were no longer able to ship convicts to the colonies. Thus Great Britain´s officials began to use private contractors to deal with overcrowding. 1980s: During the War on Drugs United States prisons suffered from huge overcrowding problems. At first public prisons used private contractors for services to help manage the workload of running a prison. 1984: The United States first fully privately managed prison was established with the Corrections Corporation of America in Tennessee.

1992: World´s Prisons in the United Kingdom becomes the world´s first private prison. After the first prison, more contracts were established for privately-managed prisons in the U.K. after the contract had ended, these prisons were subject to re-competition when the public sector was eligible to bid on the operation rights. All private prisons in the UK today are under the strict watch of Government monitors. These monitors keep privately managed prisons in line with UK standards. Any failure to meet these standards leads to financial penalties for the 11 privately managed prisons currently operating in the UK. While United States for-profit prisons are also subject to federal regulation, much of the evidence in the brief will expose the flaws with this system. The Failed Instances of Private Prisons and Horrifying Conditions in Private Prisons sections detail instances of human rights abuse. Pro teams should use this evidence to argue for the banning of for-profit prisons. Con teams on the other hand should acknowledge the need for reform in regulation and use success stories to bolster their cases. 1999: The HM Prison Ashfield prison becomes the first UK for-profit prison to house juvenile offenders. While the focus of this case must remain on the United States—Con teams can use the UK examples to their advantage as a global example of the problems with for-profit prison. 2013: As of 2013 8.4% of United States prisoners are held in for-profit institutions. The Corrections Corporation of America has seen a 500% increase in the last 20 years.

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Definitions

“For-profit prisons” Prison privatization is defined as: “a business contracting with a branch of the government to operate a prison facility. Many of the large businesses operating prisons today are publicly traded companies (Chang & Thompkins, 2002).” For the purposes of this debate, teams may assume that private prisons or privately-managed prisons as for-profit.

“in the United States” This self-explanatory piece of the resolution is sometimes abused in Public Forum debates. While using another country as an example with the problems or potential for for-profit prisons is fair, be careful. It is easy for teams to discredit any non-United States based evidence by claiming the system is too different. However, Con teams can use successful global for-profit prisons to argue that the United States system, while requiring reform, has great potential.

“Banned”

In legal terms a ban is: “a proclamation or public notice…by which a thing is forbidden…” For the purposes of this resolution, a ban on for-profit prisons would forbid the private management of prisons, but not prevent public prisons from contracting private services in a publically-managed prison.

Sources

In a debate like this calling careful attention to a team´s evidence can make the difference between a loss and a win. One of the biggest controversies surrounding for-profit systems is the validity of statistics and studies done on the subject. Be wary of industry-funded studies. While industry funded studies paint a pretty picture of private prisons, state-funded studies have pointed out flaws in these studies. Both teams will sound naïve if they focus on only one type of study. Draw evidence from independent institutes to prove the validity of your evidence. Con teams should listen for the names of a source and ask questions about how studies were conducted. Keep in mind that both publically-managed and privately-managed prisons have histories of human rights abuses, unnecessary costs, and inefficiency. As long as a Con team has evidence of public prisons shortcomings, these teams can argue that this point is moot.

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December 2014 Topic Analysis

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Angles

Every debate is winnable for either side of the resolution. Be careful not to get blind-sided with one type of argument or evidence. Pro teams need both statistics and ideological arguments. Con teams cannot get by on “potential” based arguments alone. Con teams must show practical methods of reform and success examples to win this debate.

Pro

The preponderance of the statistics on prison conditions favors pro in this debate. Use this to your team´s advantage. Include a few well-supported studies or statistics in your case to emphasize the failures of the for-profit prison system and the ways these prisons hurt taxpayers and inmates. With that said, be careful. Pro teams must have more than statistics and examples of private prisons gone wrong to convince all judges. Pro teams should emphasize the underlying problems with the concept of for-profit prisons. Simply producing evidence of a couple failures does not prove the need to ban for-profit prisons. Instead Pro teams must show that it is actually impossible to incorporate these systems into the United States criminal justice system based on justice. Explain that privately managed prisons are motivated to fulfill quotas and increase incarceration—goals that run counter to the United States vision of criminal justice. In a system based on the concept of “innocent until proven guilty” United States officials seek to provide pathways to reform for convicts. Prisons motivated to keep their prisoners there cannot and will not fulfill that goal.

Con

Con teams may struggle with the recent turn in public opinion against for-profit prisons. However, victory is still very possible. First, Con teams should emphasize that one or two examples of a failed prison system does not mean failure for the concept itself. Publically-managed prisons have plenty of instances of human rights abuse—this is not unique to for-profit prison systems. Denying the problems with United States prisons is futile. Con teams should fully acknowledge the failures of both public and private prisons. If a team denies the problems with private systems, they open the door to be furiously pelted with statistics and horror stories from their opponents. This will make Con teams appear to be hiding evidence from the judge. If Con teams openly acknowledge the failures, they can bring their debate to their own terms and emphasize the ways that privately managed prisons are ideal for change in United States criminal justice. Con teams should stress that the United States criminal justice system is in dire need of reform and argue that privately-managed prisons show great potential. Do not argue that either system is perfect. Instead stress the

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December 2014 Topic Analysis

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need for reform and innovation—two advantages for privately managed prisons with more freedom on different methods of rehabilitation.

Final Advice

1. Understand the fundamental conceptual differences between private and public management. This topic has consumed historians and economists since the beginning of Government. It is at the heart of this debate. A clear understanding will allow you to make sound conceptual and convincing arguments on both sides.

2. Do not get caught up in the numbers. Too often Public Forum debates boil down to a heated debate over one particular study or number. This is a problem for both teams because it comes down to your judge´s opinion on one thing and not your debating skill. Focus on your overarching arguments and the big picture.

3. Familiarize yourself with the popular studies on this topic. You must be able to attack and defend the biggest and most popular studies out there.

4. Do not conceal evidence from your judge. Both publically and privately managed prisons have a history of some failures. Both teams must admit this and acknowledge the need for reform. This will allow you to get down to the core issues of this debate rather than arguing who has the more “correct” statistic.

5. Be wary of your source. Just because a fact was printed by a reputable source, does not mean that is not the end all say all for the topic. Be prepared to defend your studies and point out flaws with your opposition´s. Good Luck! ☺ --Amanda Sopkin

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Topic Analysis Two

Resolution: For-profit prisons in the United States should be banned.

The preceding topic analysis did an excellent job breaking down the terms of the resolution, its context, and general strategies for both teams. I’d instead like to take a look at some particulars of this resolution’s terminology and its background.

A Backgrounder on Contracts

For the vast majority of this analysis (and this brief), for-profit prisons and privately-managed prisons will be construed as one and the same (for further analysis on this point, reference the previous topic analysis). Part of getting to know this topic is figuring out where the private company ends and public oversight begins. For that, I’d recommend economist Bruce Benson’s article on “Privatization vs. Contracting Out.” As applied to the American prison system, private prisons are actually “contracted out,” not privatized. That is, a private company has a contract with the government (federal or state) to provide a service (housing prisoners) which is still overseen by the government. For the American prison system to be privatized would imply that business interests control every facet of the prison system, including allocation, safety standards, etc. This is clearly not the case. For a more thorough valuation of privatization vs. contracting out, economist Bruce Benson has a good breakdown of the matter (simply search privatization vs. contracting out). There are two facets to a prison: construction and operation. The initial growth of the private prison industry (I won’t be using “contracting out” in place of “private” because the industry is, in fact, “private.” It’s just not “privatized.”) occurred in both construction and operation. Between natural population growth, the lack of public prison growth, the lack of public prisons to maintain quality standards, and the War on Drugs, America found its prison capacity woefully inadequate beginning about 40 years ago This amounted to a deficit in both construction and operation . Private interests gladly filled that void. The offer from private interests was twofold: to assist public entities in the construction of badly-needed prisons, and to then run those prisons.

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Assistance in construction was in the form of “nominal privatization.” Nominal privatization involves physically allocating the prison as private property, in which a government contract would be fulfilled. This has in turn led to the continuing development of prisons “on spec”: Essentially, private companies and communities would jointly pitch the funds for the construction of a prison that, without any promise of a government contract, meets all necessary state and federal requirements for a functional prison. The prison could then “compete” for government contracts on the basis that the company and community already have a functional, up-to-date prison prepared to fulfill the contract. This would, in theory, give the prison a leg up on its competitors who would have to assume the costs of constructing a prison after the awarding of a contract. There are several notable instances of derelict prisons in rotting American rural towns found in the general news and throughout this brief. While relatively rare, they are a consequence of the “on spec” prison pre-building process which does not have a real guarantee of future business. The development of private management of prisons was less novel than the private construction of them. By the time private corporations began managing prisons, they already performed a similar function for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS)—private firms would often build and operate detention centers for illegal immigrants to be processed and held prior to deportations. The difference was thus simply of who was housed: after the 1970s, privately-managed facilities began housing United States citizens as well. Keep in mind, however, that for-profit detention centers are still found throughout the United States. In fact, CCA’s contemporaneous investor reports typically cite the management of detention sites as an isolated area of future potential growth in light of the general decline in arrests of United States citizens. The process of contracting the construction of a prison and contracting its management are largely the same, and have been since the advent of the private prison industry nearly half a century ago.

1. The state decides to privatize a given facility (or construct a facility from scratch. This is where the on spec prisons’ utility comes in)

2. The state issues an RFP: a request for proposals. It is open for bidding. 3. Companies bid on the contract.

While companies can win the rights to build and operate a prison, then, the state is ultimately in control. The state determines the standards at the given prison, and the state determines the payout. The entire premise of the for-profit management of a prison is a reduction of costs. If a contract for a prison was valued at the same rate as the cost for the government to provide an identical service, there would be no purpose to hiring out a private firm. Hiring out a private firm lessens the extent of control that the government has, so any contracting needs to come with cost savings. Because private entities can typically promise cost savings (which are often specified and embedded in the contract as mandatory), they have gained popularity across the

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United States, particularly in the last decade as state governments have found it increasingly difficult to meet their obligations both to remain financially solvent and humanely house all their prisoners. This places private corporations in a conundrum: they must make a profit while also being more efficient than the state (otherwise the state has no reason to contract out its prison services). Private prisons thus must cut two layers of cost: they must operate with a profit margin on their contractual terms, and that contract must be for lower terms than the state’s cost of incarceration. I’ll refer to these as the profit and contract margins, respectively. Private corporations, skilled in efficiency, are adept at maximizing both profit and contract margins. The profit margin is the most variable, given that it can be increased to any extent that investors need it to be. The problem lies in how this is done. Private corporations are expected to maximize their contract margin in order to win the contract and leave their profit margin sufficiently intact while also providing equivalent levels of care and service as their public equivalents. But the quality of a prison and the cost to run it are fundamentally intertwined—apart from labor costs, there simply are few to corners to cut. This link is the reason for some of the tragedies that have occurred in private prisons. A particularly glaring instance of this is CCA’s Youngstown facility in the late 1990s, where cost cutting involved rationing basic supplies like food and toilet paper, housing maximum-security offenders in medium-security cells, and the failure to prevent over forty assaults (as well as two stabbings) over the course of 18 months. Why this matters for Pro teams If it seems like the above two paragraphs present something of a Catch-22 for private prisons, that’s good news for Pro teams. If Pro teams truly wish to fulfill the terms of the resolution, it’s not enough to simply show that the harm-benefit balance for public prisons is superior to that of private prisons; that still isn’t reason enough to outright ban them (and I’ll get into this particular subject in a couple pages). One of the best ways for Pro teams to establish outright that private prisons ought to be banned is to demonstrate that their existence under a contemporary pretext is impossible: that the United States criminal justice system isn’t functionally feasible with private prisons. A relatively straight-forward way to do so would be the demonstration that creating both contract and profit margins without sacrificing necessary quality is impossible. This is far from the only method, but it’s a simple enough logical argument to make without excessive empirical evidence to needle through.

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Why this matters for Con teams Based on the above, the situation would seem to be bleak for Con teams. This is compounded by the preponderance of evidence, which falls squarely to the Pro side of the debate. The weight and quantity of evidence are not necessarily related. What I have described in the preceding paragraphs is the current state of private prisons: forced to create impossible margins via methods other than quality reduction, which is impossible. Of course, this isn’t the only option. More importantly, this broad categorization fails to consider the many failings of the public prison system. The reason the savings of private contractors are even in such high demand to begin with, as noted near the beginning of this analysis, is that the state is cash-strapped. Under the standards of the state, there simply is not enough revenue to sustain the state prison model. The responsibility is thus passed onto private corporations. Under this pretense, the Con has (at least) two viable options. The first option is to accept the above premise and work with it. This involves Con teams demonstrating that private prisons can actually fulfill their operational imperative of equal service at lower cost. This can still involve an analysis of the public prison system: Con teams can simultaneously demonstrate that the public system has inefficiency (e.g. the mass unionization of public prison labor) and that private prisons are capable of delivering efficiencies across every facet of the prison quality spectrum (our Con evidence section focuses on providing evidence on this exact point). A second option is to follow the advice of the previous topic analysis and accept that private prisons have their failures. This should, of course, not be equated to giving up the resolution. By admitting that the imperative of low cost and high quality is impossible to deliver, Con teams can open the door to direct comparisons between the failures of the public and private sectors. Using both funding and quality data about public prisons (which, again, we have attempted to provide in our Con Evidence section), Con teams can demonstrate that public and private prisons’ failings fundamentally exist on the same level. The logic of showing both public and private failings is unique to this resolution. This resolution implicitly uses public prisons as the baseline by which to measure private prisons. That is, the banning of private prisons is justified if they fall so short of public prisons that their existence is unacceptable. If this topic was simply a harm-benefit comparison between public and private, admitting the harms of both and then attempting to show them as equal would likely be an unacceptably risky debate strategy for either side. Because Pro teams must surpass the harm-benefit comparison and go all the way to banning private prisons, Con teams have the leeway

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to bring up private prisons’ flaws as a method to equate them to the public prison baseline without fear of “giving up” the resolution.

For-profit

Before any discussion of private prisons begins, it is necessary to understand what a private prison is and how it works. Throughout this brief, we set for-profit and private on equal terms: a private prison is one which operates for a profit. This is inherent to the enterprise of privately running a prison: this is done by corporations with investors, and the responsibility of the corporation to its shareholders is to deliver value in terms of profit. It’s typically safe to assume that the investors in a company like the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the individuals which the corporation is responsible for incarcerating are two disparate groups. As such, we typically conflate the idea of private and for-profit. However, therein lies one of the peculiarities of the resolution: it fails to specify private prison. This would mean, then, that a publicly-managed prison could technically be considered for-profit if it in fact was not run at cost to the state (by state, we mean whichever government runs the prison. The word “government” will follow if we are referring to the state government). While this may seem far-fetched, communities in the United States have in fact experimented with the idea of a public for-profit prison. One way this would work is for local communities to act as a “contractor” for higher levels of government. Under such a scheme, a rural town could submit a “bid” to manage, say, a federal prison, and run the prison with lower operating costs than what is provided by the federal government for the incarceration of its prisoners. As such, the prison would be operated as a simultaneously for-profit and public facility. As you will see in your research for this resolution, such is not actually the case for real-world prison arrangements in the state. More often than not, local communities are simply providing the labor and land for prisons. Given the rural economic collapse which occurred following the American oil boom of the 1980s, many rural communities now face desperate situations in which the need for permanent jobs is equated to the survival of the towns. Given that prisons are still seen as a guaranteed source of income, rural communities essentially compete to land prisons, both public and private. In the instance of a private prison, a corporation like CCA will construct a prison in a rural community alongside some sort of promise to use local labor and/or material resources. As such, the prison remains under private control, although some measure of public bond financing may be used to construct it.

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Given that this is almost exclusively the real-world prison scenario, the justification for for-profit prisons as a publicly-managed boost to rural economies would involve Con teams simultaneously that private prisons are cost-effective and worse-managed than their public counterparts, and that these two factors are not mutually independent. The evidence for the former point is ample, so untangling management efficiency from cost efficiency can well allow Con teams to run an advocacy of public for-profit prisons. It’s certainly an interesting prospect.

Why this matters for Pro teams On a fundamental level, there are at least two ways that the idea of a “for-profit” prison plays into the hands of Pro teams:

1. This swings empirical evidence to the Pro 2. This swings lay judges towards the Pro

The empirical evidence advantage is most relevant with respect to economic evidence. It’s a common assumption that the public system is overladen with bureaucracy and inefficiency, thus necessitating private industry’s application of operational efficiencies. Pro teams can use both empirical evidence and the inherent qualities of private industry to demonstrate how, when applied to prisons, corporate logic is inappropriate. The first area where this could be accomplished is in financial security. The news is rife with stories of towns investing heavily in prisons, with promises from companies like Wackenhut and CCA of future guaranteed revenue. This is sometimes followed by towns left in financial ruin, as the promise of prisoners and jobs never pans out. Corporations like CCA have to secure funding and resources for their prisons; as such, local communities are made promises of jobs and income. The company then has the requisite resources and backing to begin a project like prison construction; even if the project doesn’t pan out, the company is relatively insulated from risk. Risk management is inherent to the running of any good business; but using case studies of failed projects, Pro teams can turn this into a weakness of for-profit prisons. Additionally, Pro teams can look at profit as an operational inefficiency—it’s money being spent on a prison which is never applied to the actual costs of running the prison. Amid the inefficiencies of public industry, profit is not one of them. Given the absolute wealth of empirical data about private prison security standards, staffing numbers, staff experience, staff training, building quality, etc., Pro teams have enough evidence to link substandard quality back to the profit inefficiency. The previous analysis addressed the turn of public opinion against private prisons. This can extend to a debate advantage for Pro teams. A simple way of doing so is to clearly demonstrate the purpose of a private

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corporation—to achieve financial security and prosperity—with the goals of a prison—achieving the security of its prisoners. This disconnect puts a friendly rationale onto the increasingly widespread public rejection of private prisons. While subtle, such a strategy can be enough to commandeer the attention of a lay judge. Why this matters for Con teams Again, Con teams face a winnable uphill battle. As noted in the previous analysis, it doesn’t do Con teams any good to deny or conceal the facts. The profit motivations of private corporations in the prison industry (in any industry, really) is a ready-made source of fodder for Pro teams. It would be disingenuous and inappropriate for Con teams to deny that investor-controlled motivations consider profit anything but a primary operational imperative. Instead, Con teams would be wise to use this property to their advantage. A fact to keep in mind from the two previous sections of this analysis:

1. Private prisons are not privatized. The corporation does not decide the fundamental standards upon which the prison is run.

2. The state decides those criteria. It would be prudent to additionally point out that private prisons are responsible for meeting those criteria and face consequences for failing to meet either those criteria or legal standards. Under this premise, then, Con teams can easily not only shift blame, but also show the potential of private prisons for improving the United States criminal justice system. The key is that private prisons do not dictate how they are run. As such, regardless of how much ammunition the Pro has to demonstrate that standards in private prisons are too low, or that private prisons cut too many corners, the Con can silence those points imply by demonstrating that private prisons are not at fault; the Con can admit that quality standards are abysmal so long as teams make clear that it is the state, not corporations, which set those standards. At this point, the Con has the upper ground to mount an affirmative advocacy. Having already established that a) businesses strive ruthlessly to achieve profit, and b) private prisons are bound, operationally, to contracts which they volunteer to fulfill, Con teams can simply advocate for more stringent, higher paying contracts. Under such a premise, there could be the simultaneous assurance of quality and cost savings, something the American prison system direly needs and achieves neither through public nor private means. The Don Draper pitch for Con teams thus looks like this: give private industry the same money and quality standards that the public sector gets, and see what happens.

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At the least, Con teams can insulate themselves from an inevitable onslaught of Pro evidence geared toward proving that public prisons cost-benefit balances are superior to those of private prisons. Because private prisons are inherently provided with fewer resources than their public peers, Con teams can quickly dispel the legitimacy of such Pro comparisons on a procedural basis.

Banned

This resolution is the first which hasn’t been a pure cost-benefit analysis. The term “banned” is crucial, and its importance will likely grow as teams increase their familiarity and experience with the topic. The difference between establishing that private prisons are inferior and that they ought to be banned is massive in terms of both the empirical evidence required and the philosophical mindset behind it. It’s more easily explained through an analogy to the justice system. There are two types of court cases: civil and criminal. Civil cases are what typically play out in courts of all ranks across the nation: a plaintiff sues a defendant. For either side to win, it must show that a preponderance of the evidence—the quantity of evidence—is on its side. Even a 51-49% evidence split is enough for a verdict. Contrast this to a criminal case, where the state (the prosecution) is essentially suing a defendant for wrongdoing—murder, larceny, etc. In such a case, the state can only win if it proves the defendant guilty beyond a reasonable doubt; no matter how far the preponderance of the evidence leans toward the prosecution, the defendant still wins if there are any holes in the evidence. In most PF cases, where the debate is over cost-benefit on some topic (e.g. public financing of sports stadiums)., the absolute preponderance of evidence can decide the debate. With the term “banned” however, this resolution essentially turns into a criminal case, and the Pro is the prosecution. The responsibility rests on the Pro to show that for all cases, private prisons are not only an inferior option but are outright unacceptable. While the evidentiary standard is obviously lower for Pro teams than for the prosecution in a criminal case, the proof burden is still similar. This doesn’t actually impose many additional burdens on the Pro; instead, it opens up some interesting case possibilities. For starters, the absoluteness of “ban” gives the Pro more leeway with the preponderance of evidence. Over the course of a standard harms-benefits debate, redundant empirical evidence on the same point is unnecessary. But in this case, one strategy the Pro can take is that banning private prisons is a logical option if a severe preponderance of evidence demonstrates their total lack of efficacy. This then opens the door for Pro teams using the full might of all their empirical economic and quality evidence in the debate. Additionally, the

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use of “banned” opens up the possibility of more LD-style values arguments. Banning something is a philosophically-based legislative judgment; as such, both sides have slightly more leeway with the empirical nature of their evidence. This places more of the Pro’s evidence about basic human rights on the table, for instance. The use of “banned” in the resolution allows for some clever advocacy work on the part of Con teams as well. For one thing, the term acts as an insulator for Con teams willing to admit the flaws of the criminal justice system as a whole, including those of private prisons. Con teams, as long as they establish that the criteria for banning are more stringent than simply showing private prisons’ failures, can open the door to a discussion of the criminal justice system’s failures as a whole. From there, Con teams are free to explore the failings of public prisons individually, public prison management as a whole, and the overwhelming problems of the criminal justice system as a cohesive entity. From there, the path to shifting the attack from private prisons to the system in which they must operate becomes a clear one.

Final remarks

Throughout this analysis, it may seem like I’m recommending one way forward in each section for Pro and Con teams alike. There are a vast multitude of ways to treat this resolution, and by no means have I prescribed the only (or the best) methods. This brief is intended as a starting point for the organic growth of novel cases theories and rebuttals; as such, I have tried to put myself in the shoes of a debater in the earlier stages of preparation and then covered the elements I would not have noticed or thought important in the resolution.

I always found that mixing unorthodox evidence points into debates both enlivened them and threw opposing teams off. While sound speaking styles and conventional evidence are always a must, this is certainly a factor I consider when analyzing brief. This topic in particular is exciting for the number of different perspectives each team can take on how to approach it: how to treat “banned,” how to classify a for-profit prison, how to work with the general inadequacy of the United States criminal justice system. All this should add up to a month of debating that never ceases to introduce teams to new perspectives. The bleakness of this subject aside, this resolution certainly looks like a fun one. Happy debating!

- Daniel Tsvankin

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Pro Evidence

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Private Prisons’ Conditions Encourage Recidivism

Basic rehabilitation services are often unavailable. DAT Palta, Rina. “Why For_Profit Prisons House More Inmates of Color.” npr.org. 13 March

2014. Accessed 3 November 2014. Web. http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color

"The rate of violence is higher at private prisons, and recidivism is either worse or the same than in public prisons," says Alex Friedmann, the managing editor of Prison Legal News and the associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, a group that opposes private prisons. Friedmann says part of the trouble is attributable to lower-paid, lesser-trained staff used in private prisons. But some of it, he adds, may be due to this higher-risk, younger population in private prisons.

So, Browne-Marshall asks, what are private prisons doing for their age-specific populations?

"Public prisons are devoting a lot of resources to the age-specific needs of their prisoners," she says, such as building medical facilities, bringing in highly paid medical staff, and providing expensive mental health care services. "What about the specific needs of the private prison population?"

Younger, higher-risk private prisoners need different kinds of services — especially since they're likely to get out of prison, back into society. And historically, younger prisoners are more likely to reoffend, which Browne-Marshall suggests addressing with education, drug counseling, anger management and other social services.

The trouble: While courts have intervened to require prisons to have good medical and mental health care as constitutional necessities — things that benefit older and sicker prisoners — programs that mainly benefit younger prisoners aren't usually required. (Another reason why they're cheaper to house.)

The article previously mentioned that prison populations are generally younger and less white than their counterparts in public prisons. As such, any debate involving the cost-effectiveness of private prisons should include qualifiers detailing the myriad services private prisons fail to provide (and the accompanying cost “savings”).

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Strategies to prevent recidivism. DAT Wright, Kevin. “Strange Bedfellows? Reaffirming Rehabilitation and Prison

Privatization.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 49:74-90. 20`0. Accessed 4 November 2014. Web. https://www.academia.edu/640575/Strange_Bedfellows_Private_Prisons_and_Reaffirming_Rehabilitation

Kevin A. Wright is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.

An emerging body of research on what works provides the impetus needed for a change in correctional philosophy. Programs and policies that emphasize rehabilitation and treatment are likely to be successful in reducing offender recidivism (Lipsey & Cullen, 2007; MacKenzie, 2006; Sherman et al., 1997). Equally important is knowing what is likely to be ineffective in reducing recidivism. Programs that rely almost exclusively on coercion and punishment (without a treatment component) are unlikely to result in positive outcomes in terms of reduced offending (Finckenauer & Gavin, 1999; Palmer, 1995; Petersilia, 1999; Petersilia & Turner, 1993). Private prisons could thus be rewarded for employing programs that have been empirically shown to reduce recidivism (e.g., in-prison therapeutic communities) while avoiding those that do little to curtail future criminal behavior (e.g., boot camps). In short, prison privateers would be encouraged to avoid the ‘‘correctional quackery’’ that often characterizes the current corrections system (Latessa, Cullen, & Gendreau, 2002; see also Flores, Russell, Latessa, & Travis, 2005).

Perhaps more important is the contribution of research indicating the specific components of programs that are effective in reducing recidivism. Several scholars have repeatedly emphasized that there is no magic bullet in corrections, and that what is delivered to whom in what fashion is the important distinction between successful and unsuccessful programs (Andrews et al., 1990; Andrews & Bonta, 1998; Gendreau & Ross, 1987; Palmer, 1991). Andrews and colleagues (1990) observed that appropriate service is comprised of three principles. First, successful programs match level of service intensity to level of offender risk—with higher risk offenders receiving more rigorous and frequent attention.3 Second, successful programs target what is known to influence crime (e.g., antisocial attitudes) while avoiding variables unrelated to criminal behavior (e.g., self-esteem). Finally, successful programs deliver services in a manner that is consistent with the learning styles of offenders and typically involve behavioral and social learning principles. Programs that adhere to these principles of effective intervention have been found to be successful in reducing recidivism (Lowenkamp, Latessa, & Holsinger, 2006; Lowenkamp, Latessa, & Smith, 2006; Lowenkamp & Latessa, 2004, 2005).

This card establishes a baseline for teams to evaluate the efficacy of programs in prisons, public in private. Even if no final recidivism data is available, evidence that the above criteria are fulfilled could be enough to deem a prison policy effective.

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Private prison are sorely lacking rehabilitation curriculum. DAT

Wright, Kevin. “Strange Bedfellows? Reaffirming Rehabilitation and Prison Privatization.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 49:74-90. 20`0. Accessed 4 November 2014. Web. https://www.academia.edu/640575/Strange_Bedfellows_Private_Prisons_and_Reaffirming_Rehabilitation

Kevin A. Wright is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University. Perhaps the best indication of the extent to which private prisons are currently implementing inmate programming is by consulting the Census of State and Federal Corrections Facilities. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) conducts this national census every five years—the most recent of which yielded information on over 400 private facilities. Earlier analyses using these data painted a dismal picture of the availability of programming in private prisons. As compared to state and federal facilities, private institutions were less likely to offer educational programming—including basic adult education, secondary education, special education, and vocational training. To be sure, 12.4% of private prisons were without an education program, as compared to 8.8% of state prisons and 0% of federal prisons (Harlow, 2003). Additionally, although 17% of staff in private facilities were professional, technical, or educational employees, a percentage comparable to state facilities, the number of inmates per employee in this category was 25.9 (as compared to 20.4 for state and 8.9 for federal) (Stephan & Karberg, 2003). These conclusions are reinforced by analyses from the most recent census in 2005. In addition to providing less educational programming than federal and state, private prisons were less likely to offer psychological, HIV= AIDS, or sex offender counseling and were more likely overall to not have work assignments available to inmates.4 A major shortcoming of these data, however, is that they cannot provide an indication as to the quality of programming available in these institutions.

