Cosponsoring and Cashing In: US House Members’ Support for Punitive Immigration Policy and Financial Payoffs from the Private Prison Industry

The private prison industry is a multi-million-dollar industry that has increasingly profited from the detention of undocumented immigrants. As a government contractor, therefore, the industry has a natural interest in government decision making, including legislation that can affect its expansion into immigrant detention. In this article, we examine the relationship between campaign donations made on behalf of the private prison industry and an untested form of position taking—bill cosponsorship—in the US House of Representatives. We hypothesize the private prison industry will reward House members for taking positions that benefit the industry. We also hypothesize the private prison industry will also reward House members who incur greater political risk by taking positions out of sync with the party. To test our hypotheses, we focus on punitive immigration legislation that has the potential to increase the supply of immigrant detainees over the course of eight years. We find support for our second hypothesis, that private prison companies are more likely to reward House Democrats who cosponsor punitive immigration policies even after accounting for possible endogeneity. The findings have important implications regarding the relationship between House members and private interests.

Impacts of Private Prison Contracting on Inmate Time Served and Recidivism

This paper examines the impact of private prison contracting by exploiting staggered prison capacity shocks in Mississippi. Motivated by a model based on the typical private prison contract that pays a per diem for each occupied bed, the empirical analysis shows that private prison inmates serve 90 additional days. This is alternatively estimated as 4.8 percent of the average sentence. The delayed release erodes half of the cost savings offered by private contracting and is linked to the greater likelihood of conduct violations in private prisons. The additional days served do not lead to apparent changes in inmate recidivism. (JEL H76, K42)

Holding private prisons to account: what role for Controllers as ‘the eyes and ears of the state’?

The advent of the private sector’s contemporary involvement in prisons in England and Wales saw the creation of a new role – that of the Controller. Controllers are embedded within all privately managed prisons as the ‘eyes and ears’ of the State. They hold the private sector to account on a day-to-day basis, ensuring that private providers deliver on their contractual promises and that the State’s delegated penal power is wielded in accordance with the law. While Controllers occupy an essential theoretical position within the prison accountability landscape, little is known about how Controllers understand and practice their roles and what this might mean for the nature and quality of accountability achieved. Drawing on qualitative data from interviews with Controllers, this chapter explores the vision of accountability pursued by Controllers, their orientations to contract management, and the practical nature and impact of their accountability work. The chapter focuses on the form and significance of Controllers’ relationships with private prison Directors, especially exploring themes of trust and relationality.

Simplifying Reality: The Media’s Portrayal of the Private Prison Debate

Although the media gives considerable attention to prison privatization, there have been few assessments of how newspapers portray the debate about it and how that portrayal aligns with what is known empirically about private prisons. This study addresses this gap in the literature by undertaking a content analysis of newspaper articles ( N = 131) about private prisons and private Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities, respectively. The results show that few news stories discuss the broad range of factors that scholars highlight as important aspects of the privatization debate. It is also uncommon for news reports, especially those that discuss private immigration facilities, to refer to empirical research or its importance. The implications of this limited portrayal of private facilities are discussed.

P3s and Social Infrastructure: Three Decades of Prison Reform in Victoria, Australia

Once regarded as core public sector business, Australia’s prisons were reformed during the 1990s and Australia now has the highest proportion of prisoners in privately managed prisons in the world. How could this have happened? This article presents a case study of the State of Victoria and explains how public–private partnerships (P3s) were used to create a mixed public–private prison system. Despite the difficulty of determining clear and rigorous evaluation results, we argue that lessons from the Victorian experience are possible. First, neither the extreme fears of policy critics nor the grandiose policy and technical promises of reformers were fully met. Second, short-term success was achieved in political and policy terms by the delivery of badly needed new prisons. Third, the exact degree to which the state has achieved cheaper, better, and more accountable prison services remains contested. As a consequence, there is a need to continue experimentation but with greater transparency.

Foreign experience in ensuring penitentiary security

The article constructively examines the activities of penitentiary institutions of leading foreign countries to ensure penitentiary security, taking into account the possibility of its use in domestic practice. The general characteristic of the modern Penal system of Russia is given, the main stages of its reform are noted, the political line of humanization of the Penal sphere while ensuring security for society, citizens and the state is pointed out. The internal and external aspects of penitentiary security, their organic interrelation and its integral and complex character are noted. On the basis of comparative legal method, in combination with other methods of scientific knowledge, the foreign experience of ensuring security of penitentiary institutions by differentiating convicts and conditions of serving sentences, as well as taking into account the wide use of advanced technical means of control and supervision in the process of penitentiary activity, is considered. As a result of generalization of foreign experience and its comparison with domestic practice, the existing problems of legal regulation in terms of differentiation of convicts serving sentences with isolation from society, as well as in the use of technical means to ensure prison security, are identified, and amendments to the current Penal legislation are proposed. As a matter of discussion, taking into account the review of best foreign experience, issues relevant to domestic practice, concerning the peculiarities of ensuring prison security in emergency situations, the model of a private prison institution, and the development of forms of social control and supervision of persons released from prison institutions, are noted. In this regard, conclusions about the parameters of foreign experience use in domestic practice are formulated.