Donald Trump’s unpredictability and vague rhetoric has become a fact of American politics. Yet, although it is often unclear what Trump’s statements mean or imply, he has begun to adhere to some patterns. Through his cabinet appointees, Trump has displayed a troubling desire to push America into an age of laissez-faire governing, reminiscent of the turn-of-the century.
His pick for the post of Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos, has had few comprehensible remarks aside from her advocacy of privatizing education, by drawing funds from public education to school vouchers and charter schools. Tom Price, the new head of Health and Human Services, is a proponent of eliminating the department’s health insurance initiatives. This, coupled with Trump’s executive order scaling back the Affordable Care Act, mark clear steps towards privatizing health care. Furthermore, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, arguably Trump’s most questionable nominee, is a supporter of privatized prisons.
While the administration has taken not yet taken any sort of action regarding the privatization of prisons, Trump himself stated in a 2016 March town hall meeting on MSNBC that, “we can do a lot of privatizations, and private prisons. It seems to work a lot better.”
The looming prospect of the growth of the for-profit prison industry during the Trump era illustrates the need to reiterate why these institutions are anything but beneficial for Americans. For-profit prisons took their roots in the US beginning in the 1990s, under the pretense that they would be far more efficient than government run correctional facilities in handling rapid increases in the incarcerated population. Proponents argued that competition would force privatized prisons to be as optimal as possible, and the lack of bureaucratic red tape would reduce waste.
While for-profit prisons may appear to be a win-win solution on the surface, a closer look indicates that they are breeding-grounds for corruption. Consider this; their sole source of profit is the number of cells they keep full. In other words, it is in the best interest of private correctional facilities to advocate for what they supposedly deter: crime. It is neither easy nor ideal to impact crime-rates, so for-profit prisons aim to increase what can be directly impacted through policy: the grounds and duration of sentencing.
For-profit prison companies have used their massive revenues to gain a political foothold. According to Michael Cohen of the Washington Post, since 1989, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO, the largest private prison groups, have spent approximately $10 million to fund candidates that support their platform, and $25 million lobbying. These dollars have gone towards supporting legislation aimed at increasing prison populations, such as California’s three-strikes law and Arizona Senate Bill 1070, according to NPR. The prisons then incentivize states to fill their empty prison-beds by mandating occupancy rates or payment in the form of tax dollars.
Reasoning that private prisons invite corruption is not only intuitive, and cases of abuse have been well documented at these institutions. Such examples include the infamous 2009 “Kids for Cash Scandal”, in which two Pennsylvanian judges accepted $2.6 million from private prisons in exchange for enforcing zero-tolerance policies. Their rulings sent thousands of children to “out-of-home placements” for minor offenses, according to the Juvenile Law Center.
A 2016 review of contract prisons by the Department of Justice concluded that, “contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP institutions.” The same report found that, “per capita, the contract prisons reported a 28 percent higher average of inmate-on-inmate assaults,” than in facilities run by the government. As for claims that for-profit prisons save taxpayers money, research by the Arizona Department of Corrections found that inmates could cost up to $1600 more annually in for-profit prisons, than state run facilities. The analysis attributed the increase to “cherry-picking” by prisons. Private prisons selected healthier inmates, leaving health costs for sicker patients a burden of the state.
Under the Obama administration, the Justice Department resolved to scale-back federal reliance on for-profit prisons by prohibiting the Bureau of Prisons from renewing contracts with private prison facilities. Former attorney general Sally Yates explained in a memo from the Justice Department that private prisons “do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources,” as federally funded prisons, nor do they “save substantially on costs.”
These steps for forward may now be erased under the Trump administration. In anticipation of potential favorable changes, CCA and GEO saw their shares increase by more than 58 and 28 percent respectively, the day following the presidential election, according to the Huffington Post. It is beyond troublesome that there is an industry thriving off of what society condemns — high crime and incarceration rates. We need to take action to stop these institutions from continuing to flourish and expand under Trump.
