Private prisons account for 8% of the total state and federal prison population in the United States+. Are they really a major driver of criminal policy?
[+] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
[+] https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/07/us/political-gains-by-pri...
The other 92% doesn't lobby for laws that result in more prisoners, but a billion dollar industry does.
So the 8% statistic is a red herring.
For example, the 6 states with the lowest incarceration rates (New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Maine) have no private prisons. And 9 out of the 10 states with the highest incarceration rates do have private prisons.
- Percent of privately incarcerations: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...
- Incarceration rates by state: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incarce...
This is really off the mark.
Having prisons and jails owned by the government does not mean that there's no incentive to increase the inmate population - in fact, the US is proof positive of that, because, for all the press that private prisons get, the number of them is quite small, and most of the worst abuses occur in state-run prisons.
This isn't going to be a popular opinion here, but I should point out that, in general, people tend to underestimate the extent of the prison-industrial complex in Western/Central Europe, and particularly its effect on ethnic and religious minorities. It doesn't help that a lot of the countries that have problems with this also make it either difficult or illegal to access that data officially, so it's not discussed nearly enough.
On the other hand, there are also plenty of people who want to reduce the amount of crime that happens, and then they are more concerned with if the justice system actually achieves this goal. Pain based justice plainly doesn't.
How are food, clothes, supplies, etc. sourced? Who builds the prison? Is this all done by the government down to the farmer? Or is there a supply chain that makes profit by selling to prisons? If so, there is a prison industrial complex.
How about the staff? Are they paid? Do they have a union?
If there is a profit motive, there is a potential for political lobbying / corruption.
I'd say you are now pretty clearly arguing for diluting the meaning of the "military-industrial complex" context to nothingness.
However, in the US it is common for major inter/national firms to service entire state prison systems. This is surely a representation of the prison industrial complex, and that's what I was getting at.
Simply having publicly run prisons does not preclude this type of situation, a major firm holding large contracts and thus having an incentive to grow the criminal population, unless it would be wholly socially and politically unacceptable to do so.