Trump Executive Order Ended the Prohibition on Private Federal Prisons

Private prisons are large businesses with revenues exceeding $7 billion a year. These prisons maximize profits by reducing their costs for labor, maintenance, food and medical treatment as much as possible. The focus on profits results in a “a powerful, indeed overwhelming, incentive to deny care.” For example, people incarcerated in private prisons file twice as many complaints about their medical care compared to those in BOP (Bureau of Prisons) custody.

The culture and priorities of a private prison are profit over humanity. In addition to subpar medical care, a report by the DOJ Inspector General found that private prisons had more safety and security incidents and were more likely to misuse solitary confinement. There are also higher rates of assaults and use of force, more lockdowns, and more than twice as many grievances over the quality of food and use of solitary confinement in private prisons as compared to BOP prisons. A significant reason for this discrepancy is that the focus on profits leads private prisons to pay their officers less, provide fewer hours of training to their staff, and have a lower staff-to-inmate ratio. They are simply not prepared to safely run a prison.

Compounding these problems is the fact that private prisons are not subject to the same regulations as government prisons, which means the people held in private prisons have fewer protections. For example, it was found that a private prison falsified records, hiding thousands of hours of shifts that were improperly left empty for many months. If and when the government manages to discover violations, many private prisons have made the business decision that it is cheaper to pay fines than to provide requisite services and protections to incarcerated people. It is clear that when a facility’s main motivation is profit, the profit is made at the expense of the safety and wellness of the people incarcerated there. The perverse profit incentives and resulting unsafe and unhealthy conditions led one judge to call a private facility “an absolute hellhole.”

Our legal system disfavors private prosecutors who have been hired by a victim’s family or judges who get paid only when a person is convicted. This is because there is reason to distrust situations that combine profit with what is supposed to be the administration of justice. No such rule prevents businesses from profiting from mass incarceration in the United States, which has the world’s highest incarcerated population.

Private prisons make their profits from criminalization, so they lobby for harsher sentences that will fill their prisons. Private prison companies heavily invest in lobbying legislatures to pass punitive policies that will increase the need for prisons. Just one of these companies spends $1.4 million per year lobbying federal lawmakers and employs an average of 70 lobbyists to do the same at the state level. Using incarceration as a tool to build wealth presents an opportunity for corruption. In one such example, a judge who was bribed by a private prison sentenced kids more harshly — sending them to private juvenile detention centers instead of probation — so the private prison could increase their population and thereby increase their profits. The ties between for-profit prisons and mass incarceration are not speculative; research shows that when states turn to private prisons, the number of people incarcerated rises and the length of sentences increases — both of which increase costs for taxpayers. Private prisons don’t have any incentive to attempt to rehabilitate — it goes against their business model to attempt to reduce recidivism.

Imprisoning people is expensive. Some have argued that contracting with a private company to run a prison would reduce costs and save taxpayer money. However, this has never been proven. Instead, a meta-analysis of 24 separate studies on this issue concludes that private prisons are not more cost-effective and do not relieve the financial burden of incarceration costs. Furthermore, one of the very few studies to attribute some cost savings to private prisons was recently discredited when it was found that private prison companies had financed the study; that study became the subject of an ethics inquiry.

Private prisons are also low-value employers, which brings additional harm to surrounding communities. The companies’ profit model is based on low salaries and benefits, creating as few jobs as possible while sapping municipal tax coffers and resources. Additionally, private prison employees are far less likely than BOP employees to be a part of a union and are therefore more vulnerable to low wages and poorly funded pensions, and are at risk of being easily fired. These labor practices, together with how prisoners are treated, ultimately hurt the communities in which these prisons are housed.