Mission

Research questions:

Should criminal justice be privatized?

How can private prisons be improved?

Our Process

Our group spent an extended period of time in the research phase looking for financial statements, federal quality reports, and other journalistic pieces detailing the financial choices that private prisons make and the quality of life for their inmates and guards. We immediately discovered large volumes of research revealing how detrimental private prisons are to prisoner's mental and physical health, reincarceration, and local economies. We began to categorize this information and look for individual testimonies to the human rights abuses occurring in US prisons. The final summation of our research is compiled here, on this website.

Abstract

While private prisons only constitute 8% of the nation's prisons, they are nonetheless gaining in popularity; both due to being more affordable for the US government and because of an increasing in lobbying on the corporations' parts. The research conducted for this project has concluded our current system of both public and private prisons is acceptable in handling inmates, as there are many conflicting sources regarding the efficacy of their implementation. However, to optimize our system, we have several policy recommendations, which will be discussed in detail at the end of our website. Their picking-and-choosing of inmates means that public prisons hold more people with chronic health issues, both mental and physical. They're held to a much lower standard than public prisons, due to significantly lower funding and next to no oversight. Increased lobbying is also a major driving factor behind their growing popularity and their lack of oversight. From our reseach, we found that privately operated prisons had lower quality of life, on average, in comparison to public federal prisons.

Private prisons are an acceptable alternative to public prisons, only if they improve quality of life and are held to multiple higher standards.