Competition For Prisons

A quarter of a century has passed since the Thatcher government launched one of its most controversial reforms: privately run prisons. This book offers an assessment of the successes and failures of that initiative, comparing public and private prisons, analyzing the possible and claimed benefits of competition, and looking closely at how well the government has managed the unusual quasi-market that the privatization push created. Drawing on first-person interviews with key players and his own experience working in prison finance, Julian Le Vay presents the most valuable look yet at the results of prison privatization for government, citizens, and prisoners.

Offers information on private prisons, provided by Charles H. Logan. Includes statistics on prison performance measures and public versus private prison quality, a bibliography on private prisons, and studies and reports on topics such as privatizing the prison system, increasing the privatization of prisons, and a comparison of the quality of confinement in public and private prisons.

""Criminals, Nazis, and Islamists: Competition for Powers in Former Soviet Union Prisons" examines conflicts and cooperation between inmates in male prisons in the former Soviet Union. It looks at how Vory criminal organization, that began in 1930th was able to develop rules, norms, and unique criminal ideology to ensure their monopoly in prison internal governance. In particular this book discusses the organization of inmates life inside prisons and how Vory criminal organization governs it"--

Gaes and his distinguished coauthors offer a comprehensive analysis of public versus private management of prisons, a competition that originated in the 1980s with the introduction of private facilities into the criminal justice system. The authors argue that prison performance must be measured in reference to the goals of a particular prison system and introduce the technique of multilevel modeling to allow for simultaneous measurement of the individual and the institution. They also show how their analytic framework can be applied to other criminal justice components_prosecution, adjudication, postrelease supervision, policing_and to evaluating the privatization of almost any publicly administered service. They contend that the ability to meaningfully compare public and private prisons can better inform penal policy and improve prison performance and accountability. This book will be a valuable resource for public administrators and policy analysts, corrections personnel and criminologists.

This paper examines several aspects of the private prison debate: (1) How much scope is there for improving the technical and economic efficiency of incarceration through contracting-out to private prison entrepreneurs? (2) Will a fully developed corrections industry be sufficiently competitive to ensure that any efficiency gains are passed on to the taxpayers? and (3) Would contracting-out for prison management create the opportunity for private firms to exercise influence, illegitimately and inefficiently, over public decisions about corrections? This assessment yields the following major conclusions: (1) neither theory nor the limited data that exist suggest that the task of incarceration is very well suited to the advantages offered by profit-seeking organizations--chiefly, cost consciousness and an aptitude for innovation; (2) there are serious structural barriers to genuine competition for prison management contracts; (3) in general, the enterprise of incarcerating people has relatively little scope for technical progress in trimming costs; (4) even if private-prison corporations succeed in cutting costs, there is unlikely to be sufficient competition in any given community to ensure that the savings result in diminished government budgets for corrections; (5) there is a substantial likelihood that government contracts with prison corporations will fully protect neither the interests of the public nor the prison inmates; (6) although private prisons might not be as unaccountable or inhumane as some critics have predicted, neither do they offer anywhere near the advantages promoted by their advocates and agents; (7) incarceration today remains a symbolically potent public function; and (8) dismissing widespread uneasiness among policymakers about introducing profits into punishment and corrections requires far more compelling practical advantages than private prisons are likely to deliver. Six pages of notes are included at the end of the paper. (NLL)

Born in Somerset in 1957 to itinerant Scottish parents, Erwin James lost his mother when he was seven. Shipped from home to home and subject to the whims of various caregivers after his father turned to alcohol and violence, he committed his first crime of breaking and entering when he was ten. His teenage and early adult years were spent drifting, and his petty crime turned increasingly violent, culminating in the terrible events for which he was jailed for life in 1984. Entering prison at 27, James struggled to come to terms with the enormity of his crimes and a future without purpose or hope. Then he met Joan, a prison psychologist, who helped him to confront the painful truth of his past, and to understand how it had shaped him from such a young age. Her sessions transformed his life. Encouraged to read and to educate himself, over the next twenty years Erwin James would go on to receive a BA in History, and become a regular columnist for the Guardian. Speaking to the very heart of the human condition, this is a book that offers no excuses - only the need to understand how we become who we become, and shows that no matter how far a person may fall, redemption is possible with the right kind of help. It is an important and timely memoir.