Private Prisons

As promised, I’m doing my blog on private prisons, brought to you by Wikipedia and a few other sites. Unfortunatly, I found that there are a few companies that own a bunch of prisons, but besides “contractual agreements”, I couldn’t find where they got their money.

Private prisons receive their money through contractual agreements with “local state or federal governments that commit priosoners and then pay a per diem or monthly rate for each prisoner confined in the facility” (Wikipedia). They began in England after the American Revolution. They could not ship criminals to the United States after the revolution, so “Great Britain began placing them on hulks moored in English ports” (Wikipedia). The first for-profit prison in the United States was in California in 1852. Private prisons did not become especially popular until the 1980s, where there was a war on drugs which made several prisons become overpopulated and new ones needed to be built.

This new “modern” private prison business first emerged publically in 1984 when Corrections Corporation of America received a contract to take over a facility in Hamilton County in Tenessee. By December 2000, the United States had 153 private correctional facilities (which includes prisons, jails, and detention centers). These private correctional facilities had over 119,000 people in them. Today, the United States has 264 correctional facilities, with almost 99,000 adult offenders. “7% of the 2 million adult prisoners in the United States are in private facilities.” (prisonpolicy.org)

Private prisons provide more jobs for local cities, are more cost-efficient for each local town as well as put pressure on the public prison systems. States save money if they have both public and private prison systems. There are several contradicting studies as to whether the private prison system actually saves each state money.

The poor economy has affected the stalk market for the private prisons, so there are not many new ones being built. I could not find how people gained profit from prisons, but “The cost of corrections-in cluding state, local, and federal corrections budgets-ran to more than $20 billion a year in the early 1990s. The cost of constructing enough cells just to keep up with the constant increase in prisoners is estimated at $6 billion a year” (mediafilter.org).

Sorry guys, although I found that there are three major companies that run private prisons, I really don’t know where the money comes from. Please let me know if you find anything.

Here are the sites I went to:
http://www.prisonpolicy.org/prisonindex/overviewprivate.html
http://mediafilter.org/MFF/Prison.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison