Private prisons: Exchanging humanity for profit

The United States of America tends to pride itself on its privatization of businesses, claiming that the free markets will incentivize healthy competition and create an economic environment in which corporations strive to outdo one another. This struggle for superiority would, in turn, create better service and increase the quality of their products or commodities. In most cases, this free-market model works quite well.

Yet there are some limitations that need to be put into place to prevent corruption. In my opinion, there is no better example than our country’s prison system, which is becoming more and more privatized. Why is the privatization of our prisons a negative?

A report from In the Public Interest (ITPI) has recently released some shocking numbers that may change your mind on prison privatization.

Many private prisons around the country have created deals with corporations that incentivize high occupancy rates in American prisons. Some of these deals require a 90 to 100 percent occupancy rate.

In the case of Arizona, my home state, three for-profit prisons have a 100 percent occupancy quota, which means that every single empty bed must be filled. What were to happen if this quota was not maintained?

American taxpayers, like you and me, would be paying for those empty beds. These deals can last for years. In the case of the Lake Erie Correctional Institution in Ohio, there is a 20-year contract put in place. Meaning that Ohio will be forced to maintain a steady stream of prisoners for two decades.

For Ohio taxpayers their take-home salary for the next 20 years may be dependent on how many people are carted through the system.

It may seem as if the issues are far beyond the scope of the university setting, but remember that drug and alcohol offenses are rampant on college campuses.

Students here at the University of South Dakota could suffer even heavier consequences for drug or alcohol violations by receiving prison time instead of fines or warnings, and the length of those sentences could change from person to person.

So, instead of receiving a citation from an on-campus police officer, you may be taking a ride down to the local penitentiary in the back of a police car.

This is a quite obvious downside, but there are other implications. With such high inmate quotas, it is likely that laws will be changed to ensure that as many American citizens as possible be filtered through the prison system.

This creates a dehumanization process that is quite frightening to me. Human beings become commodities that are placed into overcrowded areas like herds of cattle, and their treatment becomes severely diminished in the desire for maximum profit.

Instead of ensuring the criminal justice system is maintained based on the public interest, which is what Criminal Justice students such as myself strive for, private prisons incentivize policy changes that would not only harm American citizens but put an increase in profit over human life.

When will it be enough? When will we begin to realize just how little these corporations think of us as human beings? Do we find it acceptable that profit should supersede the rights of our own citizens? That is still up for debate.

But for me, private corporations have no feasible right to infiltrate and destroy the lives of American citizens based on a profit margin. To incentivize the purposeful imprisonment of your own people is quite a despicable notion, one that makes a mockery out of the current dogma of the prison system.

Nowhere in the contracts are social services mentioned, as ITPI states: “The report notes that contract clauses like this incentivize criminalization, and do nothing to promote rehabilitation, crime reduction or community building.” This means that necessary programs that further the education and rehabilitation of prisoners may be left as they are, diminished significantly, or scrapped altogether.

We may think of our prison system as a way to remove criminals from the public eye, but it does quite a bit more than hide the “undesirables” of our communities in a place we cannot see nor hear them. They provide assistance to prisoners that may change the course of their lives, often for the better, and when we turn social programs into profit gains, we lose sight of the human element and become blinded by wealth. This is not how our prison system should be.

Will prisoners eventually be stamped with barcodes and given a price tag upon entering? Most likely not. But the truth is not far from the fantasy. We need to reevaluate our morality before we make such powerful and influential decisions, and it is time for a discussion. USD students should be heavily inclined to join that discussion; after all, it could be your friend, your roommate, or even you that could suffer the consequences of prison privatization.