While health services are required by regulations, ancillary services such as those listed above are not. Given that the value proposition of private prisons lies in their ability to deliver “cost-effective” housing, providing these services isn’t the largest imperative, despite their existence being in the interest of the public good.

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Private Prisons and Shocking Truths on their Conditions. PSM Lavender, George. "Shocking Photos From Inside Private Prison." . In These Times, 09

Jun 2014. Web. 1 Nov 2014. <http://inthesetimes.com/prison-complex/entry/16817/shocking_photos_from_inside_private_prison>.

A privately-run prison in Mississippi holding “seriously mentally ill” prisoners stands accused of being dirty, dangerous and corrupt. East Mississippi Correctional Facility, operated by Management and Training Corporation (MTC), is the subject of a lawsuit brought on behalf of several prisoners at the facility.

After widespread criticism of conditions inside the same prison the previous operator, the GEO group, discontinued its contract with the state in 2012. At the time, the GEO group said that the prison was “"financially underperforming."

A lawsuit first filed a year ago by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center alleged that “grossly inhumane conditions have cost many prisoners their health, and their limbs, their eyesight and even their lives.”

Photos taken as part of a tour of the prison, showed “charred door frames, broken light fixtures and toilets, exposed electrical wires, and what advocates said were infected wounds on prisoners’ arms and legs,” according to the New York Times.

The Mississippi corrections commissioner, Christopher B. Epps, who won praise several years ago for reducing the use of solitary confinement in the state, and the other defendants have denied the lawsuit’s allegations. Mr. Epps declined to answer questions about the prison but said by email that conditions there had “improved tremendously” since Management and Training Corporation, or M.T.C., began running it.

“I have toured the facility and have seen the improvements firsthand,” he said. “We are committed to running a constitutionally sound prison and look forward to communicating that point in court.”

But current and former inmates described an atmosphere in which prisoners lived in fear of attacks by gang members allowed to move freely through prison units and were forced to beg for basic medical treatment. They said some set fires — using contraband matches or loose wires, according to advocates — to get the attention of guards, who sometimes ignored the flames, simply allowing them to burn out.

Christopher Lindsey, 28, who was released from East Mississippi in July, said in an interview that he had gone blind after months of not receiving appropriate treatment for the glaucoma he has had since childhood.

“I was crying in the cell, my eyes were hurting, bloodshot red, and I was slowly losing my eyesight,” he said.

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Gang Rules Private Prisons. PSM Newkirk, Margaret, and William Selway. "Gangs Ruled Prison as For-Profit Model Put

Blood on Floor." Bloomberg, 11 Jul 2013. Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-07-12/gangs-ruled-prison-as-for-profit-model-put-blood-on-floor.html>.

In the four privately run prisons holding Mississippi (BEESMS)inmates last year, the assault rate was three times higher on average than in state-run lockups. None was as violent as the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility.

The for-profit detention center, surrounded by razor wire and near the forests and farms of centralMississippi, had 27 assaults per 100 offenders last year, more than any other prison in the state, according to an April court filing. Staff shortages, mismanagement and lax oversight had long turned it into a cauldron of violence, where female employees had sex with inmates, pitted them against each other, gave them weapons and joined their gangs, according to court records, interviews and a U.S. Justice Department report.

“It was like a jungle,” said Craig Kincaid, 24, a former inmate. “It was an awful place to go when you’re trying to get your life together.”

More than 130,000 state and federal convicts throughout the U.S. -- 8 percent of the total -- now live in private prisons such as Walnut Grove, as public officials buy into claims that the institutions can deliver profits while preparing inmates for life after release, saving tax dollars and creating jobs.

No national data tracks whether the facilities are run as well as public ones, and private-prison lobbyists for years have successfully fought efforts to bring them under federal open-records law. Yet regulatory, court and state records show that the industry has repeatedly experienced the kind of staffing shortages and worker turnover that helped produce years of chaos at Walnut Grove.

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The Perverse Incentives of Private Prisons and Inmate Behavior. PSM W.W., . "The perverse incentives of private prisons." . The Economist, 24 Aug. 2010.

Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/08/private_prisons>.

LAST week authorities captured two fugitives who had been on the lam for three weeks after escaping from an Arizona prison. The convicts and an accomplice are accused of murdering a holiday-making married couple and stealing their camping trailer during their run from justice. This gruesome incident has raised questions about the wisdom and efficacy of private prisons, such as the one from which the Arizona convicts escaped.

Mother Jones reporter Suzy Khimm, writing at Ezra Klein's spot, observes that the portion of Arizona's prison population now residing in privately owned and operated facilities is 20% and growing. "Nationally," Ms Khimm notes, "there's been a similar surge in private prison construction as the inmate population has tripled between 1987 and 2007: Inmates in private prisons now account for 9% of the total US prison population, up from 6% in 2000." Should we welcome this development?

The dominant argument for private prisons is that they will save taxpayers money, as for-profit owners have an incentive to seek efficiencies bureaucrats overseeing government institutions lack. Anyway, that's the theory. According to the Arizona Republic, the reality is that private prisons in the Grand Canyon State so far cost more on a per-prisoner basis than do public institutions. Some experts contend that firms in the prison business reap profits by billing government for rather more than their initial lowball estimates while scrimping in ways that may make prisons less secure.

As the economist and legal theorist Bruce Benson has observed, it is important to distinguish between "privatisation" and "contracting out". To fully privatise a government service is to get the government out of the business altogether. Consider garbage collection. If a municipal government decides to sell its garbage trucks and buy the service from a private company with taxpayer money, that's not privatisation. That's contracting out. In a fully privatised scheme, households deal directly with privately-owned garbage-collection services. In that case, government is cut out of the loop entirely.

When we add to the mix the observations that America already puts a larger proportion of its population behind bars than does any other country (often for acts that ought to be legal), and that the US already spends an insane portion of national income on the largely non-productive garrison state, it is hard to see the expansion of a for-profit industry with a permanent interest in putting ever more people in cages as consistent with either efficiency or justice.

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Poor Incentives Neglect Rehabilitation, Encourage Recidivism AMS Short, April. “6 Shocking Revelations about How Private Prisons Make Money.” Salon.

September 23, 2013. http://www.salon.com/2013/09/23/6_shocking_revelations_about_how_private_prisons_make_money_partner/

Salon magazine provides news and expert opinions on the most relevant stories and current issues. It has been nominated for the National Magazine Award.

Three privately run prisons in Arizona have contracts that require 100 percent inmate occupancy, so the state is obligated to keep its prisons filled to capacity. Otherwise it has to pay the private company for any unused beds.

The report notes that contract clauses like this incentivize criminalization, and do nothing to promote rehabilitation, crime reduction or community building.

“[These contracts run] counter to many states’ public policy goals of reducing the prison population and increasing efforts for inmate rehabilitation,” the report states. “When policymakers received the 2012 CCA letter, some worried the terms of CCA’s offer would encourage criminal justice officials to seek harsher sentences to maintain the occupancy rates required by a contract. Policy decisions should be based on creating and maintaining a just criminal justice system that protects the public interest, not ensuring corporate profits.”

Simmons, Matt. “Punishment & Profits: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Private Prisons.” August 7, 2013. Oklahoma Policy Institute. http://okpolicy.org/punishment-profits-a-cost-benefit-analysis-of-private-prisons The Oklahoma Policy Institute (OK Policy) is a nonpartisan think tank located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Institute researches political and economic issues for the state of Oklahoma.

With an ever increasing rate of incarceration Oklahomans should be thinking about more than locking up offenders as cheaply as possible. It would be far more cost-effective to prevent crimes and reduce the need for incarceration. Yet a study comparing recidivism rates in private versus public prisons in Oklahoma concluded that “private prison inmates had a greater hazard of recidivism in all eight models tested.”

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The impacts of public prisons’ superior training programs. DAT Lundahl, Brad et al. “Prison Privatization: A Meta-Analysis of Cost Effectiveness and

Quality of Confinement Indicators.” Utah Criminal Justice Center. University of Utah. 26 April 2007. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://ucjc.utah.edu/wp-content/uploads/861.pdf

Brad Lundahl is an associate professor at the University of Utah’s College of Social Work. Understanding the interpretation of small effect sizes based on prison management is difficult given the complex issues and goals involved in the criminal justice system. The largest average effect size was found for skills training where publicly managed prisons outperformed privately managed prisons. The average effect size (d = .10) suggests that publicly managed prisons are 4% better at skills training (Lipsey & Wilson, 2001, p. 153). An example may help in interpreting the impact of this level. If a matched comparison was made between a privately and publicly prison, for every 100 inmates in a privately managed prison who received skills training there would be 104 from the public section. Does this level of advantage represent a significant value? It depends on (a) the presumed or proven relationship between skills training and healthy living and (b) the scope or number of prisoners affected. That is, does skills training result in lowered recidivism, better employment, or fewer social and emotional difficulties? If there is a relationship, then the value would be significant for the additional 4 inmates (per 100) and their families who received skills training. The benefits to society as a whole would need to be considered in relation to the costs and benefits of skills training. Unfortunately, our lack of expertise in this area limits our ability to comment authoritatively on these issues. That said, our evidence suggests that the costs of publicly managed prisons is not statistically different from privately managed systems. Thus, the 4% benefit in skills training may be “free.”

Pro teams eschew the need to weigh the positive externalities achieved by public prisons vs. their additional costs if they can show these benefits as being, as indicated in this card, “free.”

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The economic impacts of discouraging recidivism. DAT “Too Many laws, Too Many Prisoners.” The Economist. 22 July 2010. Accessed

11/10/2014. Web. http://www.economist.com/node/16636027 Crime is a young man's game. Muggers over 30 are rare. Ex-cons who go straight for a few years generally stay that way: a study of 88,000 criminals by Mr Blumstein found that if someone was arrested for aggravated assault at the age of 18 but then managed to stay out of trouble until the age of 22, the risk of his offending was no greater than that for the general population. Yet America's prisons are crammed with old folk. Nearly 200,000 prisoners are over 50. Most would pose little threat if released. And since people age faster in prison than outside, their medical costs are vast. Human Rights Watch, a lobby-group, talks of “nursing homes with razor wire”.

Jail is expensive. Spending per prisoner ranges from $18,000 a year in Mississippi to about $50,000 in California, where the cost per pupil is but a seventh of that. “[W]e are well past the point of diminishing returns,” says a report by the Pew Center on the States. In Washington state, for example, each dollar invested in new prison places in 1980 averted more than nine dollars of criminal harm (using a somewhat arbitrary scale to assign a value to not being beaten up). By 2001, as the emphasis shifted from violent criminals to drug-dealers and thieves, the cost-benefit ratio reversed. Each new dollar spent on prisons averted only 37 cents' worth of harm.

The costs of imprisoning a human being, particularly an older one (which constitutes a greater percent of returning criminals) are vast. This card is helpful for Pro teams who need to qualify the importance of this entire section in context of a debate centered around multiple issues, particularly economic ones.

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Corporations fully admit their profits depend on recidivism. DAT Kirchhoff, Suzanne M. “Economic Impacts of Prison Growth.” Federation of American

Scientists. Congressional Research Service. 13 April 2010. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41177.pdf

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) works exclusively for the United States Congress, providing policy and legal analysis

Cornell Companies, one of the nation’s largest private prison firms, in releasing its fourth quarter 2009 earnings report on February 24, 2010, noted mounting state budget pressures. But the firm said there was still sufficient state and federal business to support growth.95 In its 2008 annual report, for example, Cornell said state and federal authorities would need 35,000 to 40,000 beds annually for the next few years, while only about 12,000 to 15,000 a year were in the pipeline. The company also predicted that the weak economy would make it harder for individuals released from prison to find work and avoid situations that could lead them back into confinement:

At core, demand for beds results from high rates of recidivism among released offenders and an increasing length of sentence for those repeat offenders. Recidivism itself is highly correlated with employment opportunities for offenders; getting a job helps keep an exoffender straight. Moreover, the probability of employment for an ex-offender increases substantially with in-prison programs for adult basic education, substance abuse treatment and vocational training followed by re-entry via a “halfway house” program. Unfortunately, in this economy, these factors, unemployment and budget cuts to those in-prison treatment, education and vocational programs, lead one to conclude that demand for prison beds will likely remain strong, while the ability of government agencies to build their own beds remains constrained. As an industry, private corrections can provide beds quickly and cost effectively.96

There is a clear conflict of interest between companies, responsible to investors to guarantee profits, and the people they help incarcerate.

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Private prisons internally lengthen sentence times. Private prisons are encouraged to increase sentence times on a per-inmate basis. DAT

Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. Take, for example, the disciplinary context. Discipline in prisons is kept by guards, who have authority to “write up”—that is, to issue disciplinary tickets (D-tickets) to—inmates caught violating prison regulations. Following the receipt of a D-ticket, the inmate will be called to a hearing (D-hearing), at which time evidence may be entered and testimony heard and after which the hearing officer will issue the verdict and pronounce sentence.317 Depending on the infraction, penalties may include revocation of good-time credits318 and thus the extension of the inmate’s term of incarceration.319

Because inmates have no right of counsel at D-hearings,320 it is generally their word against that of the guard who wrote up the infraction. Under such circumstances, even in the public sector, the inmate is at a considerable disadvantage: given the solidarity among corrections officers, which can frequently devolve into a mentality of “us” against “them,”321 the hearing officer’s sympathies tend to lie with the disciplining officer. When the facility is run by a private, forprofit corporation, the worry is that the process will be skewed even more strongly against the inmate. The guard writing up the infraction, and in many cases the hearing officer as well, will be employed by a corporation with a direct financial stake—indeed, a paramount interest—in maintaining a high occupancy rate.322 This arrangement raises the concern that official testimony and judgments rendered at D-hearings will not reflect the treatment that the inmates deserve or that is consistent with the state’s interest in imposing only legitimate punishments, but will instead reflect the financial interests of the company running the prison.323

Private prisons can thus dictate their own profits by retaining prisoners for as long as their sentences can possibly allow.

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Profit-driven practices can deter inmates from getting paroled. DAT Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke

University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. The same can be said for parole decisions. In the decision of any parole board, the inmate’s disciplinary record while in prison carries great weight. Indeed, in many cases, prison officials are “called upon to provide parole boards with testimony [and] parole recommendations.”324 Again, the worry is that private contractors’ financial interest in the outcome of parole proceedings “may impair private officials’ objectivity” in a way that yields parole denials for otherwise qualified inmates.325

Little study has been made of this aspect of private prison life, and as a result little definitive proof exists of widespread abuses of discretion of the type just postulated.326 Given the demands of the integrity condition, however, to raise a salient parsimony concern it is not necessary to have definitive empirical proof that the feared abuses have in fact taken place. It is enough that the policies in question create an appreciable risk that illegitimate interests will affect the nature and scope of punishments imposed by the state.

The harm is already in the fact that there is an active motivation to deny human beings freedom from imprisonment.

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Private Prisons are Legally Unrestrained

Federal prisoners cannot bring civil rights suits against private prisons. DAT Palta, Rina. “Why For-Profit Prisons House More Inmates of Color.” npr.org. 13 March

2014. Accessed 3 November 2014. Web. http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color

Federally contracted facilities also come with their own baggage and civil rights questions.

Federal prisoners in public facilities, as well as state prisoners in private and public facilities, have the right to bring lawsuits based on alleged civil rights violations. This means state inmates in California could sue the state prison system for providing inadequate health care. Arizona inmates in a private facility could do the same against the private corporation that owns their prison and against the state of Arizona.

However, federal prisoners in private prisons cannot bring such lawsuits, according to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling.

A prisoner of this status could sue for actual damages but could not bring a civil rights suit against a private prison — the kind of suit that usually forces major changes in how prisons operate in the public sphere.

The implication here is that federally-contracted private prisons can act with an extra layer of impunity, since their actions cannot be challenged with civil rights suits by the prisoners they house.

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Family Blames Private Prison for Death of Inmate. PSM Allen, Ginger. "Another Family Blames Dawson State Jail For Inmate Death." . CBS

DFW, 14 Jun 2012. Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2012/06/14/another-family-blames-dawson-state-jail-for-inmate-death/>.

“I thought all she needed was medication, and all my daughter needed was antibiotics,” said Reni Palmer, Parks’ mother.

Parks’ family blames the staff at Dawson State Jail for not recognizing Ashleigh’s illness sooner. They say they filed a lawsuit but later dropped it. “The medical personnel in ICU told me there was basically nothing they could do for her. And these are the people at the hospital (who) told us that the prison killed my sister,” said Grady. His anger and grief was renewed in April when he saw a CBS 11 investigation which raised troubling questions about a lack of medical care at Dawson State Jail. In our previous report, CBS 11 spoke with the family of Pam Weatherby, an inmate who died while serving a one year sentence for drug possession. Weatherby’s parents believe their daughter didn’t receive adequate treatment for her diabetes while in jail.

Anne Roderick, another inmate, said Weatherby was very ill, but no one moved her from her cell from for medical treatment. Roderick claims the inmates tried desperately to keep Weatherby alive.

Nearly 20 former inmates have also contacted CBS 11 saying they were afraid to talk when they were at Dawson but now want to speak out about a lack of medical care.

Dawson State Jail is run by Corrections Corporation of America, a private prison management company based in Tennessee that has a contract with the State of Texas. CBS 11 obtained internal CCA documents that show the chief of security reported that the supervisors did not follow proper procedures by failing to call for help for Pam Weatherby.

He recommended terminating a shift supervisor. But when CCA had to file an incident report with the State of Texas, the warden wrote “staff acted in accordance with TDCJ procedure” and concluded that “no training needs have been identified.” When contacted about Ashleigh Parks’ death and other issues for this story, CCA reiterated that it is not the health care provider at Dawson State Jail, and did not comment further concerning how its staff handles inmates who complain of illness. “The public should be aware we are looking into it,” said Rep. Jerry Madden (R –– Plano) who chairs the Criminal Justice Board which oversees the state jails. Madden reviewed our findings. On the day we visited his office, he worked to get more information from TDCJ. “If everything is true, there are things that need to be looked at,” said Rep. Madden. His interest in the investigation gives Ashleigh Parks’ family hope that the state will take action to ensure the safety of inmates at Dawson State Jail.

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Private contractors aren’t held accountable by the government or market forces. DAT Mary Sigler, Private Prisons, Public Functions, and the Meaning of Punishment, 38 FLA.

ST. U. L. REV. 149 (2010). Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=fsulr

Mary Sigler is Associate Dean of Faculty and Professor of Law at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

The traditional market mechanisms for disciplining poor performance may not operate effectively in the private prison setting. As an initial matter, the “beneficiaries” of the contract—inmates—are not the purchasers of prison services. Thus, unlike the market for private education, for example, where families can research alternatives, make informed selections, and withdraw from unsatisfactory arrangements, inmates do not have a say in the decision whether to enter or terminate a private prison contract. Although the same is true when governments contract out for garbage collection—the beneficiaries of the contract are not a party to the contract—dissatisfied citizens, unlike inmates, are in a strong political position to demand improved service. Inmates, by contrast, are virtually powerless to effect change in the face of unsatisfactory prison conditions. Most lack the basic right to vote; and in any case, they constitute an unpopular minority without political influence or efficacy.

Even governments may not be well positioned to respond to noncompliance by private prison contractors. Public officials dissatisfied with a contractor’s performance—or rate increases—cannot realistically cancel the contract before finding alternative placements for hundreds of inmates. The high start-up costs for prison operations ensure that a relatively small number of players will (and do) dominate the market, giving them considerable leverage when negotiating with governments desperate to place inmates.60 Although a handful of states have canceled contracts for noncompliance, they appear reluctant to rescind promptly even in cases of extreme inmate abuse.61

Between the lack of legal recourse mentioned previously and the logistically powerful positions mentioned here, private prison corporations approach “too big to fail” status from both legal and economic perspectives.

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Private prisons’ inmates have unacceptably narrow constitutional rights. DAT Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke

University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. Arguably, any dangers private prison inmates face could be neutralized through lawsuits brought by them or on their behalf. Not only might abused inmates thereby get a remedy, but the threat of lawsuits and the accompanying possibility of major financial liability could provide incentives for private prison providers not to cut corners in ways likely to harm inmates.161 However, given the current state of the relevant law, the courts are not likely to provide a meaningful check on abuses in private prisons, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s ruling denying private prison guards qualified immunity from Section 1983 actions.162

Apart from a brief period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, judicial attitudes toward challenges to prison conditions have been marked by considerable deference to the judgment of prison officials.163 As a consequence, the constitutional rights of inmates have been interpreted extremely narrowly.164 For this reason, even instances of serious physical harm to inmates may not qualify for legal relief. Moreover, the mechanisms through which private prison providers might seek to save money could combine with the deferential standard of review under the Eighth Amendment to make it even less likely that private prison inmates could make out a successful constitutional claim.

There is a legal distinction between the harms that can be judiciously addressed in private and public prisons. For debaters wishing to get both legally and philosophically thorough treatment of the private incarceration issue, we recommend reading the source material in full.

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Case study: Eighth Amendment violations in private prisons. DAT Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke

University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. Consider, for example, the use of force by prison officials against prisoners. For an inmate to have a viable Eighth Amendment claim against a prison official for use of excessive force, the inmate must show that the prison official acted “maliciously and sadistically,” with the intention to cause harm.165 So long as the prison official can make necessary,” the prisoner’s claim will fail.166 For example, even assuming that the corrections officers at a privately run jail in Brazoria, Texas, who “forc[ed] prisoners to crawl, kicking them and encouraging dogs to bite them,”167 engaged in this abusive treatment because they were insufficiently trained in less-abusive inmate control techniques, the prisoners themselves could have no constitutional recourse so long as the guards could plausibly claim to have thought their actions necessary to “preserve internal order and discipline.”168 Under these standards, private prison inmates suffering harm traceable to contractors’ inadequate investment in labor are even less likely to recover than public prison inmates: guards who are insufficiently trained may well resort to force more readily than guards with adequate training and experience, motivated in doing so not by a “malicious and sadistic” desire to cause harm, but by their own ignorance and fear.16

This card works well in tandem with evidence about private prison guards’ relative lack of experience.

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Public prison officials have more legal leeway on whistleblowing. DAT Headley, Andrea, and Jean-Claude Garcia-Zamor. “The Privatization of Prisons and its

Impact on Transparency and Accountability in Relation to Maladministration.” International Journal of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, Vol.1 No. 8. August 2014. 11/11/2014. Web. http://www.arcjournals.org/pdfs/ijhsse/v1-i8/4.pdf

Jean-Claude Garcia-Zamor is a Professor in FIU’s Department of Public Administration. Notwithstanding the aforementioned issues within the public prison environment, there have been measures in place to ensure that publicly operated facilities are accountable and that information is accessible. For instance, there is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the Administrative Procedures Act (APA), the Government in the Sunshine Act, and various other state stipulations on public access and public records laws. These acts have all been established to provide better and more efficient access to information. In addition to these public access laws, the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA) was implemented to protect the civil rights of those imprisoned in state and local institutions and allow intervention when necessary if any institutionalized individual�s rights are exploited. Unfortunately, private prisons are not subject to or covered under any of these acts. This means that private prisons housing federal prisoners are neither required to report on what goes on inside the facilities in regards to inmate incidences (such as inmate violence, rape, assault, death, escapes, etc.), nor are ex-offenders given public access to their own records while detained within private facilities (Treadwell, 2012).Moreover, under the Whistleblower Protection Act government employees are afforded the right to report any form of misconduct or violation, without having to deal with any repercussions from their employer, whereas private sector employees do not have such protection.

There’s essentially no legal mandate for transparency, which makes legal enforcement in federally-contracted prisons logistically impossible.

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Overreliance on Private Contractors is Dangerous

Too many agencies are reliant on the same contractor. DAT “The Department of Justice’s Reliance on Private Contractors for Prison Services.”

justice.gov. United States Department of Justice. n.d. Accessed 3 November 2014. Web. http://www.justice.gov/oig/reports/plus/a0116/final.pdf

Because of the cross-cutting nature of the DOJ’s use of private prison contractors, we believe the components should also coordinate their efforts in developing contingency plans to prevent conflicts and duplication of effort. The BOP, the INS, and the USMS rely on the same contractors for prison space and, in some cases, are competing for the same resources. For example, CCA provides prison space for USMS prisoners in 17 of its facilities. INS prisoners are housed in at least 11 CCA facilities and BOP prisoners are housed in 4 facilities. Eight of the 24 CCA facilities used by the components are shared by more than one component. Thus, a disruption of service from a single contractor could affect all three components. Consequently, the components should coordinate the development of their plans to ensure that they do not conflict with or duplicate one another.

Without coordination and oversight of contingency planning, there is an increased risk that any disruption of contractor services would affect not only a single component but all three components, rendering the DOJ’s reaction to a crisis ineffective. In a worse case scenario, the DOJ could find itself having to house thousands of offenders throughout the country on a daily basis without any planning and without the required resources to address the problem. Such a prospect raises serious public safety concerns, and we believe that the DOJ should accelerate its contingency planning efforts accordingly.

INS: Immigration and Naturalization Service; BOP: Bureau of Prisons; USMS: U.S. Marshals Service. Instead of each agency operating its own facilities, they all rely on the same pool of contractors and facilities. While this increases economic efficiency, it does so at the expense of reliability and safety, which are easy to prioritize as being more important.

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States use private system more rapidly than federal system. ASF Sabol, William J. PHD. Minton, Todd D. and Harrison, Paige M. BJS Statisticians.

"Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006" Bureau of Justice Statistics. March 12, 2008. http://www.floridatac.com/files/document/pjim06.pdf

On June 30, 2006, the number of State and Federal prisoners housed in private facilities reached 111,975, an increase of 10,255 prisoners (or 10.1%) since midyear 2005. State prisoners held in private facilities increased 12.9%; those under Federal jurisdiction increased 2.1%. The proportion of all prisoners under State or Federal jurisdiction housed in privately operated facilities reached 7.2% at midyear 2006, up from 6.5% in 2003 (table 6).

Texas, Indiana, Colorado, and Florida accounted for more than half of the increase in prisoners held in private facilities between midyear 2005 and 2006. With an additional 2,806 prisoners in private facilities, Texas accounted for 27.3% percent of the total increase.

The Federal Government relies more on private prisons than State systems. ASF Sabol, William J. PHD. Minton, Todd D. and Harrison, Paige M. BJS Statisticians.

"Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 2006" Bureau of Justice Statistics. March 12, 2008. http://www.floridatac.com/files/document/pjim06.pdf

For the 12 months ending June 30, 2006, State systems reported a larger increase than the Federal system in the number of inmates housed in private prisons. State prison- ers held in private prisons increased by 12.9% to reach 84,867. Federal prisoners in private facilities increased by 2.1% to reach 27,108. The Federal system housed a larger share of prisoners in private facilities (14.2%) than the State systems (6.2%).

This is interesting to note because it expands the ground the affirmative can attack from. Normally the contract argument works on the level of states sentencing their own prisoners of the state level judicial system to facilities. Here we see that in actuality the Federal government can transfer them, and the contract would still be fulfilled because the private prison and State just want to meet a quota, they don’t care where the prisoners come from.

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Gladiator School and Idaho Correctional Centers Contracts. PSM Stroud, Matt. "The Private Prison Bracket." . Politico, 24 02 2014. Web. 1 Nov 2014.

<http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/private-prison-racket-103893.html

As inmate populations have soared over the last 30 years, private prisons have emerged as an appealing solution to cash-starved states. Privately run prisons are cheaper and can be set up much faster than those run by the government. Nearly a tenth of all U.S. prisoners are housed in private prisons, as are almost two-thirds of immigrants in detention centers—and the companies that run them have cashed in. CCA, the oldest and largest modern private prison company, took over its first facility in 1983. Now it’s a Wall Street darling with a market cap of nearly $3.8 billion. Similarly, GEO Group, the second largest private-prison operator, last week reported $1.52 billion in revenue for 2013.

But while privatizing prisons may appear at first glance like yet another example of how the free market beats the public sector, one need only look at CCA’s record in Idaho to wonder whether outsourcing this particular government function is such a good idea.

In July 2000, Idaho’s then-Governor Dirk Kempthorne made a decision similar to Jerry Brown’s. He opened the Idaho Correctional Center, the state’s first private prison. But it wasn’t long before the facility—built and operated by CCA—began to draw concerns. Prisoners in the 2,000-bed facility dubbed it “Gladiator School” for the rampant fighting that took place inside. A 2008 study by the Idaho Department of Corrections obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union showed that there were four times as many prisoner-on-prisoner assaults there than in all the state’s seven other prisons combined.

