The first substantial prison built in what is U.S. soil today was established in 1570 by the Spanish in St. Augustine, Florida, although penal incarceration (imprisonment as a legal punishment for crime) was not a reigning principle of the day. Instead, traditional punishments—such as fines, penal servitude, whippings, and the stocks—and penal transportation were much more common. Sailing crews during the Age of Exploration were often padded with convicted criminals; Christopher Columbus’s first voyage in search of the West Indies included at least four of them. And by the 1600s, it was a regular practice for Britain to ship convicts to North America, either to help colonize or to be sold into indentured servitude, the most famous example of the former being the colony and future state of Georgia, which in the 1720s was settled almost entirely by convicts. The trend towards penal incarceration in the United States began after the American Revolution, where increased mobility, growing population and urban centers, and changes in perception of one’s community made most of the traditional punishments of before lose efficacy.
But in recent decades, another trend has been taking place within the realms of our justice system, one that is unsound not only ethically but economically: mass incarceration, and the expansion of the private prison system.
In the last four decades, the number of incarcerated people in the United States has increased by 500%. This has resulted not from crime rates—which have been steadily decreasing since the 1990s—but from stricter, “tough on crime” policies and sentencing practices such as longer terms, the Three-Strikes Law, and mandatory minimum sentences. The War on Drugs has had an especially large impact on the explosion in incarceration; more than 1.25 million arrests annually are for drug possession, many of them occupying space in local jails to await trial, and in 2015 nearly half of those arrests were merely for marijuana possession, a number greater than the total arrests for all violent crimes combined. In the same year, over 460,000 of those incarcerated overall were for drug offenses—a greater number of people than the entirety of prisoners in the United States in 1980.
Despite the statistics, the impact on the crime these stricter measures are meant to combat is inconclusive at best and more often ineffective. Illegal drug use in the United States today among those 12 years of age and older has not only not decreased, but grown even higher than rates in the early 1980s, and in 2011 the Global Commission on Drug Policy declared the global War on Drugs a failure “with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world.” The decline in crime rates in recent decades has been only mildly linked to these stricter, more severe policies, due to research showing both incarceration’s studied ineffectiveness against youth crimes and drug offenses, and the tendency of people to “age out” of crime, rates dropping sharply once one reaches their 30s and 40s. Clearly, this all suggests that long-term incarceration, with the exception of extreme circumstances, is an inefficient and ultimately fallacious attempt at prevention.
If all of these facts are true and well-observed, why does the United States incarcerate the greatest number of prisoners in the entire world? Why be so “tough on crime” when abounding evidence proves that such policies don’t work?
The answer is the private prison industry, which currently makes and stands to continue making billions of dollars in profit annually off of the excessive imprisonment of the American people.
In 2010, the United States spent over $80 billion, or about $260 per average American taxpayer, on corrections expenditures alone, triple that of 1980; including police protection and judicial and legal services, the total annual bill came out to be $261 billion. The expenses of prison health care especially have been on the rise; correctional health care spending rose in 41 states by a median of 13% from 2007 to 2011, while per-inmate spending rose in 39 states with a median growth of 10%. Not surprisingly, these trends are a result not only of increases in the number of prisoners, but in the age of them, as more and more people live out longer incarceration sentences. States with greater percentages of older inmates tended towards higher per-inmate health care spending than those with less.
These costs place significant strain on state and federal budgets—and knowing this, supporters of privatization have long asserted that private facilities are more cost-effective and efficient than public ones. These assertions, however, are inaccurate at best. Private prisons often house a disproportionate amount of low-cost, low-risk inmates compared to public prisons and refuse to house those of high cost, creating a superficial illusion of cost-effectiveness, and studies not funded by the private prison industry have found little or inconclusive differences between the expenditures of publicly-owned and privately-owned facilities.
Too, private prisons by nature run contrary to the public’s best interests. Their business model functions entirely on the principle of incarcerating people, encouraging lobbyists for the prison-industrial complex to push the strict, “tough on crime” policies that invariably fill prisons with prisoners and to lobby against reform movements focused on replacing these ineffective methods with less stringent incarceration sentences, reduced numbers of prisoners, and more rehabilitative measures for drug offenders—reform movements that would also begin depriving private prisons of the source of their profit.
In the past, private prisons have been discovered to be in violation of safety regulations and endangering inmates with insufficient or withheld health care. Wages are consistently lower, benefits poorer, and staff training of less quality in order to cut costs and maximize profit, leading to higher employee turnover rates and rates of violence. Private prison corporations have been the centerpiece for incidents such as the “kids for cash” scandal in 2009, in which two Philadelphia judges were discovered to have been accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks from private detention centers in exchange for sentencing a total of about 2,500 teenagers to time in the institutions.
The purpose of laws, of the criminal justice system, of government is not to make a successful business model of itself, but to serve its people so that as many as possible have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And neither mass incarceration nor private prison corporations perform as they do today with that objective ultimately in mind.
References
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Criminal Justice Facts. (n.d.). Retrieved May 23, 2017, from http://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/
Gottschalk, Marie (2006), The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America, Cambridge.
Hirsch, Adam J. (1992), The Rise of the Penitentiary: Prisons and Punishment in Early America, New Haven.
Ingraham, C. (2016, October 12). Police arrest more people for marijuana use than for all violent crimes - combined. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/10/12/police-arrest-more-people-for-marijuana-use-than-for-all-violent-crimes-combined/
Kearney, M. S. (2014, May 1). Ten Economic Facts about Crime and Incarceration in the United States. Retrieved from http://www.hamiltonproject.org/papers/ten_economic_facts_about_crime_and_incarceration_in_the_
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Mason, C. (2012, January). Too Good to be True: Private Prisons in America (Rep.). Retrieved http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/too-good-to-be-true-private-prisons-in-america/
Meranze, Michael (1996), Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760–1834, Chapel Hill.
Rothman, David J. (2011), The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic, New Brunswick.
Shapiro, D. (2011, November 2). Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration (Rep.). Retrieved https://www.aclu.org/banking-bondage-private-prisons-and-mass-incarceration
Stauffer, B. (2017, March 02). The Human Toll of Criminalizing Drug Use in the United States. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/report/2016/10/12/every-25-seconds/human-toll-criminalizing-drug-use-united-states
T., & J. (2014, July 8). State Prison Health Care Spending (Rep.). Retrieved http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2014/07/08/state-prison-health-care-spending
Urbina, I. (2009, March 27). Despite Red Flags About Judges, a Kickback Scheme Flourished. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/28/us/28judges.html
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