Prison Instead of Princeton
Are for-profit prisons really keeping us safe?
Merchandizing Prisoners:
Who Really Pays for Prison Privatization?
By Byron Eugene Price
Praeger Publishers, 2006
ISBN: 0-275-98738-8
212 pp., $44.95
It costs approximately $22,000 per year to incarcerate each of the 2.2 million people in U.S. prisons. And since 2000, the total number of federal inmates in for-profit facilities has increased by 60 percent, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice.
Is our society growing more violent? Or, as author Dr. Byron Eugene Price suggests, is the tremendous growth of the for-profit prison system creating a financial incentive to incarcerate more people, and thereby quietly driving public policy?
In Merchandizing Prisoners: Who Really Pays for Prison Privatization?, Price, an assistant professor of public administration at Rutgers University, sets out to prove that a humanitarian crisis is afoot, and its perpetrators can be found among the Fortune 500.
In the 1980s, state and local officials, struggling to overcome a highly publicized crime wave, rising immigration and a drug epidemic, tried to regain order by passing stiffer criminal penalties, resulting in a growing prison population and, inevitably, a demand for more prisons. Private industry recognized the opportunity and offered its services, promising that it could build and manage prisons cheaply and efficiently. State legislators accepted their proposals, and watched the jobs start flowing back into their states.