The ACLU sued CCA in 2010, alleging that violence had become an “epidemic” in the facility, and the Associated Press released a video showing a prisoner beaten unconscious while correctional officers stood around watching. A 2011 settlement required CCA to keep more officers on staff, but the company apparently didn’t bother to do that. Last year, a review of CCA’s staff records showed that prison employees had falsified as many as 4,800 hours over the course of seven months; they had understaffed the prison on purpose and fudged records. The end result: Idaho's private prison experiment with CCA will end in June.

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Prison Privatization and Criticisms of Profiteering from Asylum Reforms. PSM Tencer, Daniel. "Prison Privatization Canada: Refugee Asylum Reforms Will Benefit

Private Prison Companies, Critics Charge." . Huffington Post, 12 Mar 2012. Web. 1 Nov 2014. <http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/12/03/prison-privatization-canada-refugee-asylum_n_2232701.html>.

Critics of private detention centres point to the United States as a cautionary example of what can happen when private companies build an industry out of detaining would-be immigrants.

The U.S. has seen an enormous boom in the portion of detention facilities being run for profit, with nearly half of all detainee beds now in private hands, compared to around 10 per cent just a decade ago. Over the past 10 years, the industry’s largest U.S. companies spent some $45 million on lobbying and campaign donations to ensure more business for themselves, the Associated Press reported. In that time, immigrant and refugee detention reached record highs. Federal officials have admitted that privately run facilities don’t necessarily translate into lower bills for taxpayers, the AP added.

The Harper government has moved cautiously on the issue of prison privatization, officially denying that it plans to privatize federal facilities while at the same time meeting with lobbyists pushing for more private involvement in prisons.

According to a report at CTV earlier this fall, the federal government hired auditor Deloitte & Touche to study private prison models in seven foreign countries, to determine their “relevancy to [the] Canadian market.” According to a report at Bloomberg, U.S. private prisons — faced with shrinking prison budgets and hits to their reputation at home — are lobbying for work in Canada. Federal documents showed the Correctional Service of Canada “may consider” contracting out some prison services. The Guardian reported this past summer that two of the largest U.S. private prison operators — Geo Group and Management and Training Corp. (MTC) — are lobbying Ottawa for business, and representatives of Geo Group met with Public Safety Minister Vic Toews last year.

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Private Prisons and Patronage by Governments. PSM Krugman, Paul. "Prisons, Privatization, Patronage." . New York Times, 21 Jun 2012.

Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/opinion/krugman-prisons-privatization-patronage.html?_r=2&>.

…But if you think about it even for a minute, you realize that the one thing the companies that make up the prison-industrial complex — companies like Community Education or the private-prison giant Corrections Corporation of America — are definitely not doing is competing in a free market. They are, instead, living off government contracts. There isn’t any market here, and there is, therefore, no reason to expect any magical gains in efficiency. And, sure enough, despite many promises that prison privatization will lead to big cost savings, such savings — as a comprehensive study by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, part of the U.S. Department of Justice, concluded — “have simply not materialized.” To the extent that private prison operators do manage to save money, they do so through “reductions in staffing patterns, fringe benefits, and other labor-related costs.” So let’s see: Privatized prisons save money by employing fewer guards and other workers, and by paying them badly. And then we get horror stories about how these prisons are run. What a surprise! So what’s really behind the drive to privatize prisons, and just about everything else?

One answer is that privatization can serve as a stealth form of government borrowing, in which governments avoid recording upfront expenses (or even raise money by selling existing facilities) while raising their long-run costs in ways taxpayers can’t see. We hear a lot about the hidden debts that states have incurred in the form of pension liabilities; we don’t hear much about the hidden debts now being accumulated in the form of long-term contracts with private companies hired to operate prisons, schools and more. Another answer is that privatization is a way of getting rid of public employees, who do have a habit of unionizing and tend to lean Democratic in any case. But the main answer, surely, is to follow the money. Never mind what privatization does or doesn’t do to state budgets; think instead of what it does for both the campaign coffers and the personal finances of politicians and their friends. As more and more government functions get privatized, states become pay-to-play paradises, in which both political contributions and contracts for friends and relatives become a quid pro quo for getting government business. Are the corporations capturing the politicians, or the politicians capturing the corporations? Does it matter? Now, someone will surely point out that nonprivatized government has its own problems of undue influence, that prison guards and teachers’ unions also have political clout, and this clout sometimes distorts public policy. Fair enough. But such influence tends to be relatively transparent. Everyone knows about those arguably excessive public pensions; it took an investigation by The Times over several months to bring the account of New Jersey’s halfway-house-hell to light. The point, then, is that you shouldn’t imagine that what The Times discovered about prison privatization in New Jersey is an isolated instance of bad behavior. It is, instead, almost surely a glimpse of a pervasive and growing reality, of a corrupt nexus of privatization and patronage that is undermining government across much of our nation.

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Outsourcing of Prison Health Care to Private Companies. PSM Kutscher, Beth. "Rumble over jailhouse healthcare." . Modern Healthcare, 31 Aug. 2013.

Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://www.modernhealthcare.com/article/20130831/magazine/308319891>.

Healthcare services in Florida's prisons are undergoing a big overhaul this summer as the state hands over care for its more than 100,000 inmates to a private company. The beneficiary of the five-year, $230 million contract—pushed through by Republican Gov. Rick Scott, the former Columbia/HCA leader who is a strong advocate of privatization—is a private equity-backed company called Corizon, the nation's largest private prison healthcare provider. Corizon's contract in Florida—which came after a lengthy legal fight by two labor unions to block the state's attempt to privatize prison services—follows its winning a five-year contract in February to serve 34,000 inmates in 10 Arizona facilities. The prison healthcare provider essentially serves as the HMO for a captive patient population.“We're definitely growing here,” said Rich Hallworth, CEO of Brentwood, Tenn.-based Corizon and former chief operating officer of Tufts Health Plan in Boston. The company's expansion in Florida is part of the broader, and controversial, movement by state and local governments to outsource prison healthcare to private contractors. About 20 states reportedly have outsourced all or part of their prison healthcare to vendors to cut costs. While hard data are not available on the prevalence of privatization, Dr. Marc Stern of the University of Washington, who formerly served as medical director of that state's corrections department, estimated that half of all state and local prisons and jails have outsourced healthcare services, and that these contracts are worth roughly $3 billion a year.

There is debate, however, about whether outsourcing actually saves money for corrections agencies. And the growth of private prison healthcare providers has fueled sharp criticism from prisoner advocates and legal aid groups that warn of a negative effect on quality of care, and from labor unions that see union jobs going to nonunionized private-sector contractors. Powerful political and ideological pressures drive decisions about the provision of healthcare to prisoners. For one thing, it's hard for governors and state legislatures to support higher spending and better quality for inmates' care because of the punitive public attitudes toward prisoners. Some question why prisoners should receive healthcare at all.

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Quotas Hurt Inmates and Taxpayers Lockup Quotas AMS

Short, April. “6 Shocking Revelations about How Private Prisons Make Money.” Salon. September 23, 2013. http://www.salon.com/2013/09/23/6_shocking_revelations_about_how_private_prisons_make_money_partner/ Salon magazine provides news and expert opinions on the most relevant stories and current issues. It has been nominated for the National Magazine Award.

A new report from In the Public Interest (ITPI) revealed last week that private prison companies are striking deals with states that contain clauses guaranteeing high prison occupancy rates. The report, “Criminal: How Lockup Quotas and ‘Low-Crime Taxes’ Guarantee Profits for Private Prison Corporations,” documents the contracts exchanged between private prison companies and state and local governments that either guarantee prison occupancy rates (essentially creating inmate lockup quotas) or force taxpayers to pay for empty beds if the prison population decreases due to lower crime rates or other factors (essentially creating low-crime taxes).

Some of these contracts require 90 to 100 percent prison occupancy.

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Occupancy Requirements Hurt Economies AMS Short, April. “6 Shocking Revelations about How Private Prisons Make Money.” Salon.

September 23, 2013. http://www.salon.com/2013/09/23/6_shocking_revelations_about_how_private_prisons_make_money_partner/

Salon Magazine is a respected source on current issues. The magazine strives to present new evidence and expert opinions. Salon Magazine has been nominated for the National Magazine Award.

Here are six of the most shocking facts about prison privatization and corporatization, from the report.

65 percent of the private prison contracts ITPI received and analyzed included occupancy guarantees in the form of quotas or required payments for empty prison cells (a “low-crime tax”). These quotas and low-crime taxes put taxpayers on the hook for guaranteeing profits for private prison corporations.

Occupancy guarantee clauses in private prison contracts range between 80% and 100%, with 90% as the most frequent occupancy guarantee requirement.

Arizona, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Virginia are locked in contracts with the highest occupancy guarantee requirements, with all quotas requiring between 95% and 100% occupancy.

Though crime has dropped by a third in the past decade, an occupancy requirement covering three for-profit prisons has forced taxpayers in Colorado to pay an additional $2 million.

Three Arizona for-profit prison contracts have a staggering 100% quota, even though a 2012 analysis from Tucson Citizen shows that the company’s per-day charge for each prisoner has increased an average of 13.9% over the life of the contracts.

A 20-year deal to privately operate the Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Ohio includes a 90% quota, and has contributed to cutting corners on safety, including overcrowding, areas without secure doors and an increase in crime both inside the prison and in the surrounding community.

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Private Prisons Oppose the Public Interest

Private contractors have a vested interest in retaining their own importance. DAT “The Perverse Incentives of Private Prisons.” The Economist. 24 August 2010. Accessed 3

November 2014. Web. http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2010/08/private_prisons

From an economic point of view, we should expect firms that compete for and rely on government contracts, such as weapons manufacturers and prison operators, to maximise the spread between the amount billed and the actual cost of delivering the service. If contractors can get away with providing less value for money than would the government-run alternative, they will. Moreover, contractors have every incentive to make themselves seem necessary. It is well-known that public prison employee unions constitute a powerful constituency for tough sentencing policies that lead to larger prison populations requiring additional prisons and personnel. The great hazard of contracting out incarceration "services" is that private firms may well turn out to be even more efficient and effective than unions in lobbying for policies that would increase prison populations.

When we add to the mix the observations that America already puts a larger proportion of its population behind bars than does any other country (often for acts that ought to be legal), and that the US already spends an insane portion of national income on the largely non-productive garrison state, it is hard to see the expansion of a for-profit industry with a permanent interest in putting ever more people in cages as consistent with either efficiency or justice.

At some point in the debate, an explicit valuation of prison functions needs to be made. While prisons are meant to house people efficiently, the most efficient way to do so would be the minimization of people being imprisoned to begin with. With an interest in maximizing their populations, private prisons do not fulfill this imperative.

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Private Prison Contracts and Mass Incarcerations. PSM Bowling, Julia. "Do Private Prison Contracts Fuel Mass Incarceration?." . Brennan

Center for Justice, 20 09 2013. Web. 1 Nov 2014. <http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/do-private-prison-contracts-fuel-mass-incarceration>.

Private prisons have weathered a wave of criticism recently, as revelations about their poor security and lack of oversight have gone public. Now, a new report from In the Public Interest confirms that government contracts with private prisons not only fleece the taxpayer, but often create perverse financial incentives for states to lock up more people.

The study examined 62 private prisons contracts in 21 states. It found that the majority of these contracts guarantee that the state will supply enough prisoners to keep between 80 and 100 percent of the private prisons’ beds filled. If the state fails to fulfill this ‘bed guarantee’, it must pay a fine to the company running the prisons – in effect, paying for each prison bed regardless of whether it holds a prisoner. This incentivizes states to send prisoners to private prisons rather than state-run prisons in order to meet the bed guarantee, regardless of the prisons’ distance from families, their security level, or health conditions.

In effect, this ‘bed guarantee’ payment structure penalizes taxpayers for low incarceration rates. This is a system that hurts both taxpayer and prisoner. Bed guarantees funnel taxpayer money into private prison profits at a time when states should see overall cost savings from successful attempts at curbing crime. Instead, when states reduce incarceration rates below lockup quotas, they compensate companies’ lost revenue at the per day rate, adding up to millions of dollars in fines.

Under basic economic principles, firms that compete for and rely on government contracts want to decrease their costs while maximizing their revenue. Private prison companies are no exception – they reduce costs by cutting reentry and educational programs that would help reduce recidivism, and raise revenue by keeping government funding consistent through lockup quotas. Unsurprisingly, many private prison companies actually lobby for harsh criminal justice policies – like mandatory minimums and truth-in-sentencing laws – and against efforts to reduce mass incarceration.

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Criticism of Corrections Corporation of America. PSM Brogdon, Louie. "Critics point finger at CCA: For-profit prison operator taken to task for

campaign giving, operations." . Times Free Press, 05 May 2014. Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2014/may/05/critics-point-finger-at-ccafor-profit-prison/?breakingnews>.

The American Civil Liberties Union has started a statewide campaign against the largest private prison company in the nation, but county officials say there's no plan to end a 30-year-old local contract with Corrections Corporation of America. Nashville-based CCA is a private company that contracts with governments throughout the country to operate prisons and correctional facilities. It is the largest private prison system nationwide, and the fifth largest prison system in the country -- behind only the federal government and three states.

Securities and Exchange Commission reports show the company had net income of $157 million in 2010, with $1.6 billion in revenue. The company detains 70,000 inmates in more than 60 facilities and can accommodate up to 80,000, according to the company. It runs six prisons in Tennessee, and has operated Hamilton County's Silverdale facility -- now at 1,062 beds -- since 1984. ACLU of Tennessee says CCA has broken its pledge to run jails better, and cheaper, than government. It also criticizes the company for trying to direct politics through lobbying, litigation and campaign contributions.

"Government has an interest, for a number of reasons, for reducing recidivism, but CCA has interests in ensuring their facilities are full," said Hedy Weinberg, ACLU of Tennessee's executive director.

Weinberg said for-profit corporations shouldn't be in the business of limiting people's freedoms, because the business model inherently runs counter to the public's interest. "Risk factors for their business include reductions in crime rates, lower minimum sentences for nonviolent drug charges and cost-saving measures like greater use of probation and electronic monitoring," Weinberg said.

All of those measures would reduce the number of people locked up, and save tax dollars, she said. In its Form 10-K annual report filed in 2012 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, CCA stated it does not engage in "lobbying or advocacy efforts that would influence enforcement efforts, parole standards, criminal laws, and sentencing policies."

But Carl Takei, a staff attorney for the ACLU National Prison Project, wrote recently that, "The company spends heavily on both campaign contributions and lobbying."

In 2011, Takei wrote, CCA gave $710,300 in political contributions to candidates for federal or state office, political parties, and 527 groups (political action campaigns and super-political action campaigns). That same year, CCA spent $1.07 million lobbying federal officials and an undisclosed amount lobbying state officials.

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Prison Industry and Big Businesses or New Form of Slavery. PSM Pelaez, Vicky. "The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of

Slavery?." . Center for Research on Globalization, 31 Mar 2014. Web. 2 Nov 2014. <The Prison Industry in the United States: Big Business or a New Form of Slavery?>.

Human rights organizations, as well as political and social ones, are condemning what they are calling a new form of inhumane exploitation in the United States, where they say a prison population of up to 2 million – mostly Black and Hispanic – are working for various industries for a pittance. For the tycoons who have invested in the prison industry, it has been like finding a pot of gold. They don’t have to worry about strikes or paying unemployment insurance, vacations or comp time. All of their workers are full-time, and never arrive late or are absent because of family problems; moreover, if they don’t like the pay of 25 cents an hour and refuse to work, they are locked up in isolation cells.

There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.

What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?

“The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”

The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies,

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prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.

CRIME GOES DOWN, JAIL POPULATION GOES UP

According to reports by human rights organizations, these are the factors that increase the profit potential for those who invest in the prison industry complex:

Jailing persons convicted of non-violent crimes, and long prison sentences for possession of microscopic quantities of illegal drugs. Federal law stipulates five years’ imprisonment without possibility of parole for possession of 5 grams of crack or 3.5 ounces of heroin, and 10 years for possession of less than 2 ounces of rock-cocaine or crack. A sentence of 5 years for cocaine powder requires possession of 500 grams – 100 times more than the quantity of rock cocaine for the same sentence. Most of those who use cocaine powder are white, middle-class or rich people, while mostly Blacks and Latinos use rock cocaine. In Texas, a person may be sentenced for up to two years’ imprisonment for possessing 4 ounces of marijuana. Here in New York, the 1973 Nelson Rockefeller anti-drug law provides for a mandatory prison sentence of 15 years to life for possession of 4 ounces of any illegal drug.

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Profitability of Halfway Houses and Prisons. PSM Dolnick, Sam. "As Escapees Stream Out, a Penal Business Thrives." . New York Times,

12 Jun 2012. Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/nyregion/in-new-jersey-halfway-houses-escapees-stream-out-as-a-penal-business-thrives.html?_r=2>.

After decades of tough criminal justice policies, states have been grappling with crowded prisons that are straining budgets. In response to those pressures, New Jersey has become a leader in a national movement to save money by diverting inmates to a new kind of privately run halfway house. At the heart of the system is a company with deep connections to politicians of both parties, most notably Gov. Chris Christie. Many of these halfway houses are as big as prisons, with several hundred beds, and bear little resemblance to the neighborhood halfway houses of the past, where small groups of low-level offenders were sent to straighten up.

New Jersey officials have called these large facilities an innovative example of privatization and have promoted the approach all the way to the Obama White House. Yet with little oversight, the state’s halfway houses have mutated into a shadow corrections network, where drugs, gang activity and violence, including sexual assaults, often go unchecked, according to a 10-month investigation by The New York Times. Perhaps the most unsettling sign of the chaos within is inmates’ ease in getting out. Since 2005, roughly 5,100 inmates have escaped from the state’s privately run halfway houses, including at least 1,300 in the 29 months since Governor Christie took office, according to an analysis by The Times. Some inmates left through the back, side or emergency doors of halfway houses, or through smoking areas, state records show. Others placed dummies in their beds as decoys, or fled while being returned to prison for violating halfway houses’ rules. Many had permission to go on work-release programs but then did not return.

While these halfway houses often resemble traditional correctional institutions, they have much less security. There are no correction officers, and workers are not allowed to restrain inmates who try to leave or to locate those who do not come back from work release, the most common form of escape. The halfway houses’ only recourse is to alert the authorities. And so the inmates flee in a steady stream: 46 last September, 39 in October, 40 in November, 38 in December, state records show.

“The system is a mess,” said Thaddeus B. Caldwell, who spent four years tracking down halfway house escapees in New Jersey as a senior corrections investigator. “No matter how many escaped, no matter how many were caught, no matter how many committed heinous acts while they were on the run, they still kept releasing more guys into the halfway houses, and it kept happening over and over again.”

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Larger Inmate Prison is Boon to Private Prisons. PSM Chen, Stephanie. "Larger Inmate Population Is Boon to Private Prisons." . The Wall

Street Journal, 19 Nov. 2008. Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB122705334657739263?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122705334657739263.html>.

Prison companies are preparing for a wave of new business as the economic downturn makes it increasingly difficult for federal and state government officials to build and operate their own jails.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons and several state governments have sent thousands of inmates in recent months to prisons and detention centers run by Corrections Corp. of America, Geo Group Inc. and other private operators, as a crackdown on illegal immigration, a lengthening of mandatory sentences for certain crimes and other factors have overcrowded many government facilities.

Prison-policy experts expect inmate populations in 10 states to have increased by 25% or more between 2006 and 2011, according to a report by the nonprofit Pew Charitable Trusts.

Some groups accuse the private prisons of neglecting inmates or of putting them in bad conditions. "Profit is still a motive and it's structured into the way these prisons are operated," says Judy Greene, a justice-policy analyst for Justice Strategies, a nonprofit studying prison-sentencing issues and problems. "Just because the system has expanded doesn't mean there is evidence that conditions have improved."

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed lawsuits involving several prison companies over the past decade alleging poor treatment of inmates. Last year, the organization and other parties filed a lawsuit against Corrections Corp. and the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm in federal court in San Diego, alleging that the company was operating an overcrowded, unsafe immigrant-detention center in that city. Detainees were routinely assigned in groups of three to sleep in two-room cells -- meaning one had to sleep on the floor near the toilet -- or to temporary beds in recreation rooms and other common spaces, according to the complaint. The suit also alleged that detainees had little access to mental-health care.

"We have serious concerns about for-profit prison companies because they are notorious for cutting essential costs that need to be provided to maintain a safe and constitutional environment for prisoners," says Jody Kent, a public-policy coordinator for the ACLU's National Prison Project.

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Jailing Americans for Profit. PSM Whitehead, John. "Jailing Americans for Profit: The Rise of the Prison Industrial

Complex." . The Huffington Post, 06 Oct 2012. Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-w-whitehead/prison-privatization_b_1414467.html>.

Consider this: despite the fact that violent crime in America has been on the decline, the nation's incarceration rate has tripled since 1980. Approximately 13 million people are introduced to American jails in any given year. Incredibly, more than six million people are under "correctional supervision" in America, meaning that one in fifty Americans are working their way through the prison system, either as inmates, or while on parole or probation. According to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the majority of those being held in federal prisons are convicted of drug offenses -- namely, marijuana. Presently, one out of every 100 Americans is serving time behind bars.

Little wonder, then, that public prisons are overcrowded. Yet while providing security, housing, food, medical care, etc., for six million Americans is a hardship for cash-strapped states, to profit-hungry corporations such as Corrections Corp of America (CCA) and GEO Group, the leaders in the partnership corrections industry, it's a $70 billion gold mine. Thus, with an eye toward increasing its bottom line, CCA has floated a proposal to prison officials in 48 states offering to buy and manage public prisons at a substantial cost savings to the states. In exchange, and here's the kicker, the prisons would have to contain at least 1,000 beds and states would have agree to maintain a 90 percent occupancy rate in the privately run prisons for at least 20 years.

The problem with this scenario, as Roger Werholtz, former Kansas secretary of corrections, recognizes is that while states may be tempted by the quick infusion of cash, they "would be obligated to maintain these (occupancy) rates and subtle pressure would be applied to make sentencing laws more severe with a clear intent to drive up the population." Unfortunately, that's exactly what has happened. Among the laws aimed at increasing the prison population and growing the profit margins of special interest corporations like CCA are three-strike laws (mandating sentences of 25 years to life for multiple felony convictions) and "truth-in-sentencing" legislation(mandating that those sentenced to prison serve most or all of their time).

And yes, in case you were wondering, part of the investment pitch for CCA and its cohort GEO Group include the profits to be made in building "kindler, gentler" minimum-security facilities designed for detaining illegal immigrants, especially low-risk detainees like women and children. With immigration a persistent problem in the southwestern states, especially, and more than 250 such detention centers going up across the country, there is indeed money to be made. For example, GEO's new facility in Karnes County, Texas, boasts a "608-bed facility still smelling of fresh paint and new carpet stretch[ing] across a 29-acre swath of farmland in rural South Texas. Rather than prison cells, jumpsuits, and barbed wire fencing, detainees here will sleep in eight-bed

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dormitory-style quarters, wearing more cozy attire like jeans and T-shirts. The facility's high walls enclose lush green courtyards with volleyball courts, an AstroTurfed soccer field, and basketball hoops, where detainees are free to roam throughout the day." All of this, of course, comes at taxpayer expense.

"And this is where it gets creepy," observes reporter Joe Weisenthal for Business Insider, "because as an investor you're pulling for scenarios where more people are put in jail." In making its pitch to potential investors, CCA points out that private prisons comprise a unique, recession-resistant investment opportunity, with more than 90 percent of the market up for grabs, little competition, high recidivism among prisoners, and the potential for "accelerated growth in inmate populations following the recession." In other words, caging humans for profit is a sure bet, because the U.S. population is growing dramatically and the prison population will grow proportionally as well, and more prisoners equal more profits.

…No matter what the politicians or corporate heads might say, prison privatization is neither fiscally responsible nor in keeping with principles of justice. It simply encourages incarceration for the sake of profits, while causing millions of Americans, most of them minor, nonviolent criminals, to be handed over to corporations for lengthy prison sentences which do nothing to protect society or prevent recidivism. This perverse notion of how prisons should be run, that they should be full at all times, and full of minor criminals, is evil.

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Prisons are the Problem Not the Solution and Criticisms by ACLU. PSM Winter, Margaret. "Private Prisons Are the Problem, Not the Solution." . American Civil

Liberties Union, 30 Apr 2012. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <https://www.aclu.org/blog/prisoners-rights-criminal-law-reform/private-prisons-are-problem-not-solution>.

There's no question that GEO has been a bad actor in Mississippi, and richly deserves to be ousted: only last month, a federal judge found that GEO's operation of the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility, which incarcerates teenagers as young as 13, has created "a picture of such horror as should be unrealized anywhere in the civilized world," including a pattern of sexual abuse and severe beatings. The judge also excoriated the Mississippi Department of Corrections for failing to monitor and halt GEO's abuses.

And teenagers aren't the only incarcerated population facing abuse in GEO's Mississippi facilities. At East Mississippi Correctional Facility, the state's only prison for those who need treatment for mental illness, the ACLU and SPLC have collected massive evidence that GEO has been starving the mentally ill prisoners, denying them basic mental health care, punishing them with solitary confinement, and exposing them to such systemic abuse and neglect that suicides and suicide attempts are rampant.

But there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the situation will be improved by replacing GEO with a different prison profiteer. In fact, two other big private prison contractors — Corrections Corporation of America and Wexford — are already operating the medical and mental health systems in some Mississippi prisons, and the Department of Corrections is well aware that those private contractors are providing abysmal care to prisoners with serious medical and mental health needs. The ACLU has painstakingly documented Wexford and CCA's gross lack of regard for prisoner health; MDOC has long been on notice of these deficiencies, some of which have resulted in deaths.

The root of the problem: all for-profit prison corporations are in the very business of generating the greatest possible profits, by any means necessary. Providing safe and humane conditions of confinement to the human beings in their custody is — at best — a distant secondary goal. The private prison industry has been a key player over the past two decades in driving the explosion of mass incarceration in the U.S. Families, communities and state and local government have suffered terribly from the mass incarceration binge; the only clear winner is the private prison industry and its stockholders, making billions in revenues.

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Wrongful Imprisonment in California AMS

Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites

Advocates for prisoners' rights and their allies in the state legislature say that Brown's investments in the private prison system could hamper efforts to change California's tough sentencing laws so that fewer people go to prison in the first place.

"We keep sending more people to prison than the prisons can handle," said Donald Specter, who heads the Prison Law Office, a Berkeley-based public interest firm.

The United States prison system needs real reform, not more expensive prisons.

Private Prison Industry Opposes Taxpayer Interests AMS Simmons, Matt. “Punishment & Profits: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Private Prisons.”

August 7, 2013. Oklahoma Policy Institute. http://okpolicy.org/punishment-profits-a-cost-benefit-analysis-of-private-prisons The Oklahoma Policy Institute (OK Policy) is a nonpartisan think tank located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Institute researches political and economic issues for the state of Oklahoma.

The interests of the private prison industry are diametrically opposed to those of taxpayers, corrections professionals, and prisoners. Private prisons are a business; they exist to make money. If prisoners do not reoffend, they no longer add to the company’s profits.

The CCA’s 2010 Annual Report acknowledges this, stating that, “any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

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Economic Strain of CCA AMS

Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

CCA alone holds more than 8,000 California inmates at facilities in Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma. The company's new deal with California expands the state's prison capacity by an additional 2,300 prisoners, and California's contracts with the GEO Group add another 1,400. Along with an existing private prison contract in the state, the new contracts bring California's total number of private-prison inmates to about 12,300.

California is now CCA's second-biggest customer, providing $214 million to the company last year, according to HuffPost's analysis of the company's finances. The state is surpassed only by the federal government, which paid CCA $752 million last year, a figure that accounts for contracts with three agencies -- the U.S. Marshals Service, the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The state of Georgia, the company's third-largest client, paid $99 million last year.

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Growth of Private Prisons Despite Critics Growth of Private Prisons Despite Criticisms. PSM

Cohn, Scott. "Private Prison Inudstry Grows Despite Critics." . NBC News, 18 10 2011. Web. 1 Nov 2014. <http://www.nbcnews.com/id/44936562/ns/business-cnbc_tv/t/private-prison-industry-grows-despite-critics/

The Idaho Correctional Center—the ICC — was so violent that employees and inmates had a name for the place: Gladiator School. “That was because of the assaults,” said Todd Goertzen, a former corrections counselor at the prison. “That's why they called it Gladiator School, because of that reason. If you're going to ICC, it's going to be fight or die, basically.”

