Private Prison Incarceration Essay

Words: 1744
Pages: 7

The United States sequesters the largest number of prisoners out of any country in the world.It has 2.3 million prisoners, which is close to as many as China and Russia have combined. The nation's prisons employ nearly 800,000 workers, more than the auto manufacturing industry. Handling these masses of miscreants was not a major problem for federal U.S. prisons before the 21st century until recently, when the system began to run out of funding as the population and crime rates in the United States began growing at an exponential rate because of increased illegal activity such as the rising “War on Drugs”, in par with increased governmental spending and debt. This caused the federal government to turn to the wealthy corporation owners of the United States for help to keep its criminals under lock, and when they did, the private …show more content…
As private prisons become assimilated into the heavily underpublicized and obscure American corrections system, it is time the that society takes a first look at this relatively new form of a “peculiar institution” and raises the question: Are prisons really being used as rehabilitation and deterrence for crime, or have private interests started attaching price tags to lawbreakers’ heads and began to exploit their incarceration for profit? As the federal and state governments run out of money to build more prisons to house the growing population’s misfits, private prisons have stepped into the gap and provided a quick answer to the financial issue. However, private prisons cut down on costs the government’s inmates for profit, a which in effect makes money on the decreased welfare of the inmates and is in direct violation of their natural rights, but there is hope of fixing this problem by instituting a more civilized version that has been around since ancient Babylonian times: semi-punitive penal