Question

issues related to prison privatization ..

pros and cons of prison privatization

Answer 1

1. The private-prison companies ultimately seek to save government money, but their real focus is on maintaining their own bottom lines. To minimize operating costs, these facilities cut corners, recruiting fewer employees, and less wages and less training. Private prison workers earn an average of more than $5,000 less than their government-employed counterparts, and receive 58 fewer training hours. This results in higher turnover of staff and less security in the prisons

The money saved from corporate-run prisons helps only the companies themselves, and those businesses are able to go to great and inhuman lengths to protect such profits. A particularly notorious example of this is the "Kids for Money" case in 2009, in which two Pennsylvanian judges were reported to have taken money from the owner of two private juvenile detention centers in exchange for sentencing juvenile offenders to imprisonment in those centres. In detention centers children were sentenced to imprisonment for offences such as shoplifting DVDs or failing to appear at trials they were never told of.

2. Pros of Private Prisons

Privatizing prisons creates employment opportunities for a population on many levels. There are the corresponding jobs available at the prison. Jobs in the service industry are necessary to support the population. Professionals in the transport sector must carry consumer goods in. In all, the U.S. private prison system is equating to an economic impact of around $80 billion annually.

The number of prisoners being held in publicly run federal and state prisons is increasingly outnumbering the beds and population levels that the institution was designed to hold. Most jails have a capacity of over 100 per cent. Many jails run at capacity levels of 130 per cent in California. When this is combined with low staffing levels, management of the workplace can be challenging. Through opening for-profit prisons, population levels per jail can be reduced so that prisoners can enjoy a better quality of life.

Cons of Private Prisons

Public prisons are often more expensive because all inmates, including those with high security threats, are forced to take them on. Inmates for benefit have the luxury of choosing inmates who instead increase their profits. If a low-risk prisoner becomes a high-risk prisoner under private prison supervision, most businesses have it in their contract to "replace" the prisoner

Prisons which operate on contracts for profit. Many governments are in charge of the actual services being used, not the private jail. This means the for-profit company may not even be responsible for needed repairs or improvements. It also means that if they believe the prison isn't successful enough the prison will decide to leave. If that happens, a group will be left with obsolete infrastructure, no jobs and lots of unpaid bills.