This is the story of a dangerous business: the billions of dollars that flow into the American prison industry and the companies that profit from it. But a problem for some is an opportunity for others. Private prison companies are picking up the slack. The more inmates or detainees they house, the more money they make. Private companies hold about 130,000 people, or 8 percent of American inmates. That’s nearly double the number from 10 years ago. Private prisons are the future of the American penal system, according to Richard Harbison, an executive vice president at LCS Corrections. “Private operators can design, build and operate a prison cheaper than the government, be it state or the federal government,” he said. “They operate more efficiently. Lack of bureaucracy, if you will.” Harbison said the growth of privately managed prisons comes down to a matter of dollars and cents. “If the public can get the same services for less money, those are less taxes that you and I pay,” he said. “So yeah, they should be concerned that they're getting what they're paying for. Keeping an inmate secure, keeping the public secure.”

Like much about this industry, the numbers are fraught with controversy, and estimates as to how much money privatization saves — if any — vary widely.

Other prisons are owned and operated by huge corporations. Unlike their public counterparts, they’re accountable not just to the taxpayers but to shareholders, investors and hedge funds.

The two biggest prison companies, the GEO Group and the Corrections Corporation of America, bring in more than $3 billion a year between them. But private prisons have attracted legions of critics — some from organized labor, since most private prisons, unlike their public counterparts, are non-union. Others oppose the very idea of private prisons, perhaps no one more vocally than Alex Friedmann, a writer and an editor of Prison Legal News, which has been covering corrections for more than 20 years. “Literally, you can put a dollar figure on each inmate that is held at a private prison,” he said. “They are treated as commodities. And that's very dangerous and troubling when a company sees the people it incarcerates as nothing more than a money stream.”

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Private Prisons Underperform Against Public Prisons

Statistical Data on Performance of Private Prisons in Britain. PSM VERKAIK, ROBERT . "Private prisons 'performing worse than state-run jails'." . The

Independent, 29 Jun 2009. Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/private-prisons-performing-worse-than-staterun-jails-1722936.html>.

Britain's private prisons are performing worse than those run by the state, according to data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

The findings, based on the overall performances of 132 prisons in England and Wales, appear to undermine claims by ministers that the greater use of private jails is raising standards for the accommodation of more than 83,000 prisoners held across both sectors.

Separate figures, also released under the right-to-know law, show that nearly twice as many prisoner complaints are upheld in private prisons as they are in state-run institutions.

The Government is committed to building five more private prisons to accommodate the growing prison population, which is predicted to rise to 96,000 by 2014. But the poor performance ratings among 40 per cent of private prisons in England and Wales throw into question the cost savings and other benefits of using outside businesses to tackle the prison crisis.

The data obtained by More4 News shows that four of the 10 private prisons scored the second lowest rating of 2, "requiring development", and only one above an assessment of "serious concern."

The Ministry of Justice introduced the Prison Performance Assessment Tool (PPAT) last year, providing the first direct comparison between public and private prisons.

It ranks the prisons out of four gradings using a wide range of measurements, including escapes, assaults and rehabilitation. In the second quarter of last year, the average overall score for prisons in the private sector was 2.7. For the 123 public sector prisons the average was 2.83.

In the following quarter this gap had widened to 2.6 and 2.85. This is a difference of almost 10 per cent. No private prison attained the top mark of 4, defined as "exceptional performance."

There were also disparities in the number of complaints upheld in private and state-run prisons. Rye Hill Prison, a private prison run by G4S, which has been a focus of particular criticism since it opened in 2001, saw a total of 22 complaints, well above the average in both the public and private sectors.

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Exploring the Purported Cost Efficiency of Private Prisons. PSM Smith, Adrian. "Private vs. Public Facilities, Is it cost effective and safe?." . Corrections,

06 Nov 2012. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <http://www.corrections.com/news/article/30903-private-vs-public-facilities-is-it-cost-effective-and-safe->.

Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) has a capacity of more than 80,000 beds in 65 correctional facilities. The GEO Group operates 61 facilities with a capacity of 49,000 offender beds. Most privately run facilities are located in the southern and western portions of the United States and include both state and federal offenders. Proponents of privately run prisons contend that cost-savings and efficiency of operation place private prisons at an advantage over public prisons and support the argument for privatization, but some research casts doubt on the validity of these arguments, as evidence has shown that private prisons are neither demonstrably more cost-effective, nor more efficient than public prisons. An evaluation of 24 different studies on cost-effectiveness revealed that, at best, results of the question are inconclusive and, at worst, there is no difference in cost-effectiveness. A study by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the cost-savings promised by private prisons “have simply not materialized.” Some research has concluded that for-profit prisons cost more than public prisons. Furthermore, cost estimates from privatization advocates may be misleading, because private facilities often refuse to accept inmates that cost the most to house. A 2001 study concluded that a pattern of sending less expensive inmates to privately-run facilities artificially inflated cost savings. A 2005 study found that Arizona’s public facilities were seven times more likely to house violent offenders and three times more likely to house those convicted of more serious offenses. Evidence suggests that lower staff levels and training at private facilities may lead to increases in incidences of violence and escapes. A nationwide study found that assaults on guards by inmates were 49 percent more frequent in private prisons than in government-run prisons. The same study revealed that assaults on fellow inmates were 65 percent more frequent in private prison (Austin, Conventry, 2001). After an complete analysis on private vs. public run correctional facilities, one may come to the conclusion that private run facilities are no more cost saving effective or safer than a state run facility. We must ask ourselves, is any monetary amount worth the lives of one of our own? The statistics are there, this profession is tough enough, we should take pride of it and not risk the lives of our bravest officers just to attempt to save the state a couple of dollars.

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Failed Instances of Private Prisons Failing Private Prisons in England. PSM

"Failing private prisons to be renationalised, says Labour." . The Guardian, 01 Jan 2014. Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/jan/02/failing-private-prisons-to-be-renationalised-labour>.

Labour would take control of privately run prisons if their managers failed to meet a six-month "buck up" deadline, the shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, has said in the wake of a damning report on a flagship jail run by G4S.

Tougher contracts would be negotiated, including stiffer financial penalties, after the chief inspector of prisons reported that inmates find it easier at HMP Oakwood to get hold of illicit drugs than soap, Khan said.

He accused Chris Grayling, the justice secretary, of a "catastrophic misjudgment" after he praised the "supersized" 1,605-place Oakwood in Staffordshire as his favourite prison.

Nick Hardwick, the chief inspector of prisons, said in October that the first official inspection report into Oakwood had shown that a retrieval plan for the prison was urgently needed. Hardwick said prison staff were inexperienced and were so unwilling to challenge inmates that they came close to colluding.

In an unannounced two-week visit to the prison in June inspectors reported that "on more than one occasion we were told by prisoners that you can get drugs here but not soap".

Khan said: "It's clearly not working at Oakwood. I can't remember a week going by without a disturbance, or a damning inspection. I've actually been and seen at first hand the problems in the prison and I came away really worried about conditions for prisoners and staff. As things stand, it's not delivering what the public should expect of the millions being paid to G4S to run it."

The shadow justice secretary described Grayling as a "repeat offender" after he responded to the report by describing Oakwood as a first-class facility. Graylingtold the Express & Star during a visit to Wolverhampton in November: "It's a newly opened prison. Every new prison has teething problems, whether public or private. I am very optimistic for Oakwood. It is a first-class facility. It is the most impressive set of facilities I have seen on a prison estate. Clearly the management of the prison need to address the problems but it's a prison that will be very good."

Khan said: "I'd have done things very differently than Chris Grayling. I'd have summoned in the management of G4S and told them they've got six months to buck up their ideas or they're out. Simple as that. If there's no improvement in six months, then I'd be prepared to take control of Oakwood prison away from G4S back into the hands of the public sector.

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"I'd do just the same for a failing public prison – give them six months to sort themselves out, and if they fail, impose new management that will sort it out. I see no difference whether the underperformance is in the public, private or voluntary sector – I'd apply the same laser zero tolerance. We shouldn't tolerate mediocrity in the running of our prisons."

Construction started on the £180m Category C prison in 2009. The contract to run it was awarded to G4S by the then justice secretary, Ken Clarke, in March 2011.

Khan said: "We can't go on with scandal after scandal, where the public's money is being squandered and the quality of what's delivered isn't up to scratch. The government is too reliant on a cosy group of big companies. The public are rightly getting fed up to the back teeth of big companies making huge profits out of the taxpayer, which smacks to them of rewards for failure.

No More Privatization of Ohio Prisons. PSM Lopez, German. "ODRC: No More Privatizing Ohio Prisons." . City Beat, 27 09 2012.

Web. 2 Nov 2014. <http://citybeat.com/cincinnati/blog-3981-odrc_no_more_privatizing_ohio_prisons.html>.

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections (ODRC) on Tuesday said it will not seek further privatization of state prisons. The announcement was made less than a week after CityBeat published an in-depth story detailing the various problems posed by privatizing prisons (“Liberty for Sale,” issue of Sept. 19).

Gary Mohr, director of ODRC, made the announcement while talking to legislative reporting service Gongwer in Columbus Tuesday.

“We're going to stay the course on those (sentencing reforms) and I think privatizing additional prisons would take away from that reform effort that we have, so I'm not anticipating privatizing any more prisons in the short term here,” he told Gongwer.

Ohio became the first state to sell one of its own prisons to a private prison company in 2011. The ACLU criticized the move for its potential conflict of interest. The organization argued that the profit goal of private prison companies, which make money by holding as many prisoners as possible, fundamentally contradicts the public policy goal of keeping inmate reentry into prisons and prison populations as low as possible.

In his comments to Gongwer, Mohr said the state will now focus on lowering recidivism, not increasing privatization: “I don't think you can go through upheaval of a system and continue to put prioritization on reform at the same time.

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CCA Profits from California Taxpayers, Hurts California AMS

Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html

The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites

Last week, Gov. Jerry Brown (D) signed a three-year deal to lease the CCA prison at $28.5 million per year. The prison is currently occupied by federal inmates and operates at well under full capacity, according to recent reports.

Along with two other private-prison deals inked by Brown in September with a different company, the GEO Group, the move punctuates a period of extraordinary growth for the private prison industry in California. Between 2008 and 2012, CCA's revenues in the state more than doubled, even as the company's growth began to slow in other states throughout the country, according to a HuffPost analysis of the company's annual financial documents.

California is a classic example of the problems with private prison systems. The state pumps millions into the CCA prison system as more and more citizens are imprisoned each year. CCA occupancy requirements encourage the California government to send more people to jail—rather than fixing the underlying problems with the United States prison system.

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Youth Service's International Fails AMS

Krikham, Chris. “Prisoners of Profit.” The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013. http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

Those held at YSI facilities across the country have frequently faced beatings, neglect, sexual abuse and unsanitary food over the past two decades, according to a HuffPost investigation that included interviews with 14 former employees and a review of thousands of pages of state audits, lawsuits, local police reports and probes by state and federal agencies. Out of more than 300 institutions surveyed, a YSI detention center in Georgia had the highest rate of youth alleging sexual assaults in the country, according to a recent report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In Florida, where private contractors have in recent years taken control of all of the state’s 3,300 youth prison beds, YSI now manages more than $100 million in contracts, about 10 percent of the system. Its facilities have generated conspicuously large numbers of claims that guards have assaulted youth, according to a HuffPost compilation of state reports. A YSI facility in Palm Beach County had the highest rate of reported sexual assaults out of 36 facilities reviewed in Florida, the Bureau of Justice Statistics report found.

The state’s sweeping privatization of its juvenile incarceration system has produced some of the worst re-offending rates in the nation. More than 40 percent of youth offenders sent to one of Florida’s juvenile prisons wind up arrested and convicted of another crime within a year of their release, according to state data. In New York state, where historically no youth offenders have been held in private institutions, 25 percent are convicted again within that timeframe.

Slattery and other Youth Services International executives declined interview requests over several months. In an emailed response to written questions, a senior vice president, Jesse Williams, asserted that the company carefully looks after its charges and delivers value to taxpayers.

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Prisons Strive to Cut Costs at Inmates' Expense AMS

Krikham, Chris. “Prisoners of Profit.” The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013. http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

Experts say the continued growth of for-profit prison operators like Youth Services International amounts to a cautionary tale about the perils of privatization: In a drive to cut costs, Florida has effectively abdicated its responsibility for some of its most troubled children, leaving them in the hands of companies focused solely on the bottom line.

“One of the problems with private corrections is that you are trying to squeeze profit margins out of an economic picture that doesn’t allow for very much,” said Bart Lubow, a leading juvenile justice expert who heads the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Juvenile Detention Alternatives Initiative. “So you either hire people for minimum wage who are afraid of the environment in which they work, or you don’t feed people properly. There are not a lot of margins.”

Florida's Private Prisons Scandal AMS

Krikham, Chris. “Prisoners of Profit.” The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013. http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

Florida logs reports of serious incidents that occur inside its juvenile prisons, but the state does not maintain a database that allows for the analysis of trends across the system. HuffPost obtained the documents through Florida’s public records law and compiled incident reports logged between 2008 and 2012. According to the data, YSI’s facilities generated a disproportionate share of reports of prison staff allegedly injuring youth offenders by using excessive force.

Although YSI oversaw only about 9 percent of the state’s juvenile jail beds during the past five years, the company was responsible for nearly 15 percent of all reported cases of excessive force and injured youths.

In 2012, 23 incidents of excessive force were reported at YSI facilities. By comparison, G4S Youth Services — the state’s largest private provider of youth prison beds — generated 21 such reports, despite overseeing nearly three times as many beds.

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Money Spent on Lobbying for Private Prisons

Prison Economics and Immigration Laws. PSM Sullivan, Laura. "Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law." . NPR, 28 Oct

2010. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law>. The law could send hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to prison in a way never done before. And it could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies responsible for housing them.

Arizona state Sen. Russell Pearce says the bill was his idea. He says it's not about prisons. It's about what's best for the country.

"Enough is enough," Pearce said in his office, sitting under a banner reading "Let Freedom Reign." "People need to focus on the cost of not enforcing our laws and securing our border. It is the Trojan horse destroying our country and a republic cannot survive as a lawless nation."

But instead of taking his idea to the Arizona statehouse floor, Pearce first took it to a hotel conference room.

It was last December at the Grand Hyatt in Washington, D.C. Inside, there was a meeting of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. Insiders call it ALEC.

It's a membership organization of state legislators and powerful corporations and associations, such as the tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., ExxonMobil and the National Rifle Association. Another member is the billion-dollar Corrections Corporation of America — the largest private prison company in the country.

And this bill was an important one for the company. According to Corrections Corporation of America reports reviewed by NPR, executives believe immigrant detention is their next big market. Last year, they wrote that they expect to bring in "a significant portion of our revenues" from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that detains illegal immigrants.

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Private Prison Spend Millions on Lobbying to Increase Prison Population. PSM Sanchez, Andrea. "Private Prisons Spend Millions On Lobbying To Put More People In

Jail." . Think Progress, 23 Jun 2011. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2011/06/23/251363/cca-geogroup-prison-industry/>.

Yesterday, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a report chronicling the political strategies of private prison companies “working to make money through harsh policies and longer sentences.” The report’s authors note that while the total number of people in prison increased less than 16 percent, the number of people held in private federal and state facilities increased by 120 and 33 percent, correspondingly. Government spending on corrections has soared since 1997 by 72 percent, up to $74 billion in 2007. And the private prison industry has raked in tremendous profits. Last year the two largest private prison companies — Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group — made over $2.9 billion in revenue.

JPI claims the private industry hasn’t merely responded to the nation’s incarceration woes, it has actively sought to create the market conditions (ie. more prisoners) necessary to expand its business.

According to JPI, the private prison industry uses three strategies to influence public policy: lobbying, direct campaign contributions, and networking. The three main companies have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates and over $6 million to state politicians. They have also spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on direct lobbying efforts. CCA has spent over $900,000 on federal lobbying and GEO spent anywhere from $120,000 to $199,992 in Florida alone during a short three-month span this year. Meanwhile, “the relationship between government officials and private prison companies has been part of the fabric of the industry from the start,” notes the report. The cofounder of CCA himself used to be the chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party.

The impact that the private prison industry has had is hard to deny. In Arizona, 30 of the 36 legislators who co-sponsored the state’s controversial immigration law that would undoubtedly put more immigrants behind bars received campaign contributions from private prison lobbyists or companies. Private prison businesses been involved in lobbying efforts related to a bill in Florida that would require privatizing all of the prisons in South Florida and have been heavily involved in appropriations bills on the federal level.

Tracy Velázquez, executive director of JPI recommends that we “take a hard look at what the cost of this influence is, both to taxpayers and to the community as a whole, in terms of the policies being lobbied for and the outcomes for people put in private prisons.”

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Private Prisons Lobby for Harsher Sentences. PSM Jacobsen, John. "Private Prisons Lobby for Harsher Sentences." . The Seattle Free Press,

16 May 2012. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <http://seattlefreepress.org/2012/05/16/private-prisons-lobby-for-harsher-sentences/>.

Over the past 15 years, the number of people held in all prisons in the United States has increased by 49.6 percent, while private prison populations have increased by 353.7 percent, according to recent federal statistics. Meanwhile, in 2010 alone, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, the two largest private prison companies, had combined revenues of $2.9 billion. According to a report released today by the Justice Policy Institute (JPI), not only have private prison companies benefitted from this increased incarceration, but they have helped fuel it. Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote Ineffective Incarceration Policies, examines how private prison companies are able to wield influence over legislators and criminal justice policy, ultimately resulting in harsher criminal justice policies and the incarceration of more people. The report notes a “triangle of influence” built on campaign contributions, lobbying and relationships with current and former elected and appointed officials. Through this strategy, private prison companies have gained access to local, state, and federal policymakers and have back-channel influence to pass legislation that puts more people behind bars, adds to private prison populations and generates tremendous profits at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.

“For-profit companies exercise their political influence to protect their market share, which in the case of corporations like GEO Group and CCA primarily means the number of people locked up behind bars,” said Tracy Velázquez, executive director of JPI. “We need to take a hard look at what the cost of this influence is, both to taxpayers and to the community as a whole, in terms of the policies being lobbied for and the outcomes for people put in private prisons. That their lobbying and political contributions is funded by taxpayers, through their profits on government contracts, makes it all the more important that people understand the role of private prisons in our political system.”

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Prison for Profit May Indicate More Time Behind Bars. PSM Small-Jordan, Dianne. "It’s a Cell Block Life: Prison for Profit May Mean More Time

Behind Bars." . Decoded Science, 06 Apr 2014. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <http://www.decodedscience.com/cell-block-life-prison-profit-may-mean-time-behind-bars/44271>.

…This group has lobbyists as well as investors on Wall Street. According to Global Research, “It is a multimillion industry with its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites and mail-order internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”

Global Research also pointed out that one reason that there were so many prisoners in the system was the private contracting of prisoners for work. Low-cost labor, with financial incentives for filled beds, gives prisons an incentive to keep people locked up. Private prisons receive a guaranteed amount of money for each prisoner, independent of what it costs to maintain each individual. The two largest prison corporations are the Correctional Corporation of America (CCA) and the GEO Group, Inc. who make billions of dollars in profit annually.

According to CNBC, there are more than 2.3 million people locked up. One out of 100 American is behind bars and the private companies make a reported 74$billion dollars a year. Contracts between the state and private prisons guarantee 80-100% occupancy. According to Julie Bowling of the Brennan Center for justice, if the state is unable to supply enough prisoners to keep 80 to 100% of the private prison beds filled for this bed guarantee then the state has to pay a fine for the empty bed. In an annual report filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the second largest private prison company, The GEO Group, Inc., stated “ The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of criminal enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices, or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to the decriminalization of drugs and controlled substances or a loosening of immigration laws could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, sentenced and incarcerated, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

Florida State University (FSU) and the Florida Department of Corrections (FDOC) conducted a study, building on various previous studies, based on four recidivism measures: subsequent arrest, felony convictions, imprisonment for new offense and technical violation. When FSU completed the study, based on the studies done at the Florida institutions, they concluded that there was some relationship between private prisons and lower recidivism rates when the inmates were enrolled in academic vocational and substance abuse programming – which could affect the outcome of the studies. There has been no empirical data to date that private prisons reduce recidivism.

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Corruption in Private Prisons AMS

Krikham, Chris. “Prisoners of Profit.” The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013. http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

Even as reports of negligence and poor treatment of inmates have piled up, his companies have kept their records clean by habitually pulling out of contracts before the government takes official action, HuffPost found.

In Florida, his companies have exploited lax state oversight while leaning on powerful allies inside the government to keep the contracts flowing. Slattery, his wife, Diane, and other executives have been prodigious political rainmakers in Florida, donating more than $400,000 to state candidates and committees over the last 15 years, according to HuffPost’s review. The recipient of the largest share of those dollars was the Florida Republican Party, which took in more than $276,000 in that time. Former Florida Senate President Mike Haridopolos, an avid supporter of prison privatization, received more than $15,000 from company executives during state and federal races.

Private Prisons Sway Lobbyists AMS

Krikham, Chris. “Prisoners of Profit.” The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013. http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

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Private prison companies use economic leverage in smaller elections. DAT “Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote

Ineffective Incarceration Policies.” justicepolicy.org. Justice Policy Institute. June 2011. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/gaming_the_system.pdf

The Justice Policy Center is an independent research institute based in Montreal. Private prison companies, through their Political Action Committees (PACs) and contributions by their employees, give millions of dollars to politicians at both the state and federal level.58 Since 2000, the three largest private prison companies—CCA, GEO and Cornell Companiesi—have contributed $835,514 to federal candidates, including senators and members of the House of Representatives.59 Giving to statelevel politicians during the last five election cycles was much higher: $6,092,331.60 This likely reflects two factors: that states collectively continue to be their largest client, and that at the federal level, elected officials may be less involved in the decisions to award private prison contracts than non-elected bureaucrats. Contributions to state politicians have been increasing over the past five major election cycles. For instance, 2010 marked the highest recorded year of state political giving by these private prison companies since 2000.

The issue is twofold: prison corporations are big spenders, and the spending goes to generally less-funded state elections. As such, companies like CCA are able to leverage their government-funded profits to help elect favorable officials.

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Private Prisons Hurt Non-Citizens Prisons designed to hold non-citizens (CARs) are sub-par. ASF

Flatow, Nicole. Deputy Editor of ThinkProgress Justice."How These Prisons For Non-Citizens Compound All The Problems With American Incarceration". ThinkProgress. June 11, 2014. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/06/11/3447208/how-these-prisons-for-noncitizens-compound-all-the-problems-with-us-incarceration/

At the intersection of concerns over U.S. overcriminalization, private prisons, and immigration policy are U.S. prisons made for non-citizens, where inmates bear the brunt of all three. In so-called “Criminal Alien Requirement” prisons, some 25,000 non-citizens are held in federal custody under conditions that are subject to even less oversight than those in other federal prisons, oftentimes for nothing other than immigration offenses, and with the draw of profit incentivizing the private firms that house them to pack in more individuals with less care and investment.

Like inmates in many U.S. facilities facing prison overcrowding, these inmates face medical neglect, abuse, and frequent placement in solitary confinement simply because there is nowhere else to put them. Among the findings of an American Civil Liberties Union report out this week, inmates were left to die without medical care, crammed into sleeping quarters in hallways, and put into solitary confinement for complaining about these conditions or failing to speak “English in America.” In fact, the Bureau of Prisons contract with Corrections Corporation of America mandates that ten percent of CCA’s “contract beds” be used for isolation, creating one of several perverse incentives on confinement. Another is the profit motive of private corporations, who have seen their bottom line skyrocket through investment in immigration detention.

There exist private prisons specifically designed for illegal immigrants. These facilities are underlined with racist behavior and policies that can be considered cruel and unusual. The private contracts even mandate that 10% of the beds be used for isolation treatments, further burdening the over-crowded system and hurting the mental condition of the isolated prisoners.

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Public prisons have stricter regulation, leading to worse conditions in CARs. ASF Flatow, Nicole. Deputy Editor of ThinkProgress Justice."How These Prisons For Non-

Citizens Compound All The Problems With American Incarceration". ThinkProgress. June 11, 2014. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/06/11/3447208/how-these-prisons-for-noncitizens-compound-all-the-problems-with-us-incarceration/

Set against the incentives of these private firms is lax BOP oversight and requirements as compared to that imposed on public, non-immigration facilities. Because individuals in “CAR” prisons are “not expected to return to U.S. communities,” the facilities are not required to provide vocational treatment, drug treatment, or other fundamental programs that are associated with better outcomes when individuals are released. Many who could be eligible for earlier release were they able to participate in a drug treatment program are instead left to languish behind bars, at the cost of the taxpayer. Others describe the hopelessness that accompanies total lack of rehabilitation. “I had the idea: I have three years. I will do something so I have something to make of myself. . . . But there’s nothing to do here,” one inmate said.

Two important notes come from this piece of evidence. First is that the regulations for immigration facilities are poorer than that of public non-immigration facilities, leading to worse conditions in the private prison. Second, the immigrants in the private system at CARs are not given an equal opportunity at freedom and justice as are their counterparts in the public system, as they have no options to access parole or early release, such as drug rehabilitation programs.

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The BOP renews sup-par contracts. ASF Flatow, Nicole. Deputy Editor of ThinkProgress Justice."How These Prisons For Non-

Citizens Compound All The Problems With American Incarceration". ThinkProgress. June 11, 2014. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/06/11/3447208/how-these-prisons-for-noncitizens-compound-all-the-problems-with-us-incarceration/

These facilities are also not subject to the requirement at other prisons that they place inmates close to their families, even though many have families in the United States. With many of these facilities clustered in Texas, regular visitation by those with families is out of the question, even though such visits are another factor associated with positive post- prison outcomes, and even though kids are often deprived of access to a parent.

Even the Bureau of Prisons, which oversees the facilities, acknowledged in a contract with GEO Group, “Contractor is unable to successfully achieve their own plans of action to correct deficient areas” and “Lack of healthcare has greatly impacted inmate health and wellbeing.” BOP nonetheless renewed its contracts with these firms, concluding that maintaining the contracts would require less work and disruption, and maintain the agency’s “credibility as a solid customer” with the private prison agency.

Here we see the BOP valuing corporate rights over human rights. They explicitly state their reputation as a customer and their level of efficiency outweighs the basic living conditions of noncitizens being detained in CARs.

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Undertrained personnel are a liability in private detention centers. DAT Adler School Institute on Public Safety and Social Justice; Illinois Coalition for

Immigrant and Refugee Rights. (2011). White Paper on Broken Logic: The Over-Reliance on Incarceration in the United States, Chicago, IL: Author. http://www.adler.edu/resources/content/4/1/documents/Adler_White-Paper_IPSSJ_ICIRR_Economics-of-Private-Detention_FINAL.pdf

The Adler School of Professional Psychology is a post-baccalaureate, non-profit institution of higher education and independent graduate school of psychology.

Private prisons generally try to increase profits by controlling costs--in particular labor costs, which generally make up two-thirds of operational expenses. Private operators hold down salaries, benefits, and training. The average private prison employee receives 58 fewer hours of training than the average public prison worker. This scanting on personnel costs leads to higher turnover and lower levels of experience among staff, leading to many documented instances of brutality against detainees, drug smuggling by guards, sexual assault and coercion, and other abuse. In one extreme instance, a Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) facility in Idaho is accused of running a “gladiator school” among its inmates. CCA has faced multiple lawsuits over mistreatment of detainees at several immigration facilities in Texas.

Private facilities also have a horrible track record regarding medical care. Private operators skimp on medical treatment, often failing to respond to conditions including cancer and heart problems that prove fatal when not addressed. Immigration facilities run by CCA in Arizona, New Jersey, and Colorado have all seen detainees die as a result of inadequate medical care.

The profit-motivated actions of corporations are allowed to run amok due to the legal murkiness of dealing with detainees, along with the increased emphasis on cost savings for the treatment of non-citizens.

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Private Prisons Block Need for Systematic Reform

Private Prisons Block Need for Systematic Change AMS Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's

Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

Specter, the Prison Law Office director, argues that private prison deals exacerbate the problem. "Instead of facing the sort of politically tougher questions of how to revise the sentencing structure, the state uses the private prisons as the release valve," he said.

In recent years, states around the country have dramatically lowered the size of their prison populations, in part by reforming their sentencing laws. In Texas and other states, entire prisons have closed in the wake of these changes.

The United States prison system needs reform. Pro teams do not argue that the prison system is perfect. However, private prisons are not the solution—these prisons only exacerbate overcrowding and push the real issues under the table.

