Do Private Prisons Really offer Savings Compared with their Public Counterparts?

Kish, Richard J.; Lipton, Amy F.

doi:10.1111/ecaf.12005

Cited by 20 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 17 publications

(32 reference statements)

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“…For example, 8 percent of prisoners in the US (with state rates ranging from 0 percent to 44 percent) (Kim and Price 2014;Mason 2012) and 13 percent of prisoners in the UK are held in privately run facilities (Kish and Lipton 2013;Prison Reform Trust 2011). While many studies have attempted to compare the public and the private prisons, comparability problems exist across levels of security, accounting methods, definitions of service and measurement of costs (Kish and Lipton 2013). The quality of the prisons could be reviewed according to their contribution to the reduction of the risk of recidivism.…”

Section: Contracting Out Of Prison Services Empirical Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The quality of confinement is similar across privately and publicly managed systems, with publicly managed prisons delivering slightly better skills training and having slightly fewer inmate grievances. Kish and Lipton (2013) summarized several prison studies to illustrate the inconclusiveness of the cost savings of private prisons over their public counterparts. Private firms have an advantage in building new prison facilities, both in terms of cost and time and also have a slight operating-cost advantage.…”

Section: Contracting Out Of Prison Services Empirical Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Public vs. Nonprofit Incarceration: The Case of the Netherlands

Wassenaar

Gradus²,

Molleman

2017

SSRN Journal

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Outsourcing of detention is a complex public task, due to quality risks from incomplete contracts, the public responsibility for sentencing and execution, and related social opinions. In the Netherlands, the debate about the outsourcing of prison services to the private profit sector has recently restarted. At the same time, in the Netherlands there is extensive experience of outsourcing prison services -in particular for juvenile detention and internal forensic psychiatric care -to nonprofit organizations. In the Dutch experience, we have not found differences between public and nonprofit execution, with respect to the type of contract with the prisons, costs and quality. The Dutch experience shows that outsourcing to nonprofit entrepreneurs in civil society can be an alternative to outsourcing to the private market.

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Section: Contracting Out Of Prison Services Empirical Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Contracting Out Of Prison Services Empirical Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public vs. Nonprofit Incarceration: The Case of the Netherlands

Wassenaar

Gradus²,

Molleman

2017

SSRN Journal

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“…In the short term, private correctional service providers and impacted communities could be financially compensated for the closure of prison beds, or be paid to provide EM services at a comparative rate as providing prison beds. In the long term, however, private sector involvement in the operation of EM must be considered in light of the tensions between the potential cost savings it brings (although even this is uncertain: [108]) and industry pressure to expand EM's future reach.…”

Section: Mitigating Against Back-end Net Strengthening and Net Wideningmentioning

confidence: 99%

Punitiveness in Australia: electronic monitoring vs the prison

Kornhauser¹,

Laster

2014

Crime Law Soc Change

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Internationally, the 200 year honeymoon with the prison may be ending. Research showing that imprisonment is ineffective in reducing crime is finally being heeded by some conservative governments committed to cost cutting. But, as this case-study of Victoria, Australia, again highlights, punishment regimes are neither universal nor rational. Bucking the trend, prison numbers in Victoria have increased dramatically over the last decade and are set to rise higher. The lingering lure of the prison here, we argue, is a manifestation of Australia's colonial history in which punitiveness has always competed with pragmatic innovation. Although the research findings are inconclusive, we contend that Electronic Monitoring (EM), while differently fraught, better meets the key objectives of sentencing. Using a counterfactual social science thought experiment in the form of an imagined Cabinet submission, we show how political decision makers might be persuaded to effect a shift from prison to EM if it is framed within the competing visions of Australian national identity. We argue that understanding how social policy decisions are made sharpens the scholarly research agenda and also highlights how the convergence of a unique set of non-rational cultural assumptions can shape major shifts (or near misses) in the history of punishment in a particular society.

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“…Opperman raises this question, but I'm not sure he answers it. In 2013 Economic Affairs published an interesting study by two American economists (Kish and Lipton ). While recognising the potential of privatisation to reduce costs, they argue that many published studies in the US do not take into account the full range of costs, including implicit and agency costs associated with the process of contracting.…”

Section: Privatising Prisons Can Be Controversialmentioning

confidence: 99%

Comment

Shackleton

2014

Economic Affairs

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This is a wide-ranging paper, touching on at least four areas: (a) the efficacy of imprisonment; (b) the need for further privatisation and the incentivisation of contractors by linking profits to reducing recidivism; (c) the possibility of new types of provider; and (d) the potential use of vouchers. Reforming prisonersOn the first issue, the paper concentrates almost solely on the need to change prisoner behaviour on return to the outside world. While I think this is a humane and sensible approach, it is clear that prison serves a number of purposes. Classical criminology would point to several possible functions of punishment, whether imprisonment or anything else. Prisoner reform is certainly one such function, but (in no particular order) there are also issues of deterrence, incapacitation, retribution and restitution. I'm not sure reform is always at the forefront of politicians' or voters' minds.I think that what the author has in mind here is the low-skilled, poorly educated individual -something of a victim himself or herself -who can be turned from a life of crime into a solid and reliable citizen. At the moment the system is not very good at turning such people around, and Guy Opperman (and the government) may be right in saying that we want a greater degree of incentivisation of prison contractors to this end. Whether such incentives, apparently moderately successful at the pilot level, can succeed when applied more generally is something of an act of faith. We know that pilots are not always a good guide to wider results, as they often lack proper controls (matched institutions with similar intakes, in this case) and attract a degree of enthusiasm and effort from staff which is difficult to replicate when rolled out across the system.One thing that bothers many commentators is that, compared with virtually every developed country apart from the United States, the UK jails enormous numbers of people. Doing this may have some positive effect in keeping down crime -from the incapacitation effect, certainly, and possibly (though less plausibly) from the deterrent effect. But it is a costly business, and I am not sure we need quite so many people behind bars. These include people who I am not sure should be in prison at all -such as fine defaulters, various types of white-collar criminals, drug addicts and 80-year-old sex offenders (who in Italy appear to be merely sentenced to house arrest).There are others whose social ruin is already complete and are just killing time. These are disgraced journalists, corrupt policemen, defrocked clergymen, politicians who have cheated on their expense claims. Opperman's 'reform' model doesn't really fit these people, who are never

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Do Private Prisons Really offer Savings Compared with their Public Counterparts?

Cited by 20 publications

References 17 publications

Public vs. Nonprofit Incarceration: The Case of the Netherlands

Public vs. Nonprofit Incarceration: The Case of the Netherlands

Punitiveness in Australia: electronic monitoring vs the prison

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