The issue of privately owned prisons was first brought to my attention by who of all people but Kanye West. In his controversial 2013 song “New Slaves,” West angrily raps, “See that’s that privately owned prison, get your piece today. They probably all in the Hamptons, braggin’ bout what they made.”
It turns out that Kanye might have been onto something. Two of the biggest privately owned prisons made a combined 3.3 billion dollars in 2012 from locking up 6 percent of state prisoners and 16 percent of federal prisoners, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
With the large chunks of money that these for profit prison companies take in, it only makes sense that they would attempt to influence the political process. Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders calls an end to the private prison in his Huffington Post article.
He points out that the two largest prison corporations “have funneled more than $10 million to candidates since 1989 and have spent nearly $25 million on lobbying efforts,” according to a Washington Post report.
Besides the ethical dilemma that results from making money by putting people behind bars, there are many problems within the privately owned prisons themselves that demand attention. Many reports of atrocious conditions for prisoners in for-profit prisons exist, such as the rat cake incident in Michigan, or the statistic that prisoners in Mississippi are 2-3 times more likely to be assaulted than inmates in publicly-run facilities.
The main problem undermining the privately owned prisons is a moral one. In a capitalist country such as the U.S., we generally agree that it’s a businesses’ right to maximize profit for its stakeholders by any legal means necessary. Since a privately owned prison is operating with the same fundamental logic, problems are bound to arise.
For the owners of these prisons, justice is in the rearview mirror when the allure of big money is in reach. It only makes sense that the owners of for-profit prisons would attempt to take shortcuts and exploit any loopholes that exist in the system. The repercussions are much more significant for this type of business than any other though.
If owners of privately owned prisons are getting money from the amount of people that they can manage to put behind bars, are they really that different from slave owners a couple centuries ago? That’s the case that West makes in his song, and I don’t think it’s that outlandish of an argument.
For profit prison owners make a buck off of each prisoner that gets put behind bars. Just as slaves had values that they were sold for, each prisoner has a similar price tag from the view of the for profit prison owners.
And it’s not like we’re talking about mass murderers and rapists here. During the span from 1980-2003, incarceration rates in this country quadrupled, violent crime rates remained relatively constant. The heavily publicized War on Drugs is the best studied link in the proliferation of inmates during this period.
As the U.S. searched for ways to put people behind bars, minorities in low income neighborhoods were (and still are) often targeted. This led to a drastically disproportionate number of African Americans and Hispanics representing the prison population in comparison to the U.S. population as a whole.
The roots of mass incarcerations in the U.S. are ugly and discriminative. It’s truly pathetic that we have more people in jail than any other country, including Communist China, a country with a population 4x our size. This is going to be a tricky problem to remedy, but we need to start by eliminating for profit prisons.
They’re an easy scapegoat to blame for our mass incarceration problem, despite the fact that it’s a complex, multi-level issue. Still, I think that by wiping out this corrupted practice, we can begin to lower the rate of people in prison for petty offenses.