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The financial costs of continued mass incarceration. DAT “Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote

Ineffective Incarceration Policies.” justicepolicy.org. Justice Policy Institute. June 2011. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/gaming_the_system.pdf

The Justice Policy Center is an independent research institute based in Montreal. Policies that promote incarceration over more effective public safety strategies cost more in both the short and long term. The average cost to incarcerate one person for one day in the U.S. is $78.88.119 Thus, policies that increase the length of time that someone is incarcerated can have a significant fiscal impact. For example, one study found that 10 years after California enacted its Three Strikes law, the people added to the prison system under the law between March 1994 and September 2003 would cost taxpayers an additional $10.5 billion in prison and jail expenditures, including $6.2 billion in added costs attributed to longer prison terms for nonviolent offenses.120

Most people agree that they would pay anything to be safe, but incarceration does not satisfy this requirement. Some of the most prominent criminologists in the country have found that incarceration has minimal, if any impact on public safety.121 And serving time in prison has been shown to increase the risk of future offending, not decrease it.122 Additionally, the trend of increasing prison sentences does not improve public safety. Data from the Department of Justice shows little difference in recidivism rates for people who spend short sentences in prison compared to those who are in prison longer.123

Research shows that investing in services and programs that keep people out of the justice system is more effective at improving public safety and promoting community well-being than investing in law enforcement.124 Despite evidence that investing in education and other positive social institutions can improve public safety and save states money, policymakers continue to invest in incarceration.125 Over the past 38 years corrections’ spending has increased to three times that of state spending on education.126 This misallocation of funding has the potential for a significant negative impact on the future of our youth and communities.

The idea that private prisons reduce the financial costs of incarceration is self-defeating. This implies that the goal is maximum incarceration at minimum cost.

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The opportunity cost of investing in private prisons. DAT “Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote

Ineffective Incarceration Policies.” justicepolicy.org. Justice Policy Institute. June 2011. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/gaming_the_system.pdf

The Justice Policy Center is an independent research institute based in Montreal. States and the federal government should look for real solutions to the problem of growing jail and prison populations. A number of states are already utilizing innovative strategies for reducing the number of people behind bars in their state. Reducing the number of people entering the justice system, and the amount of time that they spend there, can lower prison populations, making private, for-profit prisons unnecessary, and improving public safety and the lives of individuals.

Invest in front-end treatment and services in the community, whether private or public. Research shows that education, employment, drug treatment, health care, and the availability of affordable housing coincide with better outcomes for all people, whether involved in the criminal justice system or not. Jurisdictions that spend more money on these services are likely to experience lower crime rates and lower incarceration rates.167 An increase in spending on education, employment and other services not only would improve public safety, but also would enhance and enrich communities and individual life outcomes.

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Private prison quotas run counter to federal incarceration-easing initiatives. DAT Mock, Brentin. “Private Prisons Lock in Profits with Lockup Quotas.”

southernstudies.org. Institute for Southern Studies. 20 September 2013. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.southernstudies.org/2013/09/private-prisons-lock-in-profits-with-lockup-quotas.html

The Institute for Southern Studies is a public interest media, research, and education center.

The use of prison bed occupancy guarantee clauses comes as incarceration rates are falling in state prisons nationwide. The Pew Charitable Trusts research center reported last month that the nation's prison population has declined for three consecutive years, with both the imprisonment rate and the number of inmates dropping over 2 percent for state facilities.

Meanwhile, at the federal level, the Obama administration has been looking for ways to reduce incarceration, in part because of its devastating effects on black and Latino communities. Attorney General Eric Holder has dialed back federal mandatory sentencing minimums for nonviolent drug offenders in recent months and has been encouraging state officials to do the same.

Companies like CCA will typically lobby for contractual prisoner population obligations as a method of securing return on investment—a sensible move from a private profit standpoint. This, however, creates a gulf between the “supply” of beds and the demand for them (e.g. the number of people being incarcerated). This leaves governments with the conundrum of either breaking contracts or artificially increasing arrest rates, neither of which is a net beneficial outcome for the parties involved.

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States are already implementing cost-effective measures. DAT “Too Many laws, Too Many Prisoners.” The Economist. 22 July 2010. Accessed

11/10/2014. Web. http://www.economist.com/node/16636027 Since the recession threw their budgets into turmoil, many states have decided to imprison fewer people, largely to save money. Mississippi has reduced the proportion of their sentences that non-violent offenders are required to serve from 85% to 25%. Texas is making greater use of non-custodial penalties. New York has repealed most mandatory minimum terms for drug offences. In all, the number of prisoners in state lock-ups fell by 0.3% in 2009, the first fall since 1972. But the total number of Americans behind bars still rose slightly, because the number of federal prisoners climbed by 3.4%.

A less punitive system could work better, argues Mark Kleiman of the University of California, Los Angeles. Swift and certain penalties deter more than harsh ones. Money spent on prisons cannot be spent on more cost-effective methods of crime-prevention, such as better policing, drug treatment or probation. The pain that punishment inflicts on criminals themselves, on their families and on their communities should also be taken into account.

“Just by making effective use of things we already know how to do, we could reasonably expect to have half as much crime and half as many people behind bars ten years from now,” says Mr Kleiman. “There are a thousand excuses for failing to make that effort, but not one good reason.”

Because private prison contracts often work mandatory prison quotas into their text, the opportunity cost of contracting private prisons is massive. It has deleterious consequences for legislative attempts to curb harsh sentencing practices (because this runs counter to private prison quotas), while also diverting money from truly helpful initiatives for the criminal justice system.

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Investing in more prisons is counterproductive, legally and economically. DAT Adler School Institute on Public Safety and Social Justice; Illinois Coalition for

Immigrant and Refugee Rights. (2011). White Paper on Broken Logic: The Over-Reliance on Incarceration in the United States, Chicago, IL: Author. http://www.adler.edu/resources/content/4/1/documents/Adler_White-Paper_IPSSJ_ICIRR_Prison-Communities_FINAL.pdf

The Adler School of Professional Psychology is a post-baccalaureate, non-profit institution of higher education and independent graduate school of psychology.

Rural communities have an economic incentive to keep their prisons full, and those prisoners have to come from somewhere. In large part, many do come from a specific place: low-income African American urban communities. The explosion of incarceration has disproportionately affected African Americans, due mostly to war on drugs policies that are enforced primarily in poor urban areas of color. Black people account for 39% of the total prison population but just 14% of the U.S. population.4 A disproportionate percentage of U.S. prisoners come from a very small number of neighborhoods in some of the country’s largest cities.5 These poor urban areas have suffered from years of disinvestment, poverty, failing schools, and a general lack of resources. Yet, ironically, there are large investments being made to incarcerate people from these neighborhoods. Scholars have noted the existence of “million dollar blocks” in places like New York City and New Orleans, where large percentages of the population have been incarcerated. On some city blocks, upwards of $1 million in tax-payer funds are being spent to imprison residents. Although this represents quite an investment in poor urban areas, none of this money actually goes into the area; it goes to prisons in largely rural areas.6 With all that money being spent on incarceration in urban neighborhoods, one might be tempted to think that perhaps areas are being improved by weeding out the criminal elements. Unfortunately, evidence has shown the opposite is true. Prisoners eventually return to their home communities, meaning that the same areas sending the most people away are also receiving the most re-entrants. Formerly incarcerated individuals return to places with few resources, high poverty, and high unemployment. The revolving door has been shown to disrupt social networks and create more community disorder. Incarceration itself independently produces many of the social ills that are precursors to crime and incarceration in the first place. This includes family instability, stress, violence, trauma, high drop-out rates, unemployment, drug and alcohol abuse, and so forth. Many urban black communities are stuck in a cycle of incarceration, re-entry, and re-incarceration, where the only investments being made are for more incarceration.7 The logic seems to be: invest money up front to lock people up and you will reap the rewards of…spending more money to lock the same people up again later. Pro teams must continue linking individual cards like this one back to a central premise. For instance, the expansion and welfare of private prisons is contingent on the continued “revolving door” of urban crime and poverty.

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Horrifying Conditions in Private Prisons James Slattery's Corrupt Private System AMS

Krikham, Chris. “Prisoners of Profit.” The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013. http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

In 2001, an 18-year-old committed to a Texas boot camp operated by one of Slattery’s previous companies, Correctional Services Corp., came down with pneumonia and pleaded to see a doctor as he struggled to breathe. Guards accused the teen of faking it and forced him to do pushups in his own vomit, according to Texas law enforcement reports. After nine days of medical neglect, he died.

That same year, auditors in Maryland found that staff at one of Slattery’s juvenile facilities coaxed inmates to fight on Saturday mornings as a way to settle disputes from earlier in the week. In recent years, the company has failed to report riots, assaults and claims of sexual abuse at its juvenile prisons in Florida, according to a review of state records and accounts from former employees and inmates.

Despite that history, Slattery’s current company, Youth Services International, has retained and even expanded its contracts to operate juvenile prisons in several states. The company has capitalized on budgetary strains across the country as governments embrace privatization in pursuit of cost savings. Nearly 40 percent of the nation’s juvenile delinquents are today committed to private facilities, according to the most recent federal data from 2011, up from about 33 percent twelve years earlier.

Youth Services International, a private prison system for juveniles, contains horrifying examples of prisoner maltreatment. Pro teams can use this evidence to paint a picture of the problems with private prison systems today.

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Private Prisons Have Worse Conditions AMS Simmons, Matt. “Punishment & Profits: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Private Prisons.”

August 7, 2013. Oklahoma Policy Institute. http://okpolicy.org/punishment-profits-a-cost-benefit-analysis-of-private-prisons The Oklahoma Policy Institute (OK Policy) is a nonpartisan think tank located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Institute researches political and economic issues for the state of Oklahoma.

Prisoners certainly do not benefit from incarceration in private prisons. Private prisons have been shown to have more incidents of misconduct than public prisons. A private prison in Idaho run by CCA (which operates 3 out of 4 active private prisons in Oklahoma) established a reputation as a“gladiator school” because prison guards encouraged violence between inmates; one savage beating that took place while guards watched put the victim in a coma.

One does not have to look outside our own state borders to find similar evidence of poor and negligent management by private prison corporations. A riot at the North Fork Correctional Facilityin 2011 resulted in forty-six injuries, while a four hour long “disturbance” at the Cimarron Correctional Facility this year only ended after corrections officers used bean bag rounds and pepper balls to subdue the rioters.

Private Prisons Hurt Youth AMS

Krikham, Chris. “Prisoners of Profit.” The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013. http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

Over the past two decades, more than 40,000 boys and girls in 16 states have gone through one of Slattery’s prisons, boot camps or detention centers, according to a Huffington Post analysis of juvenile facility data.

The private prison industry has long fueled its growth on the proposition that it is a boon to taxpayers, delivering better outcomes at lower costs than state facilities. But significant evidence undermines that argument: the tendency of young people to return to crime once they get out, for example, and long-term contracts that can leave states obligated to fill prison beds. The harsh conditions confronting youth inside YSI’s facilities, moreover, show the serious problems that can arise when government hands over social services to private contractors and essentially walks away.

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Scandals in Youth Prisons AMS

Krikham, Chris. “Prisoners of Profit.” The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013. http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

According to HuffPost’s review of police reports, internal Department of Juvenile Justice investigations and youth grievance forms obtained through public records requests, Florida facilities run by Youth Services International continue to be plagued by violence, high turnover and unprofessional staff.

Youth counselors for YSI — those who work directly with juvenile inmates — earn about $10.50 an hour, or just under $22,000 per year, according to contract proposals from 2010. Because of frequent turnover and absences among staff, double shifts are common, adding additional stress to the job, former employees said.

Dockery v. Epps Case Documents Poor Conditions of Private Prison AMS

“Dockery vs. Epps.” September 25, 2014. American Civil Liberties Union. https://www.aclu.org/prisoners-rights/dockery-v-epps Founded in 1920, the American Civil Liberties Union is a nonpartisan non-profit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country.

The ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Law Offices of Elizabeth Alexander filed a petition for class certification and expert reports for a federal lawsuit on behalf of prisoners at the East Mississippi Correctional Facility (EMCF). The lawsuit, which was filed in May 2013, describes the for-profit prison as hyper-violent, grotesquely filthy and dangerous. EMCF is operated "in a perpetual state of crisis" where prisoners are at "grave risk of death and loss of limbs." The facility, located in Meridian, Mississippi, is supposed to provide intensive treatment to the state's prisoners with serious psychiatric disabilities, many of whom are locked down in long-term solitary confinement.

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Human Rights Violations Private contractors’ operational paradigms push human rights under the rug. DAT

Robbins, Ira P. “Privatization of Corrections: A Violation of U.S. Domestic Law, International Human RIghts, and Good Sense.” Washington College of Law. American University. n.d. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/13/3robbins.pdf

Ira P. Robbins is the Barnard T. Welsh Scholar and Professor of Law and Justice at the American University Washington College of Law. Prison privatization differs from private industries in prisons, which seek to turn prisoners into productive members of society by having them work at a decent wage and produce products or perform services that can be sold in the marketplace.2 Privatization is also different from the situation in which some of the services of a facility — such as medical, food, educational, or vocational services — are operated by private industry. Rather, the idea is to have the government contract with a private company to operate — and sometimes own — the total institution. The practice quickly spread abroad, with countries such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom privatizing parts of their correctional systems.

Sir Nigel Rodley, former United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, explains that “the profit motive of privately operated prisons … has fostered a situation in which the rights and needs of prisoners and the direct responsibility of states for the treatment of those they deprive of freedom are diminished in the name of greater efficiency.”3 Where the safe and fair treatment of prisoners is compromised by private corporate goals, national law and international human rights instruments should protect them. In Professor Cosmo Graham’s words, there is an attendant tension “between a human rights approach and an approach to policy delivery that emphasizes the virtues of market based delivery mechanisms.”4 This article argues that the concept of privatization of corrections is bad policy, is based on a tenuous legal foundation, and has profound moral implications.

The issue isn’t necessarily of specific impacts, but of the imperative to act in a manner contradictory to the preservation and defense of basic human rights.

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Private prisons skirt basic services for their inmates. DAT Robbins, Ira P. “Privatization of Corrections: A Violation of U.S. Domestic Law,

International Human RIghts, and Good Sense.” Washington College of Law. American University. n.d. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/13/3robbins.pdf

Ira P. Robbins is the Barnard T. Welsh Scholar and Professor of Law and Justice at the American University Washington College of Law. A private jail in Texas was investigated for diverting $700,000 from a drug-treatment program, while inmates with substance-abuse problems received no treatment whatsoever. In Minnesota a private facility neglected to establish a substance abuse treatment program even though the contract required it.51 The nearby public prison, by contrast, provided its chemically dependent inmates with full-day therapeutic sessions five times a week.52

Where services exist, they may be of poor quality. Anne Owens, the chief inspector of prisons for England and Wales, explained that “private sector contracts have tended to focus on the quantity rather than the quality” of programs, thus work available for prisoners at a particular prison was low skilled and not accredited. 53 Briefing notes following an inspection of a prison in Australia described the rehabilitation programs as “chaotic.”54

Job training programs are singled out in the Basic Principles and the Standard Minimum Rules, which require, respectively, that “[c]onditions shall be created enabling prisoners to undertake meaningful remunerated employment which will facilitate their reintegration into the country’s labour market and permit them to contribute to their own financial support and to that of their families,” and that “[v]ocational training in useful trades shall be provided for prisoners able to profit thereby and especially for young prisoners.”55 Where job training programs exist, however, they often do not do much to prepare inmates for the labor market. In a youth facility in Louisiana, for instance, a job training class consisted entirely of showing tool handling safety videos. When the participants finished watching the videos, they simply watched them again.56

Private prisons, moreso than public ones, wind up crossing the line between not providing ancillary services and basic essential ones. This is a distinction that should be made apparent in round.

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Private prison operations are contingent on limiting freedom. DAT Gopnik, Adam. “The Caging of America.” The New Yorker. 30 January 2012. Accessed

10/11/2014. Web. http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/the-caging-of-america?currentPage=all

Northern impersonality and Southern revenge converge on a common American theme: a growing number of American prisons are now contracted out as for-profit businesses to for-profit companies. The companies are paid by the state, and their profit depends on spending as little as possible on the prisoners and the prisons. It’s hard to imagine any greater disconnect between public good and private profit: the interest of private prisons lies not in the obvious social good of having the minimum necessary number of inmates but in having as many as possible, housed as cheaply as possible. No more chilling document exists in recent American life than the 2005 annual report of the biggest of these firms, the Corrections Corporation of America. Here the company (which spends millions lobbying legislators) is obliged to caution its investors about the risk that somehow, somewhere, someone might turn off the spigot of convicted men:

Our growth is generally dependent upon our ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities. . . . The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.

Brecht could hardly have imagined such a document: a capitalist enterprise that feeds on the misery of man trying as hard as it can to be sure that nothing is done to decrease that misery.

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Basic medical care in private prisons isn’t legally guaranteed. DAT Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke

University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. Or consider the Eighth Amendment standard for prisoners alleging inadequate medical care. In Estelle v. Gamble,170 the Supreme Court held that for medical neglect of prisoners to rise to the level of an Eighth Amendment violation, prison officials must be shown to have acted with “deliberate indifference to serious medical needs.”171 To satisfy this standard, prisoners must show that prison officials actually knew of the health risk and failed to take reasonable steps to address the problem.172 It is not enough for the inmate to have told an official of pain or other physical distress; he or she must also show that the official actually “dr[e]w the inference” from these facts of “an excessive risk to inmate health or safety.”173 Even under ordinary circumstances, it can be difficult for prisoners to make this showing. Add the profit motive to the picture, and the possibility of making out a claim of Eighth Amendment medical neglect becomes even more difficult. Prison operators wishing to save money on medical care might, for example, create a deliberately unwieldy process for prisoners wishing medical attention, as has apparently been the strategy of Correctional Medical Services (CMS), a for-profit prison medical services company operating in prisons and jails in twentyseven states.174 They might also hire medical staff of questionable competence, increasing the likelihood that conditions will go undiagnosed.175 Or they might institute treatment protocols of questionable efficacy that cost less than medically indicated methods. This last approach in particular might allow a defense that “reasonable” steps were taken even if they were ultimately ineffective.

There’s a gulf between the legal standard for medical care and a basic human standard. Private prisoners with medical needs can live in this gulf, creating excess misery.

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Con Evidence

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Private Prisons Don’t Provide Worse Services Recidivism data has yet to link private management with increased relapses. DAT

Volokh, Alexander. “Prison Accountability and Performance Measures.” Social Sciences Research Network. Emory Law Journal, Vol. 63. 339-416. 4 October 2013. Accessed 4 November 2014. Web. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2336155

Alexander Volokh is Associate Professor at Emory Law School. A more recent study, by Andrew Spivak and Susan Sharp, reported that private prisons were (statistically) significantly worse in six out of eight models tested.115 But the authors noted that some skepticism was in order before concluding that public prisons necessarily did better on recidivism.116 Populations aren’t randomly assigned to public and private prisons: that private prisons engage in “cream-skimming” is a persistent complaint.117 Recall the case in Arizona, where the Department of Corrections made “an effort to refrain from assigning prisoners to [the private Marana Community Correctional Facility] if they [had] serious or chronic medical problems, serious psychiatric problems, or [were] deemed to be unlikely to benefit from the substance abuse program that [was] provided at the facility.”118

But the phenomenon can also run the other way. One of the authors of the recidivism study, Andrew Spivak, writes that while he was “a case manager at a medium security public prison in Oklahoma in 1998, he noted an inclination for case management staff (himself included) to use transfer requests to private prisons as a method for removing more troublesome inmates from case loads.”119 Moreover, recidivism data is itself often flawed.120 Recidivism has to be not only proved (which requires good databases) but also defined.121 Recidivism isn’t self-defining—it could include arrest; reconviction; incarceration; or parole violation, suspension, or revocation; and it could give different weights to different offenses depending on their seriousness.122 Which definition one uses makes a difference in one’s conclusions about correctional effectiveness,123 as well as affecting the scope of innovation.124 The choice of how long to monitor obviously matters as well: “[m]ost severe offences occur in the second and third year after release.”125 Recidivism measures might also vary because of variations in, say, enforcement of parole conditions, independent of the true recidivism of the underlying population.126

Previous to this section, the article brought up several other high-profile recidivism studies from previous years. The conclusion across the board is the same: the data and methodologies used haven’t been consistent enough to warrant a final conclusion either way. The Spivak study is one Con debaters should be familiar with, as it is likely to be a popular card with Pro teams.

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Research is unlikely to prove private prisons empirically worse. DAT Wright, Kevin. “Strange Bedfellows? Reaffirming Rehabilitation and Prison

Privatization.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 49:74-90. 20`0. Accessed 4 November 2014. Web. https://www.academia.edu/640575/Strange_Bedfellows_Private_Prisons_and_Reaffirming_Rehabilitation

Kevin A. Wright is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.

Despite this call for innovation and a search for alternatives to existing policy, much of the published research is instead concerned with the cost and quality of private prisons. Put differently, the existing research on private prisons evaluates whether they can be successful as replacements for similar styles of public prisons. A number of methodological concerns have limited the ability of cost and=or quality research to provide meaningful conclusions on the contributions of private prisons. First, studies comparing private and public prisons often use a case study method that limits the generalizability of findings and the ability to make assertions about statistically significant differences across prisons (Perrone & Pratt, 2003). Second, studies often use different indicators of the dependent variables. Several different methods of measuring quality of confinement are available (Armstrong & MacKenzie, 2003; DiIulio, 1987; Logan, 1992), and cost assessments frequently leave out important institutional characteristics that could be expected to affect monetary numbers (Pratt & Maahs, 1999; also see the discussion by Geis, Mobley, & Shichor, 1999). Finally, existing studies often fail to control for relevant variables such as security level of prison and age of the facility (Perrone & Pratt, 2003).

Given the above methodological hazards, it is not surprising to see few definitive conclusions reached about the performance of private prisons—especially in comparison to that of public prisons. It is unlikely, however, that any research would produce meaningful results even if these deficiencies were accounted for. The simple fact is that prisons, both private and public, vary enormously when it comes to performance and quality (Bottomley & James, 1997; Camp, Gaes, & Saylor, 2002; Logan, 1990; Lukemeyer & McCorkle, 2006). As a way of moving beyond the quarrels over the merits of private prison performance, it is necessary for academics and practitioners to take the next step and decide how the correctional system can benefit from the existence of private prisons.

Essentially, any research purporting to make direct comparisons will either have errors or alternate methodologies challenging it. This prevents both teams from lining up empirical factors side by side for comparison purposes. More importantly for Con teams, this challenges a seeming preponderance of evidence for Pro teams indicating that private prisons are generally less effective at providing services, training staff, discouraging recidivism, etc.

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The Case for Private Prisons by CCA Employee. PSM Owen, Steve. "The Case For Private Prisons." . Politico Magazine , 28 Feb 2014. Web. 2

Nov 2014. <http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/02/the-real-story-about-private-prisons-104098.html

Recent opinion piece in POLITICO MAGAZINE about private prisons and our company, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), was a rehash of stale arguments that failed to provide a balanced look at the important role we play in addressing the many corrections challenges our nation faces.

In reality, our company is helping federal, state and local governments find solutions to overcrowded facilities, skyrocketing taxpayer costs and inmates struggling to break the cycle of crime. Our company believes we have an opportunity and a responsibility to help inmates develop the skills and values they need to be successful when they are released from prison. We are a team of 16,000 correctional officers, chaplains, teachers, nurses and counselors providing high-quality corrections services at a cost savings for taxpayers.

The opinion writer opens his piece with ill-informed commentary about CCA’s relationship with California. In fact, there is perhaps no better example of the important role we can play in addressing corrections challenges. The difficulties the state has faced with overcrowded facilities are well documented, and for more than seven years, CCA has provided an important relief valve to help them manage their inmate population. Our facilities and professional staff have alleviated unsafe conditions and created opportunities for offenders to access a wide range of programs that prepare them to re-enter their communities once their time is served. The most recent iteration of our partnership is an innovative agreement that allows California to lease needed space from our company and staff the facility with public employees.

Additionally, the tools we are providing to help manage this difficult situation are being delivered at a significant cost savings. Overall, economists from Temple University, in an independent study receiving a partial grant from our industry, analyzed state government data and found companies like ours save 12 percent to 58 percent in long-term taxpayer costs.

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Private Prisons are Cost Effective. PSM Tabarrok , Alexander. "Private Prisons Have Public Benefits ." . The Independent

institute, 24 Oct. 2004. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1411>.

If California prisons were unusually effective, the high cost might be acceptable. But with 300,000 prisoners packed into a system designed for only 170,000, it’s a challenge simply to warehouse the prisoners, let alone provide effective programs for rehabilitation. Schwarzenegger has said that prison reform is a priority. If so, he ought to privatize prisons both to lower costs and to improve efforts at rehabilitation.

More than two decades of experience with private prisons in the United States, Great Britain, Australia and elsewhere attest to the fact that private prisons can be built and operated at lower cost than public prisons.

Cost savings of 15 to 25 percent on construction and 10 to 15 percent on management are common. These are modest but significant cost savings in a $5.7 billion state system that continues to grow more expensive every year.

Private prisons not only have lower costs than public prisons: by introducing competition they encourage public prisons to also innovate and lower costs.

States with a greater share of prisoners in private prisons have lower costs of housing public prisoners. Perhaps more tellingly, from 1999 through 2001, states without any private prisons saw per-prisoner costs increase by 18.9 percent, but in states where the public prisons competed with private prisons, cost increases were much lower, only 8.1 percent.

The bad rap on private prisons has always been that cost-savings would come at the expense of quality. In California today this hardly passes the laugh test as federal Judge Thelton Henderson considers placing California’s system in receivership because of numerous problems, including the protection of corrupt prison officers and the lack of proper investigation of prisoner abuse.

Careful studies by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice and others indicate that if anything, private prisons are of higher quality than public prisons.

In fact, although prison privatization in the United States has been driven by cost savings, in Britain the driving motivation was higher quality, more humane prisons.

After studying the issue, the director general of Her Majesty’s Prison Services concluded that the private prisons “are the most progressive in the country at controlling bullying, health care, and suicide prevention.”

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Private Prisons are More Cost-Efficiently Run. PSM Elgot, Jessica. "Private Prisons More Efficient, Stop Re-Offending Better Than Public-

Run Jails, Reform Report Claims." . Huffington Post, 21 Feb 2013. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/02/20/private-prisons-jails-public-reform_n_2725164.html>.

Private prisons are more efficient and better at managing re-offending than public prisons, and jails should be put on the open market by the government, a radical new report has suggested.

Right-wing think tank Reform called for the Government to abolish limitations on private companies, but the Labour party and trade unions dismissed the report, with one union saying an entirely privatised system would cause "utter chaos."

Private companies had been able to manage entire prisons since 1992 but policy changed at the end of 2012, and from now the role of private companies will be limited to relatively small contracts including for rehabilitation services and facilities management.

Shadow Justice Minister Jenny Chapman told HuffPost UK: "While helpful in drawing some of the evidence together, the report's conclusion glosses over the fact that private sector prisons are less crowded, generally purpose built and aren't responsible for the highest risk offenders.

"They do some good work, but that's no more than we should expect."

The reported rated private prisons using official Ministry of justice figures.

10 out of 12 privately managed prisons have lower re-offending rates among offenders serving 12 months or more than comparable public sector prisons. 7 out of 10 privately managed prisons have lower re-offending rates among offenders serving fewer than 12 months, compared to comparable public sector prisons. All 12 private prisons are more cost-effective. But only 5 out of 12 prisons were better at providing public protection than public sector prisons.

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Private Prisons are Cheaper for Taxpayers. PSM Kavanagh, John. "Private prisons really are cheaper for taxpayers." . Arizona Central, 10

Jan 2014. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <http://www.azcentral.com/opinions/articles/20140111private-prisons-keep-money-taxpayers-pockets.html>.

The suggestion that private prisons cost taxpayers more money to operate than state-run prisons is wrong. A recent Republic news article disclosed that the “non-adjusted” cost of housing a medium-security prisoner was $64.52 in a state-run facility and only $58.82 in a private prison.

When you further adjust these figures, as the nonpartisan Joint Legislative Budget Committee did, by adding in the high expenses of constructing the prisons and paying for the costly and grossly underfunded public pensions of state corrections employees, the private prisons become an even better deal for Arizona taxpayers.

The allegation that the Legislature and governor ended cost-comparison studies because they found private prisons more expensive is not true. The studies were stopped because they were misleading. For three years, the Arizona Department of Corrections repeatedly refused to include in their public-prison formula the construction cost and pension-liability factors mentioned above.

Because no study is better than a flawed and misleading one, we stopped the charade. In addition, prison costs are not volatile, so we still felt comfortable using the more complete and accurate 2010 JLBC adjusted figures on the DOC that demonstrate private prisons are less expensive.

The criticism of the guaranteed occupancy rate of 90 percent that the state includes in private-prison contracts is also unjustified. Montini inexplicably calls this communism. However, under communism, the state seizes control of private businesses and makes them government operations.

