Private Prisons For Profit

Businesses like CCA (Corrections Corp of America) are not like traditional prisons, they’re private prisons designed to make a profit off our imprisoned citizens and not only do they profit from full beds, but cut corners. Consequentially they are subjected to high turnover and incompetent and inexperienced staff.

Presently, there are seven privately run prisons in Florida. These corporations make donations to campaigns to increase the possibility of them winning the contract. For instance, the Geo Group donated 25,000 to Governor Rick Scott’s Inauguration festivities. In addition, Geo Group and Core Civic donated $2 million to various candidates and political parties.

The private prison companies insist that their lobbying and campaign donations are above board and legally compliant. They are corporations in the business of making profit, and so you cannot really blame them for doing whatever it takes to achieve that

Two of the biggest for-profit prison company, GEO and Corrections Corporation of America, have funneled more the 10 million dollars to candidates since 1989 and have spent around 25 million dollars in lobbying campaigns. One of the best examples of private prisons skewing the opinion of government officials is Marco Rubio and GEO. While Marco Rubio was the state representative of Florida, he awarded GEo a

Throughout mankind, the ideas of avarice and prosperity have pushed companies to work harder, although sometimes this can come with a price. Corruption infiltrates all manners of society like government and industries and the American prison system is no different. Since America must provide housing for those who are incarcerated, they build one prison per week due to the increased rate of criminals (Franklin). Many peoples’ crimes do not fit their punishment and additionally the duration of the punishment does not match the crime committed. Why is that? The corruption of state and local governments have an incentive to maintain a certain population within prisons. This is a current conflict within the United States. Therefore, state and local governments should not have the power to dictate the amount people who reside in America’s prisons. Further, financial incentives from companies should be banned from influencing the population of prisons.

Privately owned prisons are prisons operated by private entities for profit. They can be owned by individuals or companies and earn money through unethical practices. These prisons are supposed to cut cost, which they do by providing dangerous living conditions, submitting workers (both convicts and prison employees) to unethical work conditions, understaffing, and underpaying (Blesset 9). By cutting cost owners of theses prisons thrive financially from the imprisonment of criminals which is unethical.

Across the nation, both local and federal prison systems have looked to private corporations to provide beds for

But unlike federal prisons, private ones focus on maximizing gain rather than saving money, and maximizing gain becomes possible with the business practices aforementioned. Not only has the prison itself been privatized, but also the food and medical care. One company in particular is the Aramark Corporation who provides food to prisoners at a lesser cost. If there’s one thing not to be thrifty about, its food, and this proved to be true when there were serious cases of prisoners being mal fed reported all throughout the system. There were 65 reported cases in Ohio alone of food failing to be provided or running out of it, and 5 cases of maggots being found in the food. The Aramark Corp. has also changed their recipes to include cheaper and sub standard ingredients in their food. These prisons are failing to provide these prisoners with basic human care, because the fact that they’re in prison doesn’t change the fact they’re

As previously stated, private prison companies have to rely on the big prison population in order for them to make money because he main concern of these private corporations that run these facilities is money. Due to this, these companies will do whatever it takes to make sure the prison population increases so they can keep making money. Therefore, the private prison companies will lobby for laws to boost the prison population. Due to this financial motive they will do whatever it takes to make money. In the Corrections Corporation of America’s 2010 Annual Report they even stated the following:

As can be demonstrated and exemplified from the statistics, it argued that, from approximately 300,000 inmates during the 1970 to above 2.3 million today, that to end, America can now account for having 25% of the world’s prison population (Jing, 2010; Price and Morris (2012). This gave room for the private prison industry to evolve into what it is today, due to the vast increase of prisoners. Worth to mention is that private prisons have become a cheap and easy solution to the continued increase in prison population which has caused social, legal, health and humanitarian challenges for the government of the united-states. Jing, (2010) argues that the major objectives for the privatization for the government is to reduce overcrowding, efficiency

All of this along the massive amounts of money being made really show where the true intentions of the prison system lie. This is a business and as such prisoners are really just an asset all be it a disposal one when you have laws set in place that are mostly biased and in your favor. Since race has always been an issue this is yet another contributing factor to the high prisoner population. From the Cruel & unusual: the true costs of our prison system they say that “by 2000 about 60 percent of those imprisoned were either black or Hispanic” (the Cruel & unusual: the true costs of our prison system). These slave corporations which they basically are have an always growing and sure fire influx of profits coming in. These prisons exploit the inmates for their own profit all the while still making them work for nothing, and getting every last drop of worth out of these inmates some of whom are innocent. The cost for housing over two million inmates for state and federal governments is a staggering $64 billion with a B that is an insane number (The Cruel & unusual: the true costs of our prison

Corporate officials often have conflicting motivations to run these prisons and sacrifice the quality of care in their organizations in order to make a profit. A majority of the problems arising in private prisons is due in part to lack of government oversight and insufficient accountability. In addition to inadequate accountability, for-profit prisons hope to generate the greatest possible profit, and do this by any means necessary. Some will argue that the savings to the taxpayer is worth it, however the current data available clearly says otherwise.

The U.S. prison system includes private prisons operated for profit by corporations contracted by the federal government (“Privatization Of”, n.d.). Years ago, the industry was heavily boosted by the “war on drugs” efforts of the Reagan

Studies have shown that private prisons achieve none of these goals, and the reason is simple: private prisons operate under a fundamentally different regulatory structure that alters the choices -- and motives – of its participants. Indeed, unlike their federal counterparts, private prisons operate in a market economy where maximizing profits is vital to sustainability and thus a driving factor in corporate decision-making. Under basic economic theory, when operational costs exceed current and future estimates, corporations must identify ways in which to reduce such costs and therefore increase profitability. This is precisely what happened in the private prison context. Corporations such as CCA often underestimate the cost of operating private prisons in a manner that would increase safety and treat inmates more humanely. As a result, operators of private prisons made the deliberate choice

Who is investing? At least 37 states have legalized the contracting of prison labor by private corporations that mount their operations inside state prisons. The list of such companies contains the cream of U.S. corporate society: IBM, Boeing, Motorola, Microsoft, AT&T, Wireless, Texas Instrument, Dell, Compaq, Honeywell, Hewlett-Packard, Nortel, Lucent Technologies, 3Com, Intel, Northern Telecom, TWA, Nordstrom’s, Revlon, Macy’s, Pierre Cardin, Target Stores, and many more. All of these businesses are excited about the economic boom generation by prison labor. Just between 1980 and 1994, profits went up from $392 million to $1.31 billion. Inmates in state penitentiaries generally receive the minimum wage for their work, but not all; in Colorado, they get about $2 per hour, well under the minimum. And in privately-run prisons, they receive as little as 17 cents per hour for a maximum of six hours a day, the equivalent of $20 per month.