Some in the industry have begun to accept that private prisons may not exist in the decades to come. CoreCivic, the nation’s largest and oldest private prison firm, said it has begun to plan for a federal private prison ban if a Democratic candidate wins the 2020 presidential election (current frontrunners like former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren support its abolition), according to Nashville Post.
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I’m glad states are moving to ban private prisons, but it shouldn’t be necessary at all. Private prisons are anathema. What do we need government for, if it contracts out its primary responsibilities?
That the “free” US has the highest incarceration rate in the world should tell us something, yet we can’t afford housing? Taxpayer money would be much better spend turning a number of prisons into half-way houses or something less restrictive that could rehabilitate people enough to find useful employment, or to learn something useful in order to make positive contributions to society. So much wasted potential . . .
Once again, I claim drug laws are a big part of the problem, since much of the inmate population is comprised of petty drug offenders, who will have an even harder time getting employment after release because of their incarceration records.
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I totally agree with you, Katherine, about the war on drugs being the major source of high US prison populations. Personally I would like to see all prisons abolished. Europe had no need for prisons (or police) before the Enclosure Acts drove our ancestors off the commons. The first prisons were established to lock up landless peasants who were at risk of rebelling when they had no way to provide for themselves.
Norway has abolished prisons and replaced them (for the truly dangerous offenders) with residential rehabilitation centers that provide marketable employment skills. Michael Moore visits one of them in his film Where to Invade Next:
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I didn’t know that about the English Commons, but it certainly correlates with the situation we have today, in which homeless people end up in jails and prisons, because so-called “public land” has been in many instances closed off to the public. Where I live, the public schools sit on enormous plots of land, but these are virtually deserted after school and on weekends and holidays. Why?
The government buildings lock their bathrooms, because, I was told, “homeless people come in and wash up in them.”
Huh? Let’s convert a few government buildings to homeless shelters, shall we? We’d get more value for our tax dollars.
Will check out your referenced YouTube and get back to you soon.
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Private prisons are one of those things that should NEVER have been possible. It sickens me to think about them, because the more prisoners, the greater the profit in most respects. Um… conflict of interest here? You can kiss rehabilitation (of even a half-hearted attempt at it) goodbye. After all, they depend on re-offenders for profit, don’t they?
Despicable, shameful, and makes me spitting mad to think such things exist, and have for years. Privatizing prisons? That’s some dystopian-pseudo-Orwellian-Sinclair Lewis crap there!
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I agree totally, Chatty. What I find especially disgusting about private prisons is that states are charged a penalty by many private prison corporations whenever there are too many empty beds.
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