Introduction: Background
Private prisons are part and parcel of contemporary society (U.S. Department of Justice). They cannot possibly be justified from an ethical perspective, yet they continue to operate and even make significant profits of the crimes committed in the U.S. communities. The phenomenon can be defined as the private organizations that are contracted by the government to perform the same services that state prisons do, i.e., contain the people that were sentenced by the court (U.S. Department of Justice).
Even though private prisons are still used nowadays, they must be viewed as a graphic example of human rights violations since it considers inmates not as people but as commodities, on which the organization can profit, therefore, putting money-making before the rehabilitation of criminals. Furthermore, the very existence of private jails defies one of the primary principles of democracy and human rights, i.e., the belief that one must be considered innocent until proven guilty. While there have been attempts to justify the idea of a privatized jail, they have been futile due to a complete lack of ethical foundation on which the arguments could be built (Marguiles). Therefore, private prisons as a phenomenon must be eradicated from the legal system of contemporary society.
History
The history of U.S. private prisons is long and painful. In 1982, the first private prison is known as the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) started. It was run by T. Beasley, T. D. Hutto, and R. Grants. (Price and Morris 245). However, the demand for the services of private prisons has not declined over the years, and CCA continues providing its services in the U.S. As a recent report states, there are approximately 92,500 beds across 67 prisons that are under CCA’s control. Among the primary reasons for private prisons to exist nowadays, the issues associated with overcrowding and the lack of space in state prisons need to be brought up first (Price and Morris 18). The correction beds make a total of 61,000 out of the stated number in 56 prisons.
Furthermore, numerous community-based and prerelease facilities are under the control of CCA, which means that private prisons contain a total of 8% of the U.S. prisoners and about 18% of the federal criminals. About a half of the illegal immigrants that were sentenced in the U.S. are also kept in private prisons, which may become the reason for reinforcing the role of private jails during Trump’s administration given the recent changes to the immigration laws (“Under Mr. Trump, Private Prisons Thrive Again”). Which is even more disturbing, the idea of using private prisons as the solution to the crime-related issues used to get substantial support from the present-day U.S. government up until recently since he stated the following during his election campaign: “I do think we can do a lot of privatizations and private prisons. It seems to work a lot better” (“Under Mr. Trump, Private Prisons Thrive Again”).
According to a recent report, the public frustration over the inefficacy of the penal system, which was failing miserably in its attempts to serve as the correction and rehabilitation facility due to the lack of funding, reached its boiling point. (Aman and Greenhouse 11) The demand for a more efficient system, as well as more reliable approaches to containing prisoners and preventing them from escaping grew to an incredibly high degree. The promotion of private prisons in the U.S. context was a response to the identified crisis (Price and Morris 15). Thus, the foundation for using private prisons as the solution was built (Aman and Greenhouse 10).
Procedural and Ethical Considerations
Even though there is a slight propensity to justify the idea of private prisons as the tools for containing prisoners in the circumstances where the lack of beds in state facilities is evident, the very concept of a private prison raises an array of ethical questions. Indeed, the idea of capitalizing on crime does not seem to be a legitimate foundation for business. However, apart from the identified ethical inconsistency, there are a plethora of aspects of private jail functioning that can be viewed as ethically questionable, at best, and humanly unjustifiable, at worst. When considering the reasons why private prisons should not be viewed as a part of the modern legal system, one must address three primary reasons, which include the promotion of incarceration and the absence of justice, issues with addressing juvenile crimes and offering criminals an opportunity to get rehabilitated, and the lack of control over the processes occurring in the environment of the organization. The latter problem opens a Pandora’s Box of its issues, which range from power abuse among the guards and the infringement of prisoners’ basic human rights to the possibility of contraband in the ostensibly safe confinement of a prison cell.
The issues associated with the process of closing jails are bound to have a drastic effect on the owners of prisons and, therefore, will compel them to keep jails full by overstepping legal boundaries and promoting injustice. Indeed, in small towns, where the facilities of the kind are typically located, prisons often become the source of employment and, thus, the financial well-being of an impressive number of residents. As a result, the uproar in the local community upon closing the facility is bound to be noticeable and, thus, cause certain economic and social issues.
Furthermore, there is an obvious path to the profitability of which the owners of private jails are aware. There has been substantial evidence that private jails have seen an attempt to cut expenses significantly so that the profit margins of the organizations could increase to a considerable extent: “private facilities pay their officers less, provide fewer hours of training and have higher inmate-to-staff ratios” (Marguiles). Therefore, profit becomes the leading principle that defines the choices made by the owners of the facilities, which means that the objectives which must be pursued by the organizations, such as the rehabilitation of criminals, is shifted into the background and is often overlooked. Thus, the foundational principles of ethics are violated.
Similarly, because of the lack of control over how private jails are run, there is a propensity among the owners of prisons to squeeze profit out of inmates by forcing them to perform manual labor that borders slavery and is often termed as “quasi-slavery” (Aman and Greenhouse 396). Therefore, a set of more rigid standards for controlling labor issues in private prisons needs to be established. Until then, the very foundation of a proprietary correctional facility remains bigoted.
Finally, the issue of safety and security needs to be brought up as one of the problems associated with privatized facilities. For instance, in some cases, there is direct evidence that the lack of a coherent and efficient security system makes it easy for prisoners to break the set rules: “Given the experiences in Virginia, adequate monitoring mechanisms must be in place to ensure that the advantages of privatized services are achieved” (US Department of Justice).” Thus, the approach that private prisons adopt toward managing the security-associated issues is beyond deplorable, which means that privatized jails cannot possibly view as the organizations that are run in either an ethical or reliable way.
How Ethical Problems Are Addressed
Claiming that nothing is being done to manage the ethical issues that private prisons create would be quite a stretch. Attempts to raise the ethical standards according to which private facilities are run nowadays have been made. For instance, there has been an endeavor at enhancing the levels of accountability so that more rigid control could be established (Tartaglia 1698). However, most of the approaches to addressing the issues related to the abuse of power and the ethical concerns fall flat because of the lack of reciprocity in the controlling process (Tartaglia 1701).
Therefore, private prisons as a concept are intrinsically flawed. They offer little to no opportunities for rehabilitation of the criminals. Furthermore, the owners of the identified facilities often abuse their rights by increasing profit margins with the help of the strategies affecting the rights of inmates (e.g., quasi-slave labor). The absence of control over the facilities allows for power abuse and negligence, which, in turn, leads to an array of dire outcomes from contraband to violence against inmates. Therefore, there is a necessity to put a stop to the phenomenon and eradicate it from the contemporary legal system as unethical and outrageous.
Works Cited
Aman, Alfred C., and Carol J. Greenhouse. Prison Privatization and Inmate Labor in the Global Economy: Reframing the Debate over Private Prisons. Indiana University Law Library, 2015.
Marguiles, Joseph. “This is the real reason private prisons should be outlawed.” Time. 2013. Web.
Price, Byron, and John Charles Morris. Prison Privatization: The Many Facets of a Controversial Industry. ABC-CLIO, 2012.
Tartaglia, Mike. “Private Prisons, Private Records.” Boston University Law Review, vol. 94, no. 5, 2014, pp. 1690-1744.
“Under Mr. Trump, Private Prisons Thrive Again.”New York Times. 2017. Web.
U.S. Department of Justice. Emerging Issues on Privatized Prisons. Bureau of Justice Assistance, 2013.