[PDF] Private Prisons In America eBook

Author : Lauren-Brooke Eisen
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 476 pages
File Size : 20,8 MB
Release : 2017-11-07
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0231542313

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When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration—to the tune of $5 billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen’s work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America. From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America’s largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.

Author : Shane Bauer
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 401 pages
File Size : 17,94 MB
Release : 2019-06-11
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0735223602

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An enraging, necessary look at the private prison system, and a convincing clarion call for prison reform.” —NPR.org New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 * One of President Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2018 * Winner of the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize * Winner of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism * Winner of the 2019 RFK Book and Journalism Award * A New York Times Notable Book A ground-breaking and brave inside reckoning with the nexus of prison and profit in America: in one Louisiana prison and over the course of our country's history. In 2014, Shane Bauer was hired for $9 an hour to work as an entry-level prison guard at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana. An award-winning investigative journalist, he used his real name; there was no meaningful background check. Four months later, his employment came to an abrupt end. But he had seen enough, and in short order he wrote an exposé about his experiences that won a National Magazine Award and became the most-read feature in the history of the magazine Mother Jones. Still, there was much more that he needed to say. In American Prison, Bauer weaves a much deeper reckoning with his experiences together with a thoroughly researched history of for-profit prisons in America from their origins in the decades before the Civil War. For, as he soon realized, we can't understand the cruelty of our current system and its place in the larger story of mass incarceration without understanding where it came from. Private prisons became entrenched in the South as part of a systemic effort to keep the African-American labor force in place in the aftermath of slavery, and the echoes of these shameful origins are with us still. The private prison system is deliberately unaccountable to public scrutiny. Private prisons are not incentivized to tend to the health of their inmates, or to feed them well, or to attract and retain a highly-trained prison staff. Though Bauer befriends some of his colleagues and sympathizes with their plight, the chronic dysfunction of their lives only adds to the prison's sense of chaos. To his horror, Bauer finds himself becoming crueler and more aggressive the longer he works in the prison, and he is far from alone. A blistering indictment of the private prison system, and the powerful forces that drive it, American Prison is a necessary human document about the true face of justice in America.

Author : Michael A. Hallett
Publisher : University of Illinois Press
Page : 210 pages
File Size : 24,61 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Corrections
ISBN : 0252073088

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Under the auspices of a governmentally sanctioned "war on drugs," incarceration rates in the United States have risen dramatically since 1980. Increasingly, correctional administrators at all levels are turning to private, for-profit corporations to manage the swelling inmate population. Policy discussions of this trend toward prison privatization tend to focus on cost-effectiveness, contract monitoring, and enforcement, but in his Private Prisons in America, Michael A. Hallett reveals that these issues are only part of the story. Demonstrating that imprisonment serves numerous agendas other than "crime control," Hallett's analysis suggests that private prisons are best understood not as the product of increasing crime rates, but instead as the latest chapter in a troubling history of discrimination aimed primarily at African American men.

Author : Martin P. Sellers
Publisher : Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press
Page : 148 pages
File Size : 44,64 MB
Release : 1993
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780838634929

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The purpose of The History and Politics of Private Prisons in America is to examine the history of the movement, establish how politics affects it, and provide practitioners, politicians, academics, and students with alternative thinking about the value of privatizing prison management. In the first two chapters, author Martin P. Sellers provides a brief history of incarceration and surveys the current privatization movement in the United States, identifying its roots in economics, politics, and administration. Chapter 3 identifies the many political, economic, social, and administrative arguments against privatization and attempts to explain how these arguments developed. In chapter 4, Sellers analyzes three private prisons, comparing them to three public prisons, to determine which group is more efficient at providing prison services, particularly health and education services.

Author : James Austin
Publisher :
Page : 83 pages
File Size : 40,40 MB
Release : 2001
Category : Corrections
ISBN :

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This report discusses the findings of a nationwide study on the use of private prisons in the United States. The number of these prisons grew enormously between 1987 and 1998, with proponents suggesting that allowing facilities to be operated by the private sector could result in cost reductions of 20%. The study examined the historical factors that gave rise to the higher incarceration rates, fueling the privatization movement, and the role played by the private sector in the prison system. It outlines the arguments, both in support of and opposition to, privatized prisons, reviews current literature on the subject, and examines issues that will have an impact on future privatizations. The report concludes that, rather than the projected 20-percent savings, the average saving from privatization was only about 1 percent, and most of that was achieved through lower labor costs. Nevertheless, there were indications that the mere prospect of privatization had a positive effect on prison administration, making it more responsive to reform.

Author : K.C. Carceral
Publisher : NYU Press
Page : 267 pages
File Size : 50,73 MB
Release : 2006
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 081479954X

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This is a first-hand account of life behind bars in a controversial new type of prison facility: the private prison. Privatisation is seen as a necessary and cost-saving measure, but not much is known about how these facilities are run, so this text provides a look inside a private prison by an inmate.

Author : Anna Gunderson
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 209 pages
File Size : 13,53 MB
Release : 2022-06-16
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0197624138

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A novel explanation for state prison privatization: that they do so to limit legal and political accountability for inmate lawsuits. One of the most controversial developments in the American criminal justice in the last few decades has been the development of the modern private prison industry. While there are many explanations proffered for the adoption of this policy--including partisanship, economic stress, unionization, and lobbying efforts by private prison firms--none fully explain why states privatize their prisons. In Captive Market, Anna Gunderson proposes a novel explanation for why states adopt this policy. She shows that states privatize prisons to limit legal and political accountability for inmate lawsuits, an unintended consequence of the legal rights revolution for prisoners. Evidence from an original dataset and interviews with private prison companies, government officials, and advocacy groups suggest that growing prisoner lawsuits are a significant driver of prison privatization in the United States. With over 160,000 inmates currently held in private facilities across the country, it is vital to understand the causes of this rise and the nuances of private prison policy, one with significant consequences for the American criminal legal system. An eye-opening account of an industry that many are aware of but few know much about, this book will reshape our understanding of the fundamental nature of the American carceral state.

Author : Baz Dreisinger
Publisher : Other Press, LLC
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 45,91 MB
Release : 2016-02-09
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 159051727X

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Baz Dreisinger travels behind bars in nine countries to rethink the state of justice in a global context Beginning in Africa and ending in Europe, Incarceration Nations is a first-person odyssey through the prison systems of the world. Professor, journalist, and founder of the Prison-to-College-Pipeline, Dreisinger looks into the human stories of incarcerated men and women and those who imprison them, creating a jarring, poignant view of a world to which most are denied access, and a rethinking of one of America’s most far-reaching global exports: the modern prison complex. From serving as a restorative justice facilitator in a notorious South African prison and working with genocide survivors in Rwanda, to launching a creative writing class in an overcrowded Ugandan prison and coordinating a drama workshop for women prisoners in Thailand, Dreisinger examines the world behind bars with equal parts empathy and intellect. She journeys to Jamaica to visit a prison music program, to Singapore to learn about approaches to prisoner reentry, to Australia to grapple with the bottom line of private prisons, to a federal supermax in Brazil to confront the horrors of solitary confinement, and finally to the so-called model prisons of Norway. Incarceration Nations concludes with climactic lessons about the past, present, and future of justice.

Author : Tara Herivel
Publisher : The New Press
Page : 346 pages
File Size : 19,95 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1595584544

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In Prison Profiteers, co-editors Tara Herivel and Paul Wright "follow the money to an astonishing constellation of prison administrators and politicians working in collusion with private parties to maximize profits" (Publishers Weekly). From investment banks, guard unions, and the makers of Taser stun guns to health care providers, telephone companies, and the U.S. military (which relies heavily on prison labor), this network of perversely motivated interests has turned the imprisonment of one out of every 135 Americans into a lucrative business. Called "an essential read for anyone who wants to understand what's gone wrong with criminal justice in the United States" by ACLU National Prison Project director Elizabeth Alexander, this incisive and deftly researched volume shows how billions of tax dollars designated for the public good end up lining the pockets of those private enterprises dedicated to keeping prisons packed. "An important analysis of a troubling social trend" (Booklist) that is sure to inform and outrage any concerned citizen, Prison Profiteers reframes the conversation by exposing those who stand to profit from the imprisonment of millions of Americans.

Author : Donna Selman
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 28,22 MB
Release : 2010-01-16
Category : Law
ISBN : 1442201746

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Punishment for Sale is the definitive modern history of private prisons, told through social, economic and political frames. The authors explore the origin of the ideas of modern privatization, the establishment of private prisons, and the efforts to keep expanding in the face of problems and bad publicity. The book provides a balanced telling of the story of private prisons and the resistance they engendered within the context of criminology, and it is intended for supplemental use in undergraduate and graduate courses in criminology, social problems, and race & ethnicity.