Private Prisons, America’s Life Dealers

How much is a day of your life worth?

Private prisons want to squeeze every day out of their prisoners. A study last year found that prisoners in for profit prisons spend on average 60 to 90 more days behind bars than in public prisons. For the 126,272 people in private prisons, at an average 75 days each, that amounts to 9,470,400 extra days spent in prison. With the current life expectancy, those days are equivalent to the full lives of 330 men.

The business model of private prisons motivates them to keep more prisoners for more time. This is due to the government paying a majority of private prisons based on the number of beds they have occupied. There is no supply and demand in this business model. There is no competition. The largest three private prison companies hold over 96 percent of all private prison beds. And the prisoners themselves are not consumers─each is playing the lottery when an upper power decides what type of prison they should be in.

So, how much is a day worth? According to the state of Mississippi, it is about $-8.71. A Brookings Institution study says that Mississippi spends from $6.03 to $11.39 more per day for a prisoner kept in private prison than a public one. This is largely due to private prisons opening with low costs to receive government contracts, then slowly raising them until they equalled or exceeded the costs of public prisons.

It is not only the private prison corporations like CoreCivic and Geo Group that are making money off of prisoner’s lives, but private citizens as well. These large companies have gone public on the stock exchange, allowing for others to trade based on their profits. In fact, these stock prices have gone up over 100 percent since President Trump has been in office, caused by Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinding an Obama administration order that directed the Justice Department to wean off the use of private prisons.

This government support for private prisons comes largely from their company’s lobbying efforts. Since 1989, CoreCivic and Geo Group have spent almost $25 million on lobbying and given over $10 million to political campaigns. In general, these companies tend to support legislation and candidates that will tighten laws and increase the incarceration rate, directly raising their bottom line. This tends to focus on candidates of the Republican party, particularly in states with a large number of undocumented immigrants.

Throughout this all, private prisons provide no greater quality in the treatment of their prisoners or of their guards. When a journalist from Mother Jones went undercover as a CoreCivic prison guard, he found that the guards were underpaid, the prison understaffed, and the prisoners more likely to commit violent acts.

Public and private prisons alike are also equally bad at reducing the future crime of their prisoners. Both have a recidivism rate of 75 percent, creating a loop of prisoners that only puts more money in the pockets of private prisons.

There is no benefit to privatizing prisons. They cost more in the long run, treat their prisoners more poorly, and lobby to perpetuate the economic motor of mass incarceration. They make money by restraining the lives of human beings. They make no effort to reform their prisoners. The United States has the highest percentage of their populace behind bars─we should at least attempt to treat them well.