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Although the findings from comparisons between public and private prisons may not be clear, the questions that should be asked have been identified. Moreover, what is clearly apparent is that the issues surrounding the privatization of prisons are much more complex than simply a question of whether profits should be derived from the incarceration of offenders.
Background. Though most commentators would agree that the allocation of punishment (e.g., sentencing) is a “core” state function, there is less agreement about whether its administration should be. However, this distinction between the allocation and the administration of punishment becomes blurred when one asks whether decisions on how and where a prison sentence should be served can be delegated to a private company. The experiences in Australia and elsewhere with regard to the privatization of prisons suggests the following (p. 110):
- There is an almost irresistible structural incentive for private operators of prisons to cut costs and reduce standards. When explicit standards are set, those “outputs” are the focus of performance. However, unless there is “permanent on site monitoring by a representative of the purchaser” of the services (p. 111), one cannot ensure that standards are met.
- There is insufficient evidence to suggest that private prison operators can reduce costs, especially if the costs of enforcing compliance with contract provisions are considered. If costs are reduced, it is typically because of lower wage bills, though the use of technology may allow reductions in the size of the work force. However, “the costs argument, isolated out in the way it often happens, is not useful. There are many other non-cost factors in whose context price must be evaluated” (p. 111).
- Accountability mechanisms are typically inadequate in private prisons. The advantage of having an independent “inspectorate” of prisons is that the reports which it produces can be made public and become a resource for those wanting to improve both public and private prisons.
- Private operators of prisons necessarily become a lobby for policies that will increase their markets. This is to be expected. However, this tendency is exacerbated in the USA by the building of “spec prisons” – prisons built on the speculative reasoning that, by the time they are built, the state will need them. Such a practice clearly encourages the increased use of incarceration.
- There are no “robust” methodologies which will produce reliable and valid comparisons between the performances of private and public prison operators.
- There is excessive secrecy on the part of the operators and the government about the private operation of prisons.
- Jurisdictions that have considerable experience with the privatization of prisons are discovering that private prison companies are better at selling than delivering. Predictions that were made just a few years ago about the growth of private prisons in the U.S. have turned out to be vastly over-stated. In Australia, some states – especially those which privatized the operation of their prisons (versus simply the building of them) – are seriously considering putting an end to their relatively brief marriage with the private sector operators.
- All of the traditional questions about prison labour have re-emerged clearly with the growth of private prisons. Is work carried out in private prisons considered to be “forced labour”? Prison labour is seen in a different light when it may earn a profit for the private company.
Conclusion: Privatization raises a host of issues about prisons that are largely relevant for jurisdictions with only public prisons as well. The way in which prisons are run and monitored is made salient with the movement toward privatization but the mechanisms that are put in place to monitor private prisons are typically relevant for public sector prisons too. Hence, what is necessary is to put the individual findings concerning the privatization of prisons in a cross-national context so as to better understand the impacts of these changes.
Reference: Coventry, Garry. Introduction; Harding, Richard. Prison Privatisation: The Debate Starts to Mature. Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 1999, 11, 110-118.
The privatization of prison requires open accountability which may be seen as being in conflict with private commercial contracts. In jurisdictions in which the move to privatization is driven largely by ideology rather than economics, it may be the government that is most interested in keeping details of the privatization from the public.
Background: The Australian state of Victoria has the most privatized prison system in the world. Privatization did not occur because of direct concerns about costs or prison over-crowding, but rather because of government ideology that favoured privatization. Hence, unlike a contractor whose sole interest is in value-for-money, the Victorian government had an ideological interest in demonstrating that privatizing prisons was effective.
Given that the state of Victoria had an interest in proving its ideological decisions to be fiscally and socially effective, it is not surprising that the government tried to keep details of the contract and the performance of its private prisons from public scrