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I. Introduction
This article attempts to analyze the relationship between prison privatization and society's understanding of punishment and criminal justice theory. Simply put, how are our traditional notions of deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation, incarceration, and restorative justice served when private actors, rather than public institutions, are meting out punishment?
Prison privatization has received a great deal of coverage and analysis over the past decade. The majority of this analysis has focused on the budgetary questions. Can privatized prisons help streamline an extremely expensive industry? Will competition result in cost cutting, skimping, and dangerous conditions for inmates and prison personnel? And, of course, will privatization in this sector reduce costs in the long run? Or is it merely a short-term solution?
These issues have been addressed numerous times in a variety of ways. My goal here is to provide a more theoretical analysis of prison privatization. Cost and economic variables will play a role in the analysis; however, the primary goal of this article is to discuss how privatization shapes the conception of the criminal justice system through the eyes of policy makers, inmates, private correctional providers, and society itself. Moreover, this article weighs the economic interests of private prison corporations against the effects of this industry on society as a whole. Economic theory and the bottom line will continue to drive the prison privatization debate. Yet, in a society with a growing number of inmates housed in private facilities it is important to ask how our basic conceptions of criminal justice and punishment are changing with the introduction of new private actors.
II. The history and contemporary understanding of prison privatization
First, it is crucial to note that the distinctions between a public, government-run institution and a private facility are not always clear-cut.1 According to University of Colorado Professor Ahmed White:
To the extent that the state is not ubiquitous, and that the prison is not entirely hermetic, some aspects of every prison are always private. From the labor of its employees, to provisions for inmates' subsistence needs, to the land and capital that comprise the prison's physical structure, each exemplifies every prison's endemically, if partially, private character. In this sense, it is only possible to imagine a fully public prison either in a thoroughly...