In this case, the guarantee enables a government operation to be privatized. That’s the opposite of communism.

Besides, what rational business would spend $50 million building a private prison for the state to house its prisoners without a guarantee from the state that it would use the prison? The contracts also call for the private-prison company to deed the prison over to the state after 20 years. The state then saves even more money because it then charges the private operator rent.

The charge that private prisons lack transparency is also bogus. All state contracts with private prisons require on-site state inspectors to have full access at all times, and we station three state inspectors at every private prison to ensure that the terms of the contract are fulfilled.

Can it get any more transparent than that? Maybe Montini would like to go undercover as a prisoner? I would love to arrange that!

Regarding the tragic and avoidable escape from the private prison in Kingman, if one tragic incident provides a rationale for revamping an entire prison system, then we should have totally privatized Arizona’s prisons in 2004 after the state-run Arizona State Prison Complex-Lewis was the site of the longest hostage standoff between inmates and law-enforcement officers in U.S. history.

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But wisely, we do not make major policy decisions based upon isolated incidents. The Kingman escape was just as much a black mark against the state Corrections Department because three state inspectors were stationed on-site and the facility was run by many retired DOC wardens and deputy wardens.

Finally, the baseless and illogical allegation that the governor and Legislature are creating a profit motive to lock people up in private prisons is offensive. Making such an unfounded and uncivil accusation is also hypocritical, coming from a newspaper that repeatedly editorially bemoans the lack of civility in public discourse.

Additionally, the private-prison beds currently under construction will relieve existing overcrowding. No new inmates are being “locked up” as a result.

The editorial’s claim that “guaranteeing occupancy to private operators creates a profit motive for locking people up” is bizarre, at best. Who does that motivate? I doubt it motivates cops to arrest more people or judges to send more people to prison for longer terms. Why would they do that?

The Legislature certainly has no motivation to send more people to prison at a time when our state budget is in dire economic shape. Nor has the Legislature engaged in sweeping penalty upgrades.

Incidentally, the Legislature is not focused on filling prison beds, as the editorial implied. One legislator considered early release for some prisoners several years ago, but we rejected that after our state prosecutors revealed that Arizona prisons are not overpopulated with non-violent drug offenders. A state law already diverts them into outside treatment in lieu of incarceration. Consequently, Arizona’s prison incarceration rate is only 75 percent of the national average based upon 2010 data.

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Experts from Temple University say Prison Privatization Provide Real Benefits. PSM Blackstone, Erwin, and Simon Hakim. "Prison privatization can provide real benefits." .

Sun Sentinel, 07 May 2013. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/2013-05-07/news/fl-shcol-prisons-oped0507-20130507_1_private-prisons-public-prisons-florida-chamber>.

The use of contractor-operated prisons has been the source of considerable debate in Florida and around the country. The conversation has centered on whether they provide sufficient savings and perform adequately in other dimensions to justify their use. It's a discussion that reveals deep ideological divisions about the role of privatization, but it should, above all, be a debate rooted in data and facts.

To that end, we recently examined government corrections data across 10 states, including Florida. Although these public-private partnerships have been in existence for over 30 years and currently make up only 7 percent of the corrections market, we found that they generate 12.46 to 58.37 percent in long run savings without sacrificing the quality of services.

In addition to the savings generated by the private contractors themselves, we also found that competition yields better performance for both private and public facilities. In a study prepared for the Florida Department of Management Services, MGT of America found that the three states with the lowest per diem inmate costs included Texas, Georgia and Florida – all states with competing private prisons. The authors suggested that the use of contract prisons lowered costs of state-operated prisons, as well.

What's more, we believe the adoption of "managed competition" could foster even greater efficiency in managing existing state prisons. In this model, public workers and private contractors engage in a competitive process to provide public services. By doing so, both groups have an incentive to search for innovations and offer competitive pricing.

For the corrections sector, this practice could be particularly interesting. Several states we researched have seemingly arbitrarily established savings requirements of 5 to 10 percent for contractor-operated prisons. Florida is one of those states with mandated savings of 7 percent.

Critics of contractor-operated prisons argue they generate savings at the expense of quality. Our research, however, found no evidence of this. The private facilities generally met industry standards established by the independent American Correctional Association.

For example, the Florida Chamber of Commerce reported in 2012 that the number of inmates per staff to provide rehabilitation services was 1 per 38 in private prisons and 1 per 272 in public prisons in one region. In fact, 79.3 percent of inmates in the private correctional facilities in that region participated in such educational, vocational, and life skills training, compared to 21.3 percent in public facilities. In an assessment of costs by Florida's Office of Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, contractor-

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operated prisons provided so many more substance abuse and education programs to the comparable public prisons that costs had to be added to the public prisons for appropriate comparison.

In the end, there are many reasons for the savings generated by contractor-operated prisons. OPPAGA noted a major reason for the cost advantage of private prisons is the higher retirement expenses for public prison employees. Public correctional officers have an amount equal to about 21 percent of their salaries contributed to a retirement fund, whereas private correctional officers receive matching contributions to their 401k funds of up to 5 percent of their salaries.

Another driver of savings is the leverage and flexibility in purchasing that private companies bring to their operations. We also found that contractors benefit from flexibility in their hiring.

With many difficult decisions still on the horizon for state leaders in Florida and across the country, it is important to consider all the opportunities for more efficient delivery of high-quality public services. Contractor-operated prisons – and the introduction of the managed competition model for corrections – are a proven solution that deserves a second look.

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All Prisons Should Have Competitive Neutrality In this section, we present an advocacy for a “public option” of sorts for the management of prisons. Under such a scenario, individual facilities could flip-flop between public and private control, depending on which is more efficient at the time. This approach allows Con teams to advocate private prisons without simultaneously backing their current flawed implementation.

Adding public management to private competitions improves quality. DAT Volokh, Alexander. “Prison Accountability and Performance Measures.” Social Sciences

Research Network. Emory Law Journal, Vol. 63. 339-416. 4 October 2013. Accessed 4 November 2014. Web. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2336155

Alexander Volokh is Associate Professor at Emory Law School. How much of the system, then, should we privatize? The standard way to proceed is to choose particular prisons to privatize and put them up to bid to private firms, or to contract with private firms to use their own prisons. A more beneficial approach, though, would be to have a regime of “competitive neutrality,” where the public and private sector compete on the same projects.183 The best system may be one of mixed public and private management, where private programs “complement existing public programs rather than replace them.”184 (Health care reformers’ advocacy of the “public option” in health insurance was premised on a similar idea: that public participation can make competition more fair by disciplining private providers more than they would discipline each other.)185

For instance, Gary Mohr, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, has talked about creating a “culture of competition” in corrections.186 Ohio has pursued a combination of outsourcing and insourcing: some public prisons have been sold or their management has been contracted out to the private sector, while one private prison has been taken in-house.187 The result, according to Mohr, is that one can “ratchet[] up the best practices that can be created from both the public sector and multiple private vendors.”188

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With competitive neutrality, there is effectively no public-private divide. DAT Volokh, Alexander. “Prison Accountability and Performance Measures.” Social Sciences

Research Network. Emory Law Journal, Vol. 63. 339-416. 4 October 2013. Accessed 4 November 2014. Web. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2336155

Alexander Volokh is Associate Professor at Emory Law School. In particular, recall the problems involved in figuring out the public sector’s true costs191: the same problems can make for unfair competitions if public providers’ bids don’t include the costs they bear that are paid for by other departments, their different tax treatment, and the like.192 So it’s not surprising that such a regime is rare in the United States.193

One of the advantages of competitive neutrality is that—as in Ohio— prisons can be both outsourced and insourced at different times, depending on who wins the contract, so particular prisons can “churn” between the public and private sectors. The result, according to Richard Harding, would be a “process of positive cross-fertilization,”194 where best practices migrate from one sector to another.195 “[T]he opening up of the private sector,” Harding writes, “may heighten awareness of how sloppy public accountability has often been in the past, leading to the creation of innovative mechanisms applicable to both the private and the public sectors.”196 In fact, Harding argues, systemic improvement has been one of the best consequences of privatization,197 so narrowly focusing on which sector is better in a static sense is almost beside the point.198

Under such a system, public entities are treated essentially as bidders for contracts. The combination, then is of private efficiency and public standards.

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Private prisons are not definitively more or less cost-effective. DAT Gaes, Gerry. “Cost, Performance Studies Look at Prison Privatization.” ncjrs.gov.

National Criminal Justice Reference Service. National Institute of Justice No. 259. n.d. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/221507.pdf

Gerry Gaes is former director of research at the Bureau of Prisons. The article compares two simultaneous studies of the same 4 prisons.

Although every jurisdiction has its own economic and managerial idiosyncrasies, lessons learned from the Taft studies and the NIJ meeting may help administrators and public policy analysts avoid mistakes that could lead to higher taxpayer costs and possible dire consequences of poor performance. These lessons include:

■ Cost comparisons are deceivingly complex, and great care should be taken when comparing the costs of privately and publicly operated prisons.

■ Special care should be given to an analysis of overhead costs.

■ A uniform method of comparing publicly and privately operated prisons on the basis of audits should be developed.

■ Quantitative measures of prison performance, such as serious misconduct and drug use, should be incorporated in any analysis.

■ Future analytical methods could allow simultaneous cost and quality comparisons. Someone not familiar with the literature on prison privatization might assume that cost comparisons are accomplished without controversy or ambiguity.

One key lesson learned from the Taft privatization studies is that comparisons are not as simple as might be presumed.

Consider, for example, per diem (or daily) costs. The chart below lists the per diem costs, in dollars, as analyzed by the Abt and BOP researchers for the three publicly operated prisons and Taft, the privately operated facility, for fiscal years 1999–2002.

According to the Abt analysis, the Taft facility was cheaper to run, every year, than the three publicly operated facilities. In 2002, for example, Abt reports that the average cost of the three public facilities was 14.8 percent higher than Taft.

The BOP analysis, however, presented a much different picture. According to the BOP researchers, the average cost of the public facilities in 2002 was only 2.2 percent higher than Taft.

Without a full rundown of methodologies, conclusive arguments cannot be drawn from study results across all private prisons vs. public prisons. As such, the logical advocacy is a case-by-case decision structure, which neither precludes no institutionalizes the implementation of private prisons.

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Overhead operating costs need to be determined on a case-by-case basis. DAT Gaes, Gerry. “Cost, Performance Studies Look at Prison Privatization.” ncjrs.gov.

National Criminal Justice Reference Service. National Institute of Justice No. 259. n.d. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/221507.pdf

Gerry Gaes is former director of research at the Bureau of Prisons. The article compares two simultaneous studies of the same 4 prisons.

With respect to overhead costs, different approaches by the two research groups led to different findings. Basing its analysis on the extent to which the government actually provided resources to support the Taft operation, Abt concluded that only a bare minimum of support was provided. Therefore, the Abt analysis reported a 100-percent savings of indirect, overhead costs for Taft during the time period in the study. BOP, on the other hand, assumed that most overhead costs (planning, auditing, and other central and regional operations) could continue to be incurred by the government, even if a private company was operating the prison. Therefore, the BOP researchers applied a 10–12 percent overhead rate (the average for BOP prisons during the 1998–2002 Taft study period), calculating privatization savings of 35 percent of overhead for that 5-year period. Here again, BOP estimated the costs that the government would have incurred by central administration, and Abt presented only what was reported.

One can anticipate that underlying assumptions regarding overhead costs will have significant implications for bottom-line estimations of costs and savings. As previously discussed, the assumptions made by Abt led to a finding of much less overhead for the Taft private provider, suggesting that the government could save a great deal of money by privatizing prisons. The assumptions underlying the BOP analysis were different, however, and led to a less sanguine conclusion. Unless policymakers are mindful of these subtleties in basic assumptions, they are not likely to delve so deeply—or even be presented with this level of detail—when considering taxpayer benefits of prison privatization.

At the March 2007 NIJ meeting, Mark Cohen, Ph.D., an economist at Vanderbilt University, presented data showing that privately operated (and sometimes privately financed) prison systems have lower costs over time than publicly operated prison systems. Although this may be true as an overall average, it is not necessarily true for a particular jurisdiction. Any prison administrator or other policymaker considering privatization would be well advised to consider the specific analytic assumptions underlying the studies.

Again, with the disparities between case studies, the conclusion remains the same: private prisos are always a viable and potentially extremely cost-effective option.

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The best solution is Success-Oriented Funding. DAT Bowling, Julia. “Are Private Prisons Good Investments for States?” Brennan Center for

Justice. New York University School of Law. 15 April 2014. Web. http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/are-private-prisons-good-investments-states

The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law is a nonpartisan law and policy institute.

If private prison companies are not saving taxpayer’s money, why do states continue to send funding where it doesn’t work? Unfortunately, states cannot afford their corrections systems and are scrambling to find any solutions to mitigate the increasing costs, without the time or wherewithal to evaluate the best options.

Instead, states should allocate funding according to a "Success-Oriented Funding" (SOF) model. This simple, effective approach ties funding directly to achievement of clear goals to ensure taxpayers’ dollars are not wasted. Several states have embraced this simple concept: fund what works to better the criminal justice system, using public dollars to incentivize policies that produce results like reducing mass incarceration while reducing crime.

The data will show what works, and what doesn’t. With SOF, states are informed consumers, and can allocate funds according to what works. SOF can be implemented into private or public funding streams- whether federal, state or local or whether grants, budgets, contracts or other awards. Dollars should be tightly tied to clear, measurable metrics that drive toward the twin goals of reducing crime and reducing mass incarceration. Implementing SOF into private prison contracts would entail conditioning contracts on whether private prisons met clear goals to improve outcomes for inmates and states. For example, one effective metric should be reducing the recidivism rate of private companies' prisoners upon release. This would help shift private prisons' incentives away from staying in business for themselves towards reducing mass incarceration and saving taxpayer dollars. To truly deal with expanding corrections costs, states must stop digging deeper into taxpayers’ pockets to fund initiatives that don’t produce results.

Through a combination of mass contract restructuring and SOF, private prisons could become the ideal solutions on a case-by-case basis. This fits into a broader imperative Con teams should be asking themselves both on examination of Pro cases and in the formation of their own cases: is this funding what works? Banning private prisons doesn’t seem to fully fir this imperative.

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Private Prisons Have Untapped Innovation Potential Private prison contracts can be used to efficiently reform the American prison system. DAT

Wright, Kevin. “Strange Bedfellows? Reaffirming Rehabilitation and Prison Privatization.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 49:74-90. 20`0. Accessed 4 November 2014. Web. https://www.academia.edu/640575/Strange_Bedfellows_Private_Prisons_and_Reaffirming_Rehabilitation

Kevin A. Wright is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.

The use of contracting in the operation of private prisons creates the potential for several advantages over the existing public prison model. Contracts can provide an increased flexibility toward the management of the prison and allow for administrators to respond more quickly to short-term trends and predictions (Logan, 1990; Logan & Rausch, 1985; cf., Shichor, 1999). The contracts can also have maximum occupancy caps written into them to avoid the potential of overcrowding and resource strain (Keating, 1990). Perhaps most importantly, the use of contracts forces to be visible what otherwise may have been ignored (Logan, 1987), and, as such, contracts can specifically delineate the intended processes and outcomes that guide correctional policy. Private prisons therefore present the unique opportunity for innovation in corrections through the use of contracts that emphasize principles of effective intervention and programs that work.

Existing private prison contracts, however, have little to no performance indicators reflective of rehabilitation built in. Instead, current contracts reward number of person days of confinement supplied (Bayer & Pozen, 2005; Lukemeyer & McCorkle, 2006), a reduction in operating costs as compared to public prisons (Brister, 1996), or, at minimum, performance that is equal to that of public prisons (McDonald, Fournier, Russell-Einhorn, & Crawford, 1998). In short, the promise of innovation is stifled and private prisons instead often resemble their public prison counterparts (Thomas, 2005). Without contract stipulations related to therapeutic programming and other rehabilitation efforts there is limited reason for the private sector to focus on such issues (Armstrong & MacKenzie, 2003). Private prisons are more likely to maintain the status quo of the confinement model in an endless pursuit of profit. It is this very pursuit of profit, however, that can be used to encourage private prisons to reaffirm rehabilitation.

Private prisons, by nature, are only as effective as the requirements of their contracts. Rather than ban them, then, the logical alternative is to take advantage of private prisons’ operational efficiencies and contractually encode requirements for space (occupancy limits) and rehabilitation-minded programming.

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Private prisons are a superior setting for rehabilitation. DAT Wright, Kevin. “Strange Bedfellows? Reaffirming Rehabilitation and Prison

Privatization.” Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 49:74-90. 20`0. Accessed 4 November 2014. Web. https://www.academia.edu/640575/Strange_Bedfellows_Private_Prisons_and_Reaffirming_Rehabilitation

Kevin A. Wright is an Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State University.

First, the privatization of prisons can serve as the vehicle that the rehabilitation effort has searched for in its revivification. The importance of knowing what now works, as compared to what does not in terms of treatment, has the potential to produce results favorable to rehabilitation that would be in direct contrast to the muddled outcomes of the 1970s. At the same time, the prison still stands as the major symbol of the punitive movement. Thus, reaffirming rehabilitation within prison walls is not asking get-tough pundits to concede that prisons should be torn down and replaced with rehabilitation and treatment centers. Rehabilitation in addition to incarceration seemingly provides an option that the general public calls for in debates on how to deal with offenders. Offenders who are imprisoned may finally have the opportunity to produce meaningful change that occurs away from the pressures of society (Lipton, 1996; MacKenzie, 2000). In essence, it appears that private prisons and the rehabilitative ideal would be the perfect marriage for corrections.

Private prisons provide a slightly superior option in that they provide a layer (albeit, a nominal one) between themselves—a corporation—and the institution which does the incarceration—the state.

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Private Prisons Succeed in Private Operations. PSM LaFaive, Michael. "Private Prisons Succeed." . Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 1 Sept

1996. Web. 3 Nov 2014. <http://www.mackinac.org/546>.

The Benefits of Private Operation. When the modern correctional privatization movement started, it was widely believed that any private role would be limited to small facilities housing low-security prisoners. Today however, it is common to see contract awards for facilities with rated capacities of between 1,000 and 2,000 prisoners and for prisoners requiring medium or high security.

A growing body of research finds that contracting our corrections reduces costs, improves service quality, and yields other benefits as well. Critics who initially argued that contracting with private companies could not save money have been proved wrong. First, the fact that contracts exist implies that the contracting agencies are confident that cost savings are being realized. Many statutes even require tangible evidence of savings before contracts can be awarded. Second, private sector fringe benefits, especially retirement contributions, are less generous for private employees than for government employees. Third, the private sector does not have the costly bureaucratic requirements that government imposes on itself in employee hiring, firing, promotion and procurement of goods and services. Fourth, private prisons are designed to operate efficiently with fewer personnel in a way public prisons are not.

The precise magnitude of cost savings is difficult to determine because governmental accounting systems generally do not show the total cost of public operations. Government agencies depend in varying degree on services provided by other government agencies (accounting, data processing, legal, etc.) free of charge. For-profit firms must account for all of these costs.

Nevertheless, a good deal of evidence on efficiency improvements has been accumulated. For example:

* A 1989 study by Charles H. Logan and Bill W. McGriff found that annual operating costs of a Hamilton County (Chattanooga), Tennessee, penal farm were reduced by 5.4 percent under a CCA contract.

* A 1991 study by the Texas Sunset Advisory Commission found an estimated cost reduction of 14.4 percent for four prisons operated by CCA and Wackenhut.

* In a 1994 study, Australian economist Allan Brown found that a privately operated prison in Queensland saved 20 percent compared to a similar facility operated by government.

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Private Prisons Implement Beneficial Changes AMS Wright, K. A. (2010). Strange bedfellows? Reaffirming rehabilitation and prison

privatization. Journal of Offender Rehabilitation, 49, 74-90. Web. https://sites.google.com/site/privateprisons2/pros This report contains breakthroughs on new research showing the benefits of private prisons.

Private prisons allow for the opportunity of “what works” in corrections to be implemented into the performance evaluations (Wright, 2010).

Private prisons give the ability to test new incarceration philosophies and programs without lengthy approval procedures (Antonuccio, 2008). Then, the focus of interest is treatment instead of control. If private prisons failed to provide treatment, they are held accountable for the failed programs. Treatment and rehabilitation mindset in private prisons allows the capitalistic thinking and interests to be reformed. A rehabilitation mindset to private prisons creates a sense of legitimacy because it creates a measurable benefit (Wright, 2010).

Better Service of Private Prisons AMS

Blakely, C., & Bumphus, V. (2004). Private and public sector prisons: A comparison of select characteristics.Federal Probation, 68 (1), 27-32. Web. https://sites.google.com/site/privateprisons2/pros The Blakely/Bumphus report on private prisons compared public prisons against private prisons in 2004. The results were published in Federal Probation, an excellent source for expertise on the criminal justice system.

Private prisons rated better in providing an environment where inmates felt safe and secure from being assaulted. Private prisons operate at an average capacity of 82% compared to public prisons that operate at an average of 113% capacity (Blakely & Bumphus, 2004). (…) 28% of private prison inmates on average participated in drug treatment programs while only 14% of public prison inmates participated (Blakely & Bumphus, 2004). Private prisons have a greater enrollment and completion in academic, vocational, and substance abuse programs. (…) Inmates in private prisons are paid an average of ten cents more per day than inmates in public prisons (Blakely & Bumphus, 2004). (…) Private prisons house a greater percentage of females, which tend to be more expensive and problematic, than public prisons. As a result, the operational costs for the government are reduced by housing these females in private prisons (Blakely & Bumphus, 2004).

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Private Prisons Outscore Public AMS Logan, C. H. (1996). Public vs. private prison management: A case comparison. Criminal

Justice Review, 21(1), 62-85. Web. https://sites.google.com/site/privateprisons2/pros The Criminal Justice Review provides the nation´s most relevant research on issues relating to United States prison systems.

In a 1992 study, private prisons outscored state and federal prisons in the dimensions of conditions, security, management, order, and safety (Logan, 1992). (…) A well designed facility, greater operational and administrative flexibility, decentralized authority, higher morale, enthusiasm, and sense of ownership among line staff, greater experience and leadership among top administrators, and stricter “by the book” governance of inmates were factors that predicted a high performance of private prisons (Logan, 1992) (…) Private prison employees had a higher moral and greater job satisfaction than public prisons (Logan, 1996). (…) Management reported more flexibility in hiring, firing, evaluating, assigning, and resigning personnel (Logan, 1996). Communication and positive relationships among all levels of staff and management are important to effectively and efficiently run a prison. Staff at private prisons complained less and praised their management more compared to a public prison (Logan, 1996).

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Private prisons can still enhance savings by penetrating union-dominated markets. DAT Camp, Scott D., and Dawn M. Daggett. “Quality of Operations at Private and Public

Prisons: Using Trends in Inmate Misconduct to Compare Prisons.” bop.gov. Federal Bureau of Prisons. 27 June 2005. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.bop.gov/resources/research_projects/published_reports/pub_vs_priv/camp_daggett.pdf

Scott D. Camp is a Senior Social Science Research Analyst with the Office of Research at the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Studies comparing the costs of public and private prisons have generated controversy. Proponents of prison privatization promise cost savings of 5 to 15 percent, and some research has found that these savings have been achieved (Segal and Moore 2002). Likewise, a study financed by the Association for Private Correctional and Treatment Organizations that was not covered in the Segal and Moore (2002) review found that states with private prisons spent almost 9 percent less on corrections than states without private prisons (Blumstein and Cohen 2003). Pratt and Maahs (1999) did a meta-analysis of 33 different cost evaluations and found that private prisons were no more cost-effective than public prisons. Instead, they found other factors to be more predictive of costs, factors such as the age of the facility, the economy of scale realized, and security level.

Some researchers claim that the private sector has largely missed the opportunity to realize significant cost savings in the United States because of their inability to penetrate the markets in the Midwest and Northeast where labor costs and the presence of unions are highest (Austin and Coventry 2003). More to the point, researchers who examined the existing cost studies noted that the results of cost comparisons were specific to the prisons examined and did not generalize to prison privatization in general (General Accounting Office 1996; McDonald, Fournier, Russell-Einhorn, and Crawford 1998; Perrone and Pratt 2003). In addition, there is controversy over the methods used in the studies (Perrone and Pratt 2003; Thomas, Gookin, Keating, Whitener, Williams, Crane, and Broom 1996), especially the handling of certain costs in the comparisons, most particularly overhead costs (Nelson 1998). The most general problem is that overhead costs of the contracting agencies are not typically separated into those costs that are avoided by contracting with the private sector and those overhead costs that were incurred (unavoidable costs) regardless of whether the private sector operated the prison or not.

“Past performance does not dictate future results” holds particularly true. The more private prisons expand into union strongholds, the more labor savings are achieved. Given that a majority of prison costs are labor-related, this is an impactful economic distinction.

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Private Prisons Cut Costs Why Private Prisons Cost Less AMS

Asia Pacific Economics Blog. “Private Prisons.” April 16, 2014 http://apecsec.org/private-prisons-pros-and-cons/ Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) is a forum for 21

Pacific Rim member economies that seeks to promote free trade and economic cooperation. The source provides new information on critical United States policy issues.

The crucial amount an administration disburses to an exclusive company to manage and operate a prison could be less than when the administration were to manage the jail itself. Factors like lower costs of labor affect that greatly. Public service workers normally make more in general wages, income moreover of benefits those exclusive employees do. The salaries add up to half the expense of running a prison. Private companies still pay the same wages as administrations do, on the other hand fees for overtime, workers and healthcare recompense claims are normally lower.

Private Prison Benefits from Lower Costs and Higher Efficiency AMS Antonuccio, R. C. (2008). Prisons for profit: Do the social and political problems have a

legal solution?. Journal of Corporation Law, 33 (2), 577-593. The Journal of Corporation Law The Journal of Corporation Law (J. Corp. L. or JCL), at the University of Iowa College of Law, is the nation's oldest student-published periodical specializing in corporate law research.

Private corporations are able to build prisons in locations that provide economic benefits to the community (Antonuccio, 2008). The benefits to the community include jobs, increase spending in the community, stable employment, and a general economy for the community.

(…) It takes the government over two years to build a prison compared to a private prison corporation that can build a prison in 18 months (Antonuccio, 2008).

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Private Prisons Reduce Operational Costs AMS Bales, W.D. “Recidivism of Public and Private State Prison Inmates in Florida.”

Criminology and Public Policy. 2005. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2005.00006.x/abstract The Web. https://sites.google.com/site/privateprisons2/pros Bales report on private prisons is one of the most respected research pieces on the subject. These excerpts draw on the research of other critical reports on private prisons.

• Private prisons are able to reducing “red tape” costs to complete simple tasks such as hiring and firing staff and purchasing equipment (Perrone & Pratt, 2003). (…)

• The per diem is cheaper by $3.40 for private privates (Perrone & Pratt, 2003). (…)

• Private prisons house a greater percentage of females, which tend to be more expensive and problematic, than public prisons. As a result, the operational costs for the government are reduced by housing these females in private prisons (Blakely & Bumphus, 2004). (…)

• The free market and increase of market competition help lower the prison cost whileincreasing the quality of services and facilities (Perrone & Pratt, 2003). (…)

• Even though private prisons have lower salaries, private prisons can hire more staff to reduce over-time costs (Perrone & Pratt, 2003).

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Private Prisons are More Efficient Private Prison Benefits from Lower Costs and Higher Efficiency AMS

Bales, W.D. “Recidivism of Public and Private State Prison Inmates in Florida.” Criminology and Public Policy. 2005. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1745-9133.2005.00006.x/abstract The Web. https://sites.google.com/site/privateprisons2/pros Bales report on private prisons is one of the most respected research pieces on the subject. These excerpts draw on the research of other critical reports on private prisons.

• Private prisons are seen as a necessary supplement to public ones in the crisis of prison overcrowding. Private prisons allow the government to speed up the process of building a prison because the legislators do not have to authorize bonds (Camp & Gaes, 2002).

(…)

• It takes the government over two years to build a prison compared to a private prison corporation that can build a prison in 18 months (Antonuccio, 2008).

(…)

• Private prisons are seen as a necessary supplement to public ones in the crisis of prison overcrowding. Private prisons allow the government to speed up the process of building a prison because the legislators do not have to authorize bonds (Camp & Gaes, 2002).

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Case study: Texas prison savings contracts. DAT Glans, Matthew. “Research & Commentary: Contracting Out Prison Services.”

heartland.org. The Heartland Institute. 6 June 2011. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://heartland.org/policy-documents/research-commentary-contracting-out-prison-services

The Heartland Institute is a national nonprofit research organization. The cost of incarceration, rehabilitation, and security in state, local, and federal prisons has become a serious budget problem. Correctional facilities cannot fully be privatized because the courts, police, and others who put people there are inherently governmental, but the services can be contracted out. Today, private companies in the United States operate 264 correctional facilities, with a prisoner population of approximately 99,000 adult offenders.

