Private Prisons Essay Example

Alaska Statutes s section 33. 30.

031, which provides that the Commissioner of Health and Welfare may enter into contracts with public or private entities to provide for the confinement of inmates when the state lacks proper facilities.

These private f acclivities may be located outside the state upon the Commissioner's determination that the state lacks appropriate instant et facilities or that outfaces private facilities are necessary because of health or security reasons or due to mini .NET overcrowding. Similarly, Alaska Statutes section 33. 0.

061 authorizes the Commissioner of Health and Welfare e to contract with private outfaces facilities to house Alaska prisoners, as long as the Commissioner determines t hat rehabilitation or treatment of the prisoner will not be substantially impaired. Given the way the federal government and states like Alaska have supported t he private sector's prison ventures and the booming market, it is perhaps not surprising that by 1 996 there were moor e than one hundred private jails and prisons located across twenty's states.

As of 1 997, the private prison Indus story was grossing 550 million dollars annually; Alaska is among the twentieth states that make use of private prison ins. Thirteen states, the Federal 5 system, and Washington, D.

C. , reported a housing total of 71 ,208 prisoners in private facilities in 1999. Specifically, Alaska housed thirteen percent of its prison population in private facilities du ring 1999, making it second only to New Mexico thirteen percent. History of the private prison Aimed White, 2001 , Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado Shoo I of Law; J. D.

, Yale University School of Law, 1994, American

Criminal Law Review, 38 Am. Grim. L. Rev. 111 , Rule of Law and the Limits of Sovereignty: The Private Prison in Jurisprudential Perspective, p.

20 Despite its contemporary ubiquity, the prison is a relatively recent fixture in W stern (indeed, every) society. Moreover, from the outset the prison was infused with private ownership and control, and with private functions, in many respects quite similar to the contemporary private prison. Only in the in nineteenth century did the prison come to constitute a common mode of criminal sanction in the United States, and only in the twentieth century did the prison mom to comprise a primarily publicly managed affair. It is fair to say that the prison was private long before and long after it was, in fact, a prison. This history does much to anticipate the character r of the contemporary private prison, its juridical structure and its dysfunctions.

The historical development of the prison is utterly steeped in the interpenetrate Zion of the public and private realms in Western society. Although the distinction of public and private realms was Ion g ago introduced to the Western world in a very furtive wayfarer example, appearing in the attempt of the early Roman away to distinguish public and private wrongs a practical, concrete matter the distinction only really took hold in t he nineteenth century, and only then (as countless realists and critics have indicated) in a most incomplete fashion. Performed societies, especially ancient ones, are rather uniformly characterized by the confusion of public and private e realms and, where law itself had attained articulate form, a confusion of public and private legal norms.

Freer

entry enough, the underdevelopment of the publication distinction manifested itself in the juxtaposition of civil and c nominal legal regimes and, perhaps even more saliently, in the juxtaposition of public and private control of the a administration of "criminal" sanctions.

Only recently in Western society did there exist anything even approaching a public monopoly of criminal justice functions. Of course, sequestrated punishments did appear in the promote run world, including the European world. But only rarely did this involve any kind of formal, punitive incarceration, which h almost always was used for purposes of criminal and civil detention, and not for punishment as such. Much h more typical were extralegal instruments or punishments based on the application of fines and tortoise as notions, forced labor, banishment and exile, corporeal punishment, and the like.

These practices were consistent not only with the barbarism of the day but, more importantly, with existing structural and material realities: the rigid socio al relations, the absolute lack of social surplus, and the general shortage of labor in such societies. In this kind of hiss original context the prison as we know titan as George Rescue and Otto Cheerier stressful not assume a centre I place in the system Of social control.

When the practice of punishment by incarceration did appear in performed s society, it tended to reflect within itself the prevailing confusion of the public and private in society as a whole. Almost t always, early prisons, which in scale, function, and internal structure were more like contemporary jails than anything Eng, either were privately owned or managed, or served transparently private functions, or both.

From its very Inc

option in Western society, the prison was used to achieve such private ends as the collection of civil debts, the punish .NET and secreting away of rivals, and the administration of domestic tyranny.

In medieval Europe, this tradition played out perhaps most conspicuously in the punitive use Of prisons to maintain order within the essentially private domain ins of noblemen and clergy. In the early modern era, this dynamic prevailed in the use of prisons to detain uppercase delinquents and the insane. To an equal degree, the early prison almost always was a privately owned or managed affair. Feudal manors maintained prisons that were private in the truest sense: privately functioning , privately managed, and privately owned.

From medieval times through the Industrial Revolution, the maintenance CE of European jails tended to be the personal responsibility of local sheriffs and their analogues, enterprising mini r noblemen, or everyday entrepreneurial "keepers. " Not just an obligation, though, this function remained a "business proposition" until at least the end of the eighteenth century, with the keepers and "franchisees" taking fees from the SST ate and inmates (or "customers") alike. In the sixteenth century in Europe, there arose an institution that completely merged private (or at least noncommercial) functions with profit management: the scalded "house of correction. The souse of correction, which united 6 under private management the functions of poorhouse, jail, and manufacture y, also juxtaposed under private management very minimal public safety functions (as we would now think of t hem) with public welfare and laboratory functions. The private, liberationists character of the house of corrections was not at a II unique among early modern punishments.