The main benefits of prison privatization, according to its supporters, are reduced costs for taxpayers and improved results through increased efficiency and reductions in prison overcrowding. Contractors are capable of running prisons less expensively than the government can, without reducing the quality of service.

Critics of privatization argue the efficiency gains are minimal and the studies used by proponents as evidence overlook hidden costs and are not spread over multiple facilities and multiple years. They cite a 1996 U.S. Government Accountability Office report that found no evidence conclusively demonstrating efficiency gains from privatization.

According to a Texas Sunset Review Commission Agency Performance Review, private prisons in Texas achieved a contractually guaranteed 10 percent savings over the cost of a state-run facility, and when the additional tax revenue generated by the private prison was taken into account, the total savings rose to 14 percent. A similar report in Louisiana found private prisons have an 11 to 13 percent lower operating cost, fewer critical incidents with the prisoner population, and better overall discipline.

The data on how private prisons shift costs is much less empirical and open to argument compared to the hard numbers of prison efficiency seen here. While financial data such as this should always be on hand, Con teams should proceed to shift their research to ensure they are ready to discuss the methodology of prison cost savings.

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An economic projection of cost savings. DAT Mitchell, Matthew. “The Pros of Privately-Housed Cons: New Evidence on the Cost

Savings of Private Prisons.” heartland.org. Rio Grande Foundation. March 2003. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/12247.pdf

The Rio Grande Foundation is a New-Mexico-based research institute. Estimated total savings are quite staggering. A 45 percent privatized state spends about $10,000 less annually per-prisoner than a state with no privatization. In other words, an unprivatized state that chooses to privately house 45 percent of its prisoners can cut its perprisoner budget by a third!

The other explanatory variables have no less of an interesting effect on cost. For example, when all other factors are held constant, every extra dollar earned by an entry-level state police officer (as an indicator of the market wage for prison guards) leads to an increase in 92 cents in a state’s annual per-prisoner cost. The magnitude of right to work legislation was particularly interesting. All else being equal, the presence within a state of a right to work law reduces annual per-prisoner cost by over $9,000. This is strong evidence of the costly nature of union power.

This card is heavily applicable for teams running affirmative Con cases advocating the wider-spread adoption of private prisons.

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Private prisons often provide superior services at lower prices. DAT Segal, Geoffrey F. and Adrian T. Moore. “Weighing the Watchmen: Evaluating the Costs

and Benefits of Outsourcing Correctional Services.” heartland.org. Reason Public Policy Institute. January 2002. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/12358.pdf

Adrian Moore, Ph.D., is vice president of policy at Reason Foundation

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On balance, private prisons in this metastudy were found to have superior programming. Keep in mind that this is a supplement to essential evidence on the significant cost savings and efficiency gains of private prisons.

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Private Incarceration is Safer Private prisons have a higher rate of accreditation. DAT

Mitchell, Matthew. “The Pros of Privately-Housed Cons: New Evidence on the Cost Savings of Private Prisons.” heartland.org. Rio Grande Foundation. March 2003. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/12247.pdf

The Rio Grande Foundation is a New-Mexico-based research institute. Capacity management and speed of delivery continue to drive privatization. According to one survey, 21 percent of state agencies who privatized say they turned to private firms because of their reputation for speedy delivery.11 This is because private firms can construct jails and prisons in about half the time it takes government to do so.12 But in addition to capacity management and speed of delivery, states also turn to private firms in order to improve quality and lower cost.

There are a number of reasons to believe that private prisons offer a better, safer product. One is accreditation. The American Correctional Association is an independent, non-profit professional corrections organization. They accredit public and private prisons. Forty-four percent of all private prisons are currently accredited. Just ten percent of public prisons are accredited.13 Court orders offer another perspective on quality. “In 2001, of the 50 state correctional departments, 13 entire departments were under a court order to relieve unsatisfactory conditions.”14 Not a single private prison has ever been placed under a court order for unsatisfactory conditions.15 Finally, there is evidence from a number of independent studies. Sixteen of eighteen studies surveyed by the Reason Public Policy Institute found private prisons to perform as well or better than public prisons.16

There are gruesome contemporaneous instances of conduct breaches at private prisons. That said, however, private prisons need to be examined comparatively against their public counterparts, otherwise safety data is meaningless toward the resolution.

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Public and Private Prisons Have Identical Deficiencies The implicit case for banning private prisons lies in their failures compared to the standard for institutions: public prisons. By showing that public prisons also fail to reach ideals, Con teams can blur the distinction between public and private prisons, thus eliminating the imperative to single one out as needing to be banned without calling into question the entire criminal justice system and its need for reform, a debate which falls to the Con’s favor. If an alternative solution (private prisons) has the same negative impacts as the status quo (public prisons) in addition to more positive ancillary qualities (the economic and social benefits shown in other sections), there’s no reason to ban it. Even without the positive factors, just putting public and private harms on equal grounds precludes banning one or the other.

Neither public nor private prisons meet democratic standards. DAT Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke

University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. To judge private prisons from the perspective of the humanity principle, it is not enough to consider merely the idea of private prisons. Instead, it is necessary to examine prison contracting as a practice, within the regulatory context in which private prisons actually operate. Conducting this contextual analysis has made plain that, at least as currently structured, private prisons pose an appreciable danger to the possibility of legitimate punishment.

Yet public prisons, too, will invariably fall short when measured against the ideal the humanity principle represents.279 Given conditions in publicly run prisons and jails, it would be absurd to suggest otherwise. The question then becomes, of what relevance is the sorry state of many public prisons to the present discussion?

Were comparative efficiency the operative framework here, drawing attention to existing conditions in public prisons would serve as a rejoinder: yes, conditions in private prisons are at odds with the demands of the humanity principle, but so are conditions in public prisons—the implication being that, given the shortcomings of public rejects the “either/or” approach of comparative efficiency. It aims not to champion the least bad alternative, but instead to understand how and why existing prisons and jails, public and private, fall so far short of the ideal. For liberal legitimacy, therefore, the current state of public prisons represents not a rejoinder to the foregoing critique of private prisons, but rather an occasion for asking whether the insights gleaned from that critique help also to explain failings in the public system.

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The systemic problems of public and private prisons are identical. DAT Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke

University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. That there is much to learn about public prisons from a study of private prisons only makes sense. Although the privatization of corrections is generally treated in the private prisons literature as a radical departure from prevailing penal practices, prison privatization represents neither an isolated nor an aberrant approach to punishment. It is instead the logical extension of practices that are standard fare in the prison system as a whole. Of these practices, two in particular bear emphasizing: (1) the widespread use of private contractors to provide key prison services at a cheaper cost than the state would otherwise pay, and (2) the delegation to correctional officers of considerable discretion—and thus, considerable power— over vulnerable and dependent prisoners absent mechanisms adequate to check possible abuses.

The foregoing discussion suggests that the risk that private prisons will be unsafe and inhumane stems directly from these two practices. Yet both of these practices are also standard components of state-run prisons across the country. As to the first, virtually every corrections facility in the country contracts out to for-profit providers for at least some necessary services, including everything from food services to medical, dental, and psychiatric treatment to rehabilitative and educational programming, garbage collection, and even inmate classification.280 The state’s primary motivation for such contracting is its potential to cut the cost of corrections to the state; for the majority of contractors, as in the case of private prison providers, the aim is to make as large a profit as possible.281 And although perhaps some services—say, garbage collection—can be carried out without having an impact on prison conditions, most others directly affect the wellbeing of prisoners.282

And as to the second, in terms of correctional officers’ discretion in dealing with prisoners, there is little if anything to distinguish public from private. Prison officials in public and private prisons alike have direct control over all aspects of prisoners’ day-to-day lives,283 the circumstances of which are well hidden from public view. Furthermore, the mechanisms in place to check potential abuse in the public prisons are either identical to those that apply in the private context, or else, despite differences, are just as likely to be inadequate.

The middle paragraph holds a particularly valuable insight for Con teams: There’s really no such thing as a fully public prison. Given that public prisons contract essential services, Pro teams cannot point to superior statistics backing public jails as evidence of the private industry’s failures.

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Pro Counters

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Private Prisons Are More Costly

Private prisons rely on the same funding mechanisms and encourage further spending. DAT Benson, Bruce L. “:Privatization vs. Contracting Out.” cato-unbound.org. Cato Institute.

19 August 2007. Accessed 3 November 2011. Web. http://www.cato-unbound.org/2007/08/19/bruce-l-benson/privatization-versus-contracting-out

Bruce L. Penson is Florida State University’s Economics Department chair. Now consider so called contracting-out. The contracting out for prison services (unfortunately called privatization by most policy makers and many academics) actually refers to a particular type of contract in which some part of the bureaucratic decision-making hierarchy is replaced by a decision-making hierarchy that operates under a different set of incentives than those faced within the bureaucracy. Profit maximizing firms under contract may produce the service at lower cost but that may not be efficient in an allocative efficient sense (that is why I put quote marks around “efficient” in my previous remark – I probably should have used something like “cost-effective”). Other differences in incentives also may arise (e.g., abuses of power may be less likely if the private firm can be sued and the bureau cannot).[2] Importantly, however, the service is still purchased (financed) by a government organization dominated by individuals with their own objectives (a dictator, elected representatives, or bureaucrats with discretionary power, all of whom are subject to political pressures from powerful special interests). That is, the service is still paid for by coercively collected taxes, after all, and allocated to uses determined through political processes with all of their public choice problems. Indeed, one of those public choice problems is that contacting firms become lobbyists who have incentives to demand more spending on prisons and perhaps more criminalization, as I have noted elsewhere. Of course, corrections unions have similar incentives, but as Randy said in conversation, for-profit firms may be more efficient at lobbying too.

The point is that production of prison services by for-profit firms providing those services to the state is not what I mean by privatization. Indeed, in the context of our interchange, Randy’s statement that “purely private prisons in the current state-run legal system would still end up increasing incarceration rates” does not make sense. These firms are not “purely private” when they operate in our current, state-run legal system. They still provide services to the state and are financed through taxes, because, under the incentives that currently exist (e.g., the focus on punishment rather than restitution) there is very little private demands for such services.

The arguments above, simplified: there is little separating the funding of public and private prisons. Private prisons are potentially more effective at lobbying. While they are economically efficient, the fact that imprisoning people is the least efficient way for society to treat individuals means that operating efficiency for prisons is actually a net harm, as it encourages further imprisonment.

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Private Prisons Dispute Criticisms on Efficiency. PSM Tait, Maggie. "Private prison companies dispute criticisms." . Stuff, 01 Jul 2009. Web. 2

Nov 2014. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/politics/2556713/Private-prison-companies-dispute-criticisms>.

The State should be responsible for prisoners not private companies, the Human Rights Commission said today. Chief Human Rights Commissioner Rosslyn Noonan appeared before Parliament's law and order select committee which is considering the Corrections (Contract Management of Prisons Amendment) Bill. Senior managers from private prison company GEO Group were present and heard groups condemn their business. The firm ran Auckland Central Remand Prison (ACRP) for five years until Labour won the 1999 election and refused to renew its contract. Ms Noonan said protecting the rights of detainees was a key function of government and should not be contracted out.

"The management of prisons involves the exercise of some of the state's most coercive powers against individuals," the commission's submission said.

"There should be direct accountability for the exercise of such powers. A government department directly accountable to a minister provides the clearest accountability."

If the bill was to go ahead the commission wanted its monitoring measures beefed up. Recommendations included protecting staff from being sacked if they gave information to monitors and permitting prisoners to complain directly to monitors. Also prisons should be required to comply with international conventions around torture. Ms Noonan said early intervention would make the biggest difference. She called for willingness across parties not to make political capital out of the issue. Catholic organisation Caritas was concerned problems in the United States' private prisons – such as beatings, rapes, suicides and other deaths in custody – would be repeated here. It noted that in the US the same people running private prisons were also involved in lobbying government for longer sentences. GEO Group Australia managing director Pieter Bezuidenhout said his company had managed prisons in Australia for 17 years, operating in Queensland, Victoria and New South Wales. He said he had listened to criticisms and said his company could only do what governments told it to.

"We've got no say in terms of the length of sentence. We've got no interest in the length of the sentence," he said.

"We are paid on a bed capacity. . . It's up to the state or government to fill those beds. There's no interest for me to have longer sentences or lesser sentences because I am getting paid for 500 beds." While National MPs had emphasised cost savings, that should not be the only driver, Mr Bezuidenhout said. "Privatisation is not about cost savings. If that's all you want to achieve I am saying that you are knocking at the wrong door. "Privatisation will bring an enhanced public service because you've got a mixed economy, and in a mixed economy both the private operator and the public service will improve and enhance service." He said in

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NSW prisoners spent 30 per cent more time out of their cells than those in public prisons. GEO was aware of problems in the US but said there was high awareness about issues in Australasia and the company had to protect its reputation so would not cut corners. Dom Karauria, a former general manager for ACRP and now executive general manager for the firm's operations in Australia, said politicians had the power to ensure safety.

Private corporations face costly lawsuits which suck taxpayer money. DAT Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote

Ineffective Incarceration Policies.” justicepolicy.org. Justice Policy Institute. June 2011. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/gaming_the_system.pdf

The Justice Policy Center is an independent research institute based in Montreal. Issues related to a lack of available medical care, safety incidents in prisons, and poorly trained staff also result in lawsuits. The state or jurisdiction could be named in the suit in addition to the private prison company, but in some cases the state sues the private prison company directly. Either way, taxpayers shoulder the burden of the cost of damages and legal fees, either directly or through increased costs for future prison contracts. Examples include:

In November 2008, the State of Texas indicted The Geo Group in the death of Gregorio de la Rosa, Jr.138 One of the outcomes of the case was a $42.4 million dollar civil suit settlement out of court.139

In 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the ACLU National Prison Project filed a law suit against The GEO Group, the prison administration, and state officials for abuse, violence, sexual contact with staff, and other conditions at the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi.140

On March 11, 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class action lawsuit regarding the violent conditions inside the Idaho Corrections Center, which became known as ‚Gladiator School.‛ The state corrections agency was originally implicated in the lawsuit as well as CCA and facility staff. However, the ACLU dropped the IDOC from the lawsuit to save the state taxpayers money.141

The hidden costs of private prisons, including those from civil suits due to dicey humanitarian situations in them, winds up begging the question of whether there is such a thing as to run a prison “cost-effectively.”

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Private prison contracts can financially wreck rural communities. DAT Gaming the System: How the Political Strategies of Private Prison Companies Promote

Ineffective Incarceration Policies.” justicepolicy.org. Justice Policy Institute. June 2011. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.justicepolicy.org/uploads/justicepolicy/documents/gaming_the_system.pdf

The Justice Policy Center is an independent research institute based in Montreal. The community can also be hurt if they decide to pay for the construction of a private prison, in anticipation of future ongoing contract revenues. There is no guarantee that once a private prison facility is built that it will be filled and stay filled.

In 2000, the town of Littlefield, Texas borrowed $10 million to build a prison that would be operated by The GEO Group and filled with contract beds from Idaho and Wyoming. But, given ongoing state budget crisis, Idaho removed all out of state prison contracts and the prison is now empty. GEO abandoned the prison too, which is now for sale or contract. As of early 2011, Littlefield was paying $65,000 per month against the original loan for construction.142

In Hardin, Montana the city entered into a deal with a group of private investors to finance the construction of a private prison in 2006.143 The idea behind footing the bill for the prison was that opening such a facility would bring jobs and revenue to the small town of 3,600 people. However, since construction was completed in 2007 the facility has remained vacant, leading to a technical default on $27.4 million in revenue bonds, further devastating the town’s economic development prospects.144

Because private prison corporations promise guaranteed revenue for towns in the form of secured government contracts and jobs for locals, rural towns often pitch for the construction of prisons as a convenient method to kickstart the local economy. This leads to overreliance on individual companies and contracts to pull through. If they don’t, towns and communities are still left with the burden of their initial investment without any of the future revenue to offset it.

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Prison development fails to boost local economies. DAT Adler School Institute on Public Safety and Social Justice; Illinois Coalition for

Immigrant and Refugee Rights. (2011). White Paper on Broken Logic: The Over-Reliance on Incarceration in the United States, Chicago, IL: Author. http://www.adler.edu/resources/content/4/1/documents/Adler_White-Paper_IPSSJ_ICIRR_Economics-of-Private-Detention_FINAL.pdf

The Adler School of Professional Psychology is a post-baccalaureate, non-profit institution of higher education and independent graduate school of psychology.

Private prison operators sell their facilities to communities with promises of increased economic development and new jobs. Further scrutiny has disproven these claims. One 2010 review of the impact of prisons on local communities from 1976 to 2004 asserts that “prisons have not and are not likely to make a positive contribution to local employment growth.” Another 2010 report reviewing all prisons built in the US since 1960 questioned the benefits of prison construction in rural communities. Yet another study of prison development in upstate New York showed that while new prisons created those jobs, few local residents qualified for those jobs.

Local communities that rely on the promise of prison development often end up worse off. Most dramatically, Littlefield, Texas, was forced to raise taxes and slash services to make up a $9 million budget hole left when the GEO Group, another private corrections company, closed its prison there. Communities often offer incentives such as property tax exemptions, subsidies, and municipal services such as water and road maintenance that burden local taxpayers.

Rural communities often conflate the construction of a prison with the filling of that prison with local jobs. Contracting the prison out isn’t guaranteed, and neither is the source of the employment.

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The promised savings from private prisons are empty. DAT Bowling, Julia. “Are Private Prisons Good Investments for States?” Brennan Center for

Justice. New York University School of Law. 15 April 2014. Web. http://www.brennancenter.org/blog/are-private-prisons-good-investments-states

The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law is a nonpartisan law and policy institute.

The wave of criticism against private prison companies has grown amidst revelations of poor security, lack of oversight, and perverse financial incentives to lock up more people. Now, a new report from In the Public Interest confirms that private prisons not only rely on faulty math to get states to agree to binding contracts, but also fail to save states money even when their contract legally requires it.

The report examined over 40 studies of private prisons and outcomes in five individual states, and found added costs with private companies when compared to state run facilities. It concluded that companies use questionable methodology in calculating the costs of public and private prisons, inflating public prison costs to make private prisons seem more affordable. These companies can cherry-pick the least expensive prisoners available (often choosing not to house elderly, sickly, or higher-security prisoners), while filling their contracts with expensive terms, occupancy minimums, and automatic increases that create added hidden costs to the state. The study found that Ohio, New Mexico, Florida, Georgia, and Arizona all failed to see savings that were promised – or even legally required in the cases of Ohio (5 percent savings) and Florida (7 percent) – with private prisons.

Even conventional economic theory—that the private sector is more capable of quickly implementing cost-cutting measures—doesn’t necessarily apply to this debate. Pro teams should challenge this premise.

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Market competition doesn’t make private prisons more efficient. DAT Mary Sigler, Private Prisons, Public Functions, and the Meaning of Punishment, 38 FLA.

ST. U. L. REV. 149 (2010). Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=fsulr

Mary Sigler is Associate Dean of Faculty and Professor of Law at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

A “market failure,” as I use the term here, occurs when the ordinary operation of market mechanisms cannot be counted on to yield optimal outcomes. Thus, for example, if a government contracts with a private firm for the provision of an essential service that requires significant initial capital expenditures and expertise, the government is in a poor position to negotiate—or deny—contract extensions if it has become dependent on the private provider’s service. In a variety of contexts, including prison construction and management, the firm may be able to raise rates dramatically over the initial contract bid because the government cannot forgo the service—say, housing dangerous criminals—and lacks readily available alternatives. Additionally, private firms face the risk of business failure. A corporation may mismanage its operation to the point of bankruptcy, leaving the government either to bail out the operation financially or scramble to identify alternative service providers, which may themselves extract a premium based on the government’s desperation for immediate supply. Other sources of market failure include the use of campaign contributions to influence the public officials who award government contracts36 and the inherent challenges of drafting suitable contracts that specify with adequate precision the terms and expectations of performance. In the absence of “solid and measurable performance standards,” it will be difficult to determine whether government is “getting the full measure of services it expects at the promised lower cost.”3

This card contextualizes and provides the “why” for private prisons failing to save costs.

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Private Prisons Make Prison System Worse California's Private Prisons AMS

Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html

The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

California's exceptionally powerful prison guard union was waging a fierce campaign against private prison companies, telling voters that the facilities were poorly run and that the industry would take away union jobs. "Public safety should not be for profit," Don Novey, president of the prison guard union, told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time.

Still, David Myers, the president of Corrections Corporation of America, a Nashville-based giant of the for-profit prison industry, believed his company's decision to build a prison in that remote corner of the state would eventually pay off.

"If we build it, they will come," he predicted.

Sixteen years later, as California struggles to relieve overcrowding in one of the nation's largest prison systems, the inmates are coming by the thousands.

The private prison system is a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. After building large expensive prisons and instating shocking occupancy requirements, prisoners streamed in to these prisons in abundance. The occupancy requirements on private prisons put state governments under pressure to imprison more people—thereby exacerbating the problems with the nation´s prison system.

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System Needs Reform AMS

Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

Not so long ago, Brown himself was an outspoken champion of sentencing reform. As mayor of Oakland in 2003, he called the state's sentencing system an "abysmal failure" and said he regretted his role in establishing it during his first stint as governor in the late 1970s. By locking people up for fixed terms, he said in 2003, the state was denying prisoners any real incentive to acquire the life skills needed outside of the prison system, creating what he referred to as "postgraduate schools of crime."

Needless Prisoners AMS

Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

But critics say the state incarcerates many prisoners who pose no real danger to the public, including elderly inmates and the terminally ill. And they argue that the governor could safely decrease the prison population by allowing more inmates to earn reduced sentences for good behavior.

James Austin, president of the the JFA Institute, a national criminal justice research group, testified in the state's overcrowding case that California could safely release 22,758 prisoners. Using a computer program developed by the state, he determined that 40 percent of all California prisoners were unlikely to return to prison within three years of their release. Letting them out early would constitute a "safe and effective" way to meet the population target, he remarked in his testimony.

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Working in private prisons is demoralizing for prison staff. DAT Robbins, Ira P. “Privatization of Corrections: A Violation of U.S. Domestic Law,

International Human RIghts, and Good Sense.” Washington College of Law. American University. n.d. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.wcl.american.edu/hrbrief/13/3robbins.pdf

Ira P. Robbins is the Barnard T. Welsh Scholar and Professor of Law and Justice at the American University Washington College of Law. Obviously, security officers and prison personnel in private prisons are not civil service employees. Without the stability and protection of civil service, the turnover rate for security staff in private prisons in the U.S. is over 50 percent, compared to just 16 percent for public facilities.16 In the United Kingdom, staff turnover at private prisons is 35 percent, while it is only five percent in the public sector.17 Turnover rates at individual prisons can be much worse than these averages: one private facility in Florida reported an annual staff turnover rate of 200 percent.18

Salaries for guards at private facilities also lag behind those of public employees, as one of the principal cost-cutting areas in private prisons is in labor costs. Private prison companies generally pay employees less than public institutions in both direct salary and fringe benefits.19 For instance, the starting salary for guards at a private prison in Alabama is $7 per hour, compared with $11 per hour for public guards. In the U.K. the average pay for private prison officers is more than 50 percent less than it is for public prison officers.20 This is hardly the type of incentive needed by prisons to recruit suitable security guards.

Moreover, the conditions of employment at private prisons tend not to contribute to the recruitment or retention of suitable personnel. The staff-to-inmate ratios are 15 percent lower at private prisons than public ones, which increases the workload for private guards.21 Employees in one private British detention center had to work 12-hour shifts with no lunch breaks for 7-day stretches. 22 A guard at a private facility in Tennessee found the conditions so demoralizing that he returned to his previous job at a fast food restaurant, where he felt his work would be better respected.23 Private facilities in Australia have experienced a number of security staff walkouts because of poor working conditions. At Port Hedland, for instance, guards walked off the job as a result of fear that detainees were stockpiling homemade weapons — a charge the chief executive officer of the detention center denied even when presented with evidence. As the local union leader explained, the private prison “can’t ensure the guards’ safety and for budget constraints they don’t want to.”24 At a Canadian prison, guards had to organize their own campaign to get vaccinations for Hepatitis B despite obvious risks at the facility. A local health professional reported that “[p]ublic-run institutions vaccinate each of their staff … [b]ut in a private-run enterprise, profit comes at the expense of the workers.”25 The net harms extend to everyone in the prison—both prisoners and staff. This is an underrated consideration for Pro teams.

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The turnover rate at private prisons is too high to maintain security in the system. DAT Blakely, Curtis, and Vic Bumphus. “Private and Public Sector Prisons--A Comparison of

Select Characteristics.” United States Courts. Federal Probation, Vol. 68 #1. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/federalcourts/pps/fedprob/2004-06/prisons.html

Curtis Blakely is a Truman State University justice systems professor. The private sector required correctional officers to undergo an average 174 hours of pre-service training and 42 hours of annual in-service training. In comparison, the public sector required correctional officers to undergo an average 232 hours of annual pre-service training and 42 hours of in-service training. This suggests that the public sector required 58 additional hours of pre-service training above that provided by the private sector. This finding supports its related hypothesis and suggests that the private sector is nearer the less eligibility end of the ideological continuum than is the public sector.

The private sector also reported an average correctional officer turnover rate of 43%. Turnover refers to the total number of officers leaving a particular prison during a specific year. Similar information was also available regarding total staff turnover rates and their causes. Figures indicate that 71% of those individuals leaving private prisons resigned their position, while 0.6% retired, 21% were terminated/dismissed, and 7% transferred to another facility. In comparison, the public sector reported an average correctional officer turnover rate of 15%. This suggests that the private sector experienced officer turnover rates approaching three times that of the public sector. Total staff turnover rates were also available for the public sector, indicating that 63% resigned their position, 15% retired, and 22% left for unknown reasons. Thus, the private sector had approximately 9% more of their staff resign and 15% fewer of their staff retire. This finding supports its related hypothesis and suggests that the private sector is nearer the less eligibility end of the ideological continuum.

When considering staff to inmate ratios, the private sector reports an average 6.7 inmates per correctional officer and 3.7 inmates per staff member. The public sector, in comparison, reported an average 5.6 inmates per correctional officer and 3.1 inmates per staff member. This finding suggests that the private sector had higher inmate to officer and staff ratios than did the public sector. This finding is not surprising considering private prisons are newer (Pratt & Maahs, 1999), may employ advanced security measures, and incarcerate a less serious inmate population. Because the differences between the sectors did not exceed 25%, this particular finding will not be used to place either sector upon the ideological continuum.

A prison’s ability to maintain order is a function of its staff’s experience. With high turnover and little training, private prison staff find it more difficult to maintain order than their counterparts in public prisons. Considering the maintenance of order is a core function of a prison, this is an impactful finding.

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Prison contracts incentivize recidivism and mass incarceration. DAT Mock, Brentin. “Private Prisons Lock in Profits with Lockup Quotas.”

southernstudies.org. Institute for Southern Studies. 20 September 2013. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.southernstudies.org/2013/09/private-prisons-lock-in-profits-with-lockup-quotas.html

The Institute for Southern Studies is a public interest media, research, and education center.

According to a new report from In the Public Interest, a nonprofit resource center that studies the privatizing of public functions, prison companies are increasingly striking deals with states that have occupancy guarantee clauses.

Some of these inmate lockup quotas are as high as 90 percent, and a few even require 100 percent occupancy. Under these agreements, states that fail to meet capacity mandates must pay the difference -- meaning they must use taxpayer money to pay for empty beds. The report calls these payments "low-crime taxes."

Louisiana and Virginia are among the four states locked into contracts with the highest occupancy guarantee requirements, with all quotas requiring at least 95 percent occupancy. The other two states are Arizona and Oklahoma. Among the companies involved in such contracts are Tennessee-based Corrections Corporation of America, the largest for-profit private prison company in the United States, and GEO Group of Florida.

"Establishing quotas for prison beds creates a perverse incentive to make criminal justice policy based on principles of economics instead of public safety," said Dana Kaplan, executive director of the Juvenile Justice Project of Louisiana. "This is to the detriment of the people of our state, particularly those families and individuals most impacted by our high incarceration rate, and the taxpayers footing the bill."

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Corrupt Collaboration CCA Prisons Maintain Relevance through Congressional Influence AMS

Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

As CCA's presence in California has grown, the company has significantly boosted its spending on political campaigns and lobbying in the state, a HuffPost analysis of campaign finance data found. It spent nearly $290,000 on California campaigns during the 2011-12 election cycle, up more than eightfold from the 2005-06 cycle.

Since running for governor in 2010, Brown has taken in $15,000 from CCA, which also spent $50,000 in support of his initiative to raise taxes. And he received $25,900 from the GEO Group. (Hedging its bets, the GEO Group also contributed $25,900 to his 2010 Republican opponent, Meg Whitman.)

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Union and Private Prisons Alliance AMS

Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

For years, California's prison guard union, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, served as a powerful check on the growth of the private prison industry. The union spent millions to support the campaigns of political allies, and launched media attacks that were widely seen as lethal to the political aspirations of opponents.

Now the union and the private companies are partners. Brown's deal with CCA stipulates that the state will staff the private facility with union guards, effectively creating a detente between the former foes. When Brown first announced the deal in August, the union's leader, Mike Jimenez, joined him on stage in a show of solidarity.

Advocates for prisoners' rights and criminal justice reform worry that this alliance could prove particularly damaging to sentencing reform efforts, expanding the prison system for years to come.

In addition to the corrupt deals made with congress-people, private prisons are now closely aligned with California´s union system. These alliances make it difficult to objectively evaluate the private prison system and still more difficult to deliver the much needed reforms California´s prison system requires.

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Private prisons undermine the democratic principles of the criminal justice system. DAT Mary Sigler, Private Prisons, Public Functions, and the Meaning of Punishment, 38 FLA.

ST. U. L. REV. 149 (2010). Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://diginole.lib.fsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=fsulr

Mary Sigler is Associate Dean of Faculty and Professor of Law at Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.

Skeptics of the “social meaning” argument against prison privatization observe that the cultural context that confers meaning is by no means fixed. Indeed, perhaps “there are already some legislators, judges, administrators, and entrepreneurs”—we might add citizens and criminal offenders—“who actually and honestly do not believe that ‘private’ imprisonment is significantly different from ‘public’ imprisonment in cultural terms.”148 To the extent that this is the case, it suggests how far we have strayed from the normative path of liberaldemocratic meaning. In fact, we can recall or envision changes in meaning regarding a number of culturally significant phenomena, such as marriage, parenthood, and rape. But presumably it is not a matter of indifference to us what course these changes take— whether rape is or is not regarded as a serious violation of the self, whether marriage and family are limited to heterosexual couples or extended to homosexuals, polygamists, or other nontraditional arrangements. In each instance, the challenge is to make a case for meaning in terms of our liberal-democratic values and to promote or resist cultural change on that basis.

In the case of criminal punishment, the contemporary focus on incapacitation, combined with an “us versus them” mentality toward criminal offenders, represents an impoverished conception of the liberal- democratic community and charts a course in the wrong direction. It fails to take seriously both the capacity of persons to make and remake themselves and the number and variety of obstacles, affecting some more than others, in the way of making socially responsible choices. By contrast, the communicative conception of punishment is predicated on precisely those features of the human condition— on our potential and our limitations—that ground our liberal-democratic commitments. There is thus nothing “mysterious” about the idea that it matters who inflicts punishment.149 For punishment engages fellow citizens in one of the most serious and definitive enterprises of a liberal-democratic community—holding ourselves and one another responsible for our actions—and the voice of the community is clearest when it speaks for itself.

Boiling down the arguments of this card: For justice to serve its purpose, it needs to be administered as a function of the people, not by a private entity

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Faulty Reporting on Private Prison System Reality of Private Prisons Exposed AMS

Krikham, Chris. “Prisoners of Profit.” The Huffington Post. October 22, 2013. http://projects.huffingtonpost.com/prisoners-of-profit The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice looks at past performance when choosing contractors, but evaluators rely on companies to self-report their contracting history. In some of the most egregious instances of negligence and failure to report serious incidents, however, Slattery’s companies pulled out of their contracts early, rather than wait for the government to take action. In other cases, the contract’s end date worked in the company’s favor. Executives could then technically say they had never had a contract canceled.

Moreover, state officials don’t examine a potential contractor’s record in other states if the company already has contracts in Florida.

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Public Prisons Staff are not Paid Large Salaries Costs in Prison System not a Result of Prison Staffing Salaries AMS

Simmons, Matt. “Punishment & Profits: A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Private Prisons.” August 7, 2013. Oklahoma Policy Institute. http://okpolicy.org/punishment-profits-a-cost-benefit-analysis-of-private-prisons The Oklahoma Policy Institute (OK Policy) is a nonpartisan think tank located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Institute researches political and economic issues for the state of Oklahoma.

Much of the presumed cost savings of private prisons are achieved through lower staffing costs: private prisons pay their employees less than public prisons. But Oklahoma is not exactly paying exorbitant salaries. The starting salary for a public corrections officer in Oklahoma is $11.93 an hour, or $22,700 a year. Almost 30 percent of Department of Corrections staff members are eligible for food stamps, while 85 percent qualify for reduced cost lunches for their children.

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Private prison staff are relatively underpaid and inexperienced, with disastrous results. DAT Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke

University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. Nor have predicted innovations in prison management through privatization come to pass.252 Instead, the private prisons of today function very much like public prisons, only with a cheaper labor force.253 Private prisons thus generally exhibit all the particularized characteristics that make public prisons dangerous places: the considerable discretion and power conferred on guards;254 the fear on all sides; the simultaneous monotony and high pressure of the prison environment;255 inmates’ possible proclivity to violence; and the relative social and economic disempowerment of prison guards, who do a difficult job in a tense and dangerous environment and for whom power over prisoners constitutes both a rare perquisite and an outlet for frustration.256 But in addition, private prison employees are likely to be less qualified (because less well remunerated) and less well trained than their public-sector counterparts.257

Given this situation, it seems likely that private prisons as currently constituted would turn out to be more violent places than their state-run counterparts. And in fact, although much of the available data is inconclusive regarding the overall quality of conditions in private prisons as compared with public facilities,258 meaningful data do exist showing elevated levels of physical violence in private prisons.259

For example, in 1997, researchers at the U.S. Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) surveyed private prison operators and received responses pertaining to sixty-five of the eighty private correctional facilities then in operation in the country.260 They then compared this information to comprehensive data on public prisons nationwide. Comparing the number of “major incidents,” including “assaults, riots, fires and other disturbances” in the public prisons over twelve months with those occurring in private facilities over the same period,261 the survey found a greater number of such incidents per one thousand inmates in the private prisons: 45.3 per 1,000 inmates in public prisons, as compared with 50.5 in private facilities.262 When inmate assaults were taken alone, the disparity was even more marked: 25.4 per 1,000 inmates in publicly run facilities, as compared with 35.1 in private prisons.263

Any increased for labor in public prisons can thus be looked at as the economic cost of preventing violenc in the prisons. Given that this is a worthwhile investment, the increased cost of public prison labor shouldn’t be looked at as an absolute negative impact.

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Private Prison Accreditation Is Meaningless Even if a prison is accredited, it doesn’t necessarily follow procedures. DAT

Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. It is a standard requirement of state enabling statutes that private prison operators achieve and maintain official accreditation from the American Correctional Association (ACA),190 an independent “organization of correctional professionals dating to 1870.”191 The ACA sets standards governing every aspect of penal life192 and, on request, certifies the facilities that meet these standards to a satisfactory degree.193 The requirement that private prisons receive ACA accreditation is certainly desirable; indeed, in this regard, the private sector, having been forced to satisfy ACA standards, is ahead of many public-sector facilities, 20 percent of which did not have such accreditation in 2001.194

Still, it would overestimate the effect of ACA accreditation to assume that this requirement sufficiently checks private-sector abuses. For one thing, ACA visits are highly structured, so that “certification [indicates] compliance with standards for only a brief period.”195 Moreover, the standards are largely procedural in character, generally satisfied by a showing as to “what the written procedures of the institution lay down as operational processes, rather than observing whether those processes in fact are followed.”196 Arguably, these problems could be resolved by an overhaul in the accreditation process, and such an overhaul would certainly be welcome. In its current form, however, the ACA is unlikely to undertake sufficient reform to ensure adequate protection against inmate abuses. For one thing, ACA officials are generally chosen from the ranks of experienced corrections officials.197 As a result, personal and professional relationships between ACA overseers and prison management are not uncommon, creating a common sympathy and sense of purpose that tells against both more meaningful standards and more rigorous enforcement.198 Moreover, the institutions being inspected “ha[ve] to pay for the whole procedure,” providing income on which the ACA is dependent for its survival.199 For this reason, “a degree of capture is likely.”200

It is well documented that private prisons achieve a much higher rate of accreditation than their public counterparts. This cannot be conflated by Con teams with real measurements of quality.

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Con Counters

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Private Prisons Do Not Promote Overcrowding Private Prisons Do Not Cause Incarceration AMS

Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

Evan Westrup, a spokesman for Brown's administration, said that the contributions played no role in Brown's decision to sign the new contracts. Steve Owen, a CCA spokesman, said that lobbying allows the company to "educate" government about "the types of solutions we provide and to stay current on issues that affect our ability to best serve our partners."

"Under longstanding policy, CCA does not take a position on or in any way promote policies that determine the basis or duration of an individual's incarceration," he added.

Overall, California houses about 119,000 prisoners within its borders and thousands more in CCA prisons in other states, and it has one of the most crowded prison systems in the country. In 2009, a panel of federal judges concluded that the in-state prisons were so densely packed that prisoners were dying as a result. The judges ordered the state to reduce overcrowding.

The private prison system was introduced to help alleviate overcrowding issues. Private prisons provide a solution to California´s overcrowding deaths.

2011 Case Declares Need for Private Prisons AMS Knafo, Saki and Kirkham, Chris. “For-Profit Prisons Are Big Winners of California's

Overcrowding Problem. The Huffington Post. October 25, 2013. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/25/california-private-prison_n_4157641.html The Huffington Post is a popular site with news spanning a broad spectrum of relevant political issues. The Huffington Post is currently ranked number 1 among the U.S.´s political sites.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling, with Justice Anthony Kennedydeclaring in the majority opinion that the lack of adequate space in California's prisons was causing at least one inmate to "needlessly die" every six or seven days.

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The Economic Savings Are Indisputable A decade’s worth of studies have a unanimous conclusion. DAT

Segal, Geoffrey F. and Adrian T. Moore. “Weighing the Watchmen: Evaluating the Costs and Benefits of Outsourcing Correctional Services.” heartland.org. Reason Public Policy Institute. January 2002. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://heartland.org/sites/all/modules/custom/heartland_migration/files/pdfs/12358.pdf

Adrian Moore, Ph.D., is vice president of policy at Reason Foundation

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Case study: Rural economic benefits from private prisons. DAT Kirchhoff, Suzanne M. “Economic Impacts of Prison Growth.” Federation of American

Scientists. Congressional Research Service. 13 April 2010. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R41177.pdf

The Congressional Research Service (CRS) works exclusively for the United States Congress, providing policy and legal analysis

Shelby, located in Toole County (population 3,541), Montana, in the northern part of the state, is host to a 660-bed maximum security prison, the Crossroads Correctional Center, which was financed, built, and operated by CCA.

Every five years, Shelby city officials publish a review of the economic impacts of the institution.163 According to the most recent review, covering a period through 2008, the prison employs 181 people from Shelby and the surrounding area. It generates $100,000 to $150,000 in annual billings for the local medical center, which serves the prison population and people who moved to the area to work at the prison. The prison buys only 5% of its supplies from local Toole County, though it contracts for another 75% from Montana-based businesses. Property values in the county have increased, in contrast to other rural Montana communities which have shown significant declines. It is not possible to say whether the improvement is due to the prison or other factors, such as energy-related development in the area.

The prison has created some strains, including an increase in the number of cases heard at the courthouse. The local police force has had to devote about 1,320 hours from 2005 through 2008 on prison-related work, such as investigating in-prison assaults and serving warrants or civil court summons. There have been fights and gang activity at the prison and, in 2008, CCA had a national security company bring employees in from out of state to fill jobs at the prison.164 But officials say the costs are more than balanced by the nearly $500,000 in annual property taxes paid by the prison, and Shelby Mayor Larry Bonderud said the town continues to attract business and has experienced no stigma from the maximum-security facility. Mayor Bonderud said he preferred the higher security institution, in part because it requires higher staffing levels and therefore more local jobs.165

While broad, empirical data is fundamentally what proves the resolution, specific case studies can be equally impactful with judges as a supplement.

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Private Prison Conditions Aren’t Worse Overcrowding isn’t an issue. DAT

Blakely, Curtis, and Vic Bumphus. “Private and Public Sector Prisons--A Comparison of Select Characteristics.” United States Courts. Federal Probation, Vol. 68 #1. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.uscourts.gov/uscourts/federalcourts/pps/fedprob/2004-06/prisons.html

Curtis Blakely is a Truman State University justice systems professor. The private sector is also much less crowded than previous speculation has suggested. The belief that the private sector operates at or above capacity to maximize profit has not been substantiated by this study. In fact, the private sector operated, on average, 24% below that of the public sector. Again, this may be due more to the nature of the private sector as an "overflow mechanism" for the public sector than to any specific ideology or operating objective that it may ascribe to. Finally, since the private sector operates below capacity and houses less serious offenders it should, by all conventional thinking, also be a safer place to be incarcerated. However, findings suggest otherwise. Precisely why the private sector is a more dangerous place to be incarcerated remains unexplained. Further research would be useful to support or discredit observations similar to those made in Kesler et al. v. Brazoria County (1998) where the court suggested that private sector violence may be associated with staffing practices.

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The state ties the hands of private contractor. DAT Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke

University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. Certainly, nothing in the foregoing discussion goes to show that the state’s use of private prisons could never satisfy the humanity principle. What it does show is that, when the state looks to privatization to save money on the cost of corrections, there is reason to expect conditions of confinement to fall below even that level of quality and safety that can be reasonably expected of those charged with the difficult task of running the prisons. When the state’s aim is saving money, it will be unwilling to undertake measures that will substantially raise the cost of privatization, even when doing so could arguably ensure more meaningful protections for vulnerable inmates. So the state will invest minimally in monitoring contractual compliance, placing perhaps one full-time monitor at each site, despite the arguable need for a full-time team of monitors if the effort is to be at all effective. When money is the state’s primary concern, it will hesitate to rescind contracts even when evidence of abuse is considerable, fearing the costs such a move would entail. It will also forbear from specifying contractual terms requiring private contractors to provide minimum levels of staffing and training for private prison guards and stipulating the salaries and benefits to be paid to them. Doing so would only increase the cost of contracting to the state and would, moreover, greatly tie the hands of contractors, for whom cutting labor costs is the central available means to keep expenses down.

While the state is on the hook failing to provide the minimum funding for adequate inmate services, it is the private contractors which are held accountable for this failure, despite simply directing funding to the most pressing areas of need. Without adequate (state-provided) resources, there is no way for any prison, regardless of whether it is public or private, to succeed.

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Prisons’ Problems Trace Back to the Justice System American incarceration rates are too high for prisons to keep up. DAT

“Too Many laws, Too Many Prisoners.” The Economist. 22 July 2010. Accessed 11/10/2014. Web. http://www.economist.com/node/16636027

There are over 4,000 federal crimes, and many times that number of regulations that carry criminal penalties. When analysts at the Congressional Research Service tried to count the number of separate offences on the books, they were forced to give up, exhausted. Rules concerning corporate governance or the environment are often impossible to understand, yet breaking them can land you in prison. In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (ie, he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased.

“The founders viewed the criminal sanction as a last resort, reserved for serious offences, clearly defined, so ordinary citizens would know whether they were violating the law. Yet over the last 40 years, an unholy alliance of big-business-hating liberals and tough-on-crime conservatives has made criminalisation the first line of attack—a way to demonstrate seriousness about the social problem of the month, whether it's corporate scandals or e-mail spam,” writes Gene Healy, a libertarian scholar. “You can serve federal time for interstate transport of water hyacinths, trafficking in unlicensed dentures, or misappropriating the likeness of Woodsy Owl.”

Private prisons are a solution to a problem created by the United States criminal justice system: nearly everything is criminalized in some way, shape, or form. Given the already-present overcrowding of public prisons, no positive outcome is achieved through the banning of private prisons given the continuing zealousness for locking people up.

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The state fails to set minimum standards for private prisons. DAT Headley, Andrea, and Jean-Claude Garcia-Zamor. “The Privatization of Prisons and its

Impact on Transparency and Accountability in Relation to Maladministration.” International Journal of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education, Vol.1 No. 8. August 2014. 11/11/2014. Web. http://www.arcjournals.org/pdfs/ijhsse/v1-i8/4.pdf

Jean-Claude Garcia-Zamor is a Professor in FIU’s Department of Public Administration. Take for example, the Florida Department of Management Services, in which the contracts are so vague that they do not specify any standards of performance in relation to “private prisons� inmate education, vocation, and treatment programs” nor does they outline any specified policy for “inmate visitation and telephone costs that are comparable to those provided by the state�s public prisons” (Treadwell, 2012, p. 144). This one example portrays the vagueness of contracts, which can lead to maladministration in that one of the goals of incarceration is rehabilitation. This goal can be forfeited if the performance measures and standards are not detailed enough to match the quality of services within the public prison environment. The sensitive nature of prison entails that scrutiny be given to any and all minute factors in that they can hinder or facilitate rehabilitative aims and thus affect recidivism.

As mentioned above, due to the vagueness of contracts there is a lack of defining various daily activities, thus private actors are ultimately responsible for daily management decisions (Mörth, 2007) in regards to the provision of public goods and services, which poses management problems in itself (see Pozen, 2003).Further, these private actors are neither required to disclose their actions and decisions nor the reasons for acting in such a way. While the government is accountable to the extent in which it ensures that prison services are being provided, the daily operational procedures are forfeited. Therefore, there is a level of accountability that is diminished, because of the lack of control that government officials and the public have over controlling the daily activities that are not defined within the contract (Mulgan, 1997). Additionally, without the mere knowledge of what is going on within the private agencies, accountability is further weakened due tothe lack of transparency. Moreover, studies have shown that the incomplete nature of contracts gives way to sacrificing the quality of private prison operations, especially as it relates to prison violence and the quality of personnel (Hart, Shleifer, &Vishny, 1997).

Con teams should become adept at differentiating between the inherent problems of private prisons, and the problems of poor oversight/contracting. Only one (the former) should be a reason to ban private prisons.

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Private Prisons and Legal Constraints Public and private prisoners alike have identical legal protections. DAT

Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. With respect to the courts, aside from the narrow Richardson exception,284 the legal standards previously canvassed, both substantive and procedural,285 apply equally to public and private prisons.286 The same holds for the certification standards of the ACA, which does not distinguish between public and private prisons when assessing facilities for accreditation purposes, and thus judges each on the same basis. As for the threat of service-provider replacement in cases of poor performance and ongoing monitoring of internal prison affairs, although the structuring regimes differ in each case, these mechanisms appear no more effective at constraining abuses in the public sphere than in the private.

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Private prisons’ lobbies do not dictate prison legislation. DAT Dolovich, Sharon. “State Punishment and Private Prisons.” Duke Law Journal. Duke

University. December 2005. Accessed 11/11/2014. Web. http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1274&context=dlj

Sharon Dolovich is a Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. And were private prison providers to seek to wield such influence themselves, they would enter a politicized arena in which several other interest groups already work to shape criminal justice policies in ways consistent with the financial interests of their members.365

Perhaps the most notable example in this regard is the California Correctional and Peace Officers’ Association (CCPOA). This organization, one of the most powerful lobby groups in California,366 represents all of California’s correctional officers and consistently supports state legislation providing for enhanced sentencing, seemingly regardless of the legitimacy of the punishments thereby imposed.367 The existence of CCPOA and other criminal-justice interest groups, however, does not vindicate the state’s use of private prisons, as some commentators appear to believe.368 Any time criminal justice policy is influenced by parties hoping to further their financial interests through increased incarceration regardless of the demands of legitimate punishment, it is cause for concern. The fact that the private prison industry is not the only group motivated in this direction suggests not that there is no problem with private prisons,but that the problem is more widespread than previously recognized.369

As private prison advocate Charles Logan sees it, introducing the private prisons industry into the political mix better serves “the public interest” by forcing competing interest groups—correctional officers’ unions, state agencies, etc.—to press their claims in the most vociferous way possible. This process, Logan claims, allows policymakers and citizens to “sort[] out the [public interest] from among competing definitions and claims.”370

This card in no way vindicates the use of lobbying by private prison contractors. However, it does mitigate the impact of the Pro's lobbying point. The most powerful lobby for harsher sentencing is, after all, majority composed of public prison employees. Private prison lobbying cannot thus be shown to conclusively be creating additional harm.

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Contentions

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Pro Case

Introduction: As a nation based upon innovation, the United States has struggled for decades on issues of private enterprise. Critics of the U.S.´ prison system praised private prisons because of the potential for reform. What was once a promising solution to the scores of problems with United States´ prisons has shown itself to be altogether wrong for the principles of United States criminal justice. The United States criminal justice system emphasizes equality for all men before the law and the necessity of rehabilitation—of giving prisoners a chance to reform their lives and contribute to society in a positive way. Private prisons take the emphasis off of rehabilitation and use extraordinary lockup quotas to focus on keeping prisons as full as possible. Because these prisons fail to achieve their purpose and cost United States taxpayers, we affirm the resolution that Resolved: For Profit Prisons in the United States should be banned.

Contention One: Private Prisons Encourage Recidivism The state of California is a textbook example of the many issues with for-profit prisons. According to Salon Magazine, which has been nominated for the National Magazine Award for its expert research, “Three privately run prisons in Arizona have contracts that require 100 percent inmate occupancy, so the state is obligated to keep its prisons filled to capacity. Otherwise it has to pay the private company for any unused beds.” Salon Magazine reports that “[These contracts run] counter to many states’ public policy goals of reducing the prison population and increasing efforts for inmate rehabilitation.” Occupancy requirements like the quotas established in California encourage officials to seek the harshest possible sentences just to maintain the ludicrously high occupancy requirements. These quotas focus on ensuring prison profits—which is the heart of the issue with for-profit prisons. For-profit prisons are actively interested in incarcerating as many people as possible. This goal is immediately counter to United States pillars of rehabilitation. In addition to the occupancy quotas established by many private prisons, Assistant Professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Arizona State Kevin Wright reports: “An emerging body of research on what works provides the impetus needed for a change in correctional philosophy. Programs and policies that emphasize rehabilitation and treatment are likely to be successful in reducing offender recidivism. Equally important is knowing what is likely to be ineffective in reducing recidivism. Programs that rely almost exclusively on coercion and punishment (without a treatment component) are unlikely to result in positive outcomes in terms of reduced offending.” Kevin Wright goes on to report that 12.4% of private prisons were without an education program, as compared to 0% of federal prisons. Not only, or perhaps, because private prisons are directly incentivized to keep prisoners inside, these prisons are much less likely to offer the resources needed to prevent recidivism.

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Contention Two: Costs While proponents of private prisons often call these systems more efficient and less costly, the facts show that private prisons are hurting American taxpayers. The Justice Policy Institute, a Montreal based independent institute of research, has found that: “Policies that promote incarceration over more effective public safety strategies cost more in both the short and long term. The average cost to incarcerate one person for one day in the U.S. is $78.88.119 Thus, policies that increase the length of time that someone is incarcerated can have a significant fiscal impact. For example, one study found that 10 years after California enacted its Three Strikes law, the people added to the prison system under the law between March 1994 and September 2003 would cost taxpayers an additional $10.5 billion in prison and jail expenditures, including $6.2 billion in added costs attributed to longer prison terms for nonviolent offenses.”

Private prisons actively promote incarceration. According to Salon Magazine, “65 percent of the private prison contracts ITPI received and analyzed included occupancy guarantees in the form of quotas or required payments for empty prison cells (a “low-crime tax”). These quotas and low-crime taxes put taxpayers on the hook for guaranteeing profits for private prison corporations.”

Contention Three: For-Profit Prisons Block Need for Reform My partner and I fully acknowledge the flaws with United States public and federal prisons and the need for systematic change. For-profit prisons are not the solution to this issue, these prisons prevent the deep-rooted reform the United States criminal justice system needs. According to the Huffington Post, currently ranked number 1 among United States political sites, Prison Law Office director Specter argues that private prison deals exacerbate the problems with United States´ criminal justice. "Instead of facing the sort of politically tougher questions of how to revise the sentencing structure, the state uses the private prisons as the release valve," he said. In recent years, states around the country have dramatically lowered the size of their prison populations, in part by reforming their sentencing laws. In Texas and other states, entire prisons have closed in the wake of these changes. These states´ changes show that reform is very possible—but for-profit prisons must not be a part of the picture.

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Con Case

Introduction: The Corrections Corporation of America, or CCA, was founded in 1983. In 1997, CCA opened a facility in Youngstown, Ohio. By md-1998, within a span of just one and a half years, the facility had seen about 45 assaults and fatal stabbings. You will likely hear Pro teams bring up this case, or something like it. The reason we bring it up instead is to show that it is not our goal to defend all the actions of private prisons, or their employees. And it is not my partner and I’s goal to defend all the general practices of private prisons, either. In negating the resolution Resolved: For-profit prisons in the United States should be banned, our goal is neither to establish that for-profit, or private, prisons are superior to public ones, nor that in most cases they are the better option. The American criminal justice system is broken and badly in need of reform. Private prisons are a part of that system, but so too are public ones. And it is by not only meeting minimum prison standards but also serving as a useful and beneficial component of both the modern prison system and a potential reformed one that private prisons serve their essential purpose. It is for this reason that they cannot, and should not, be banned.

Contention 1: Private prisons aren’t deficient To ban something is to accept that it does an unacceptable net harm to society. In the American criminal justice system, imprisonment is a requisite; prisons are a necessity. Public prisons are inherent to the system, which means that the merits of private prisons ought to be measured relative to those of their public counterparts. So, in comparison to public prison, my partner and I pose the simple question: have private prisons, as a collective, done enough harm to warrant their banning? One criterion for banning private prisons is the potential harm to prisoners: if private prisons violate human rights to an extent greatly surpassing public ones, they ought to be banned. This simply is not the case. For instance, Curtis Blakely of Truman State University found that “In fact, the private sector operated, on average, 24% below that of the public sector.” Contrast this with public prisons in massive states like California, where crowding has reached the extent that judicial orders have forced the state to export prisoners. There have been isolated incidents of overcrowding, unclean or unsafe conditions, etc. in private prisons. But until these levels far surpass those of public prisons, which are considered an essential good for the criminal justice system, there is no basis for banning public prisons. And as with the overcrowding example, any deficiency in the private sector can be matched and exceeded by the public sector.

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Contention 2: Private prisons are an asset to the criminal justice system

Imagine trying to fix a car with just a wrench and a couple screwdrivers. This is the equivalent of using solely public facilities and management to handle America’s prisoners. This isn’t simply matter of capacity, although California’s crowding predicament is a terrifying example of just such a problem. Instead, this is an issue of versatility. As noted by Alexander Volokh of Emory Law School, “the best system may be one of mixed public and private management, where private programs ‘complement existing public programs rather than replace them’.” Volokh goes on to cite the Ohio correctional system, where some public prisons have been turned over to private management and other private prisons turned public, allowing the state to ratchet up the best possible practices at all its facilities. By their nature, private facilities are adept at turning a profit; operational efficiency is a goal, not a nice ancillary asset. The public sector, meanwhile, is defined by regulation and the enforcement of standards. By thus turning over high-risk populations to the state and letting the private sector handle lower-risk matters where operational efficiency is easier to achieve without endangering care standards, state correctional systems can minimize costs without harming the quality of their incarceration p rograms.

Contention 3: Private prisons enable reform The American criminal justice system is badly in need of reform. A common trope is that private corporations are heavily invested in the status quo, thus preventing changes in a system which has one of the highest recidivism and incarceration rates in the free world. In fact, the use of privately-contracted prisons has the potential to be a far more effective harbinger for reform than a fully public system ever did. The reason is that private companies are contracted to run prisons. As explained by Kevin A. Wright of Arizona State University, “contracts can provide an increased flexibility toward the management of the prison and allow for administrators to respond more quickly to short-term trends and predictions.” Essentially, by specifying individual contracts, the state can experiment with reform-minded policies on-demand, on a per-prison basis. Private prisons’ contracts are also the reason they cannot be banned: corporations cannot actually be held accountable for the transgressions that occur in their prisons. Private contractors’ only duty is to fulfill the terms of their contracts. The significance of this is articulated by Sharon Dolovich of the UCLA School of Law: “When the state’s aim is saving money, it will be unwilling to undertake measures that will substantially raise the cost of privatization, even when doing so could arguably ensure more meaningful protections for vulnerable inmates.” With states across America finding themselves cash-strapped, states fail to contract high-quality services in exchange for more money; the economics simply aren’t feasible. It is thus foolish to blame private companies for the failings of the contracts under which they operate. Private prisons are tools. When paired with progressive contracts and baseline adequate funding, they can realize their potential as a reformative mechanism in the U.S. criminal justice system.