Convict "transportation," especially, closely replicated the early prison's thorough juxtaposition of public and private characteristics. Transportation saw the forced removal of t en's of thousands of "criminals" (and the ERM has to be used advisedly) from Europe to places like Australia, North Am Eric, and New Caledonia, where they spent their terms laboring for private contractors, often in the immediate cuts odd of such contractors.

Other punishment regimes of this time, forced labor on public works and galley Slav ere, were not exactly private; yet they too operated on a statistic, mercantilism logic of public printmaking that once a gain underscored the confusion of public and private in these times and places. In the United States, the confusion of public and private impressed itself into t e history of criminal justice generally, and that of the prison more specifically.

In colonial America, there were no true e prisons and very few jails to start with, and incarceration was rarely resorted to as formal criminal punishment. As in medieval Europe, labor was too precious, social surpluses too short, and culture too backwards to justify such institutions.

Punitive incarceration was not, of course, unknown. However, as elsewhere, it was subordinate to other practices like banishment, fines, corporeal punishment, and, of course, outright vigilantism. And where there were jails and prisons, they were happily privately run opportunistically, it seems, in that even ostensibly p public officials derived their salaries both from fees as well as from charges levied on inmates.

As in Europe, these facilities often took the form of privately houses of corrections. America generally is regarded as the birthplace of the modern prisoners prison n, that

is, as a place for largesse, longer, and punitive incarceration.

Indeed, the foundations Of the modern prison were set with the inauguration of two rather distinct models of the "penitentiary": the scalded "Walnut Street" or "Pennsylvania" system, established n the 1 sass; and the "Auburn" or "congregate" system, which grew out of the Walnut Street system early in the nineteenth century. Both of these systems were premised on a set of common n practices, centered around the segregation of inmates into private cells and the enforcement of stringent rule sees of inmate silence.

The main difference between the two lay in their distinct ways of monopolizing inmate labor. The Wall nut Street system, which mandated silence by absolute solitude among inmates, lent Itself only to the minimal, in efficient use of labor (for example, in a manufacturer mode).

The Auburn system retained for a time the Walnut Street t system's rules of silence, but eschewed the institution of absolute solitude in the course of instituting a much more e efficient, collective, factories system of labor. The Auburn system thus gave rise to a set of practicalities notably the mainly nocturnal use of private or semiprivate cells combined with some type of collective labor in the dactylic continue to inform the structure of contemporary prisons worldwide. Though still infused with some private characteristics, each model of the pent entirety marked a significant movement towards the modern, public prison.

Both systems also brought about the seer action of criminal inmates from civil detainees (for example, debtors).

The inefficient Walnut Street system proved especially incompatible with the profitable employment of inmates, and hence with private management or o

wineries structures. And while the Auburn system could profitably employ labor, it was only rarely that this involve Veda direct private control. Sometimes jurisdictions leased out inmates to contractors who installed their capital in the e prison and directly managed the inmates' work; more often this system involved a more subtle reduction of ere sterile public institutions to the logic of private market actors. Under the dominant "eyepiece" system, prison adman agitators assumed the role of factory managers, organizing the (hopefully) profitable production of commodities by their inmates.

The quintessential big house prisons employed this system to quite profitable ends, selling on the co memorial market everything from shoes to furniture until the twentieth century.

At the same time that the rise of the penitentiary marked a move away from t he private prison, other institutions from roughly the same period show just the opposite movement. Most obvious in t his regard are the punitive aspects of Southern slavery. In many ways, slave plantations in the antebellum South we re private prisons unto themselves. Masters and mistresses retained wide authority by custom and law to disciple nee their "properties" for all manner of deed, criminal or otherwise.

Of course, slave owners did not entirely monopoly size criminal justice functions with respect to their slaves, but they nearly did so, and the exceptions example, the modest and usually ineffective 7 legal limits on owners' disciplinary overestimations prove the rule.

In such a social system, incarceration exacted direct costs in lost labor, fines were utterly inapplicable, and public punishment TTS of all sorts implied a loss of slaves' services and an abrogation of owner's prerogative. Accordingly, the

punishment NT of slaves most often took the form of corporeal punishment, extra work, and punitive resort to the slave auction, all privately administered.

In the postmortem South, until at least the 1 sass, the practice of substituting t he plantation for the penitentiary continued in the guise of several different forced labor regimes. Among the m ore salient examples of these was the scalded "criminality" system, whereby "criminal" offenders (for example, t hose who were "convicted" of allotting very dubious vagrancy, petty larceny, or trespassing laws) typically w ere afforded the "opportunity" to exchange future labor for payment of their fines and "court costs" by local Ian downers and capitalists.

Sometimes formal, statutorily authorized outcome of convictions, sometimes informal an d the result of pretrial flabbergasting, the result was always the same: reduction to peonage as criminal punishment (or, more accurately, criminal sanction as a source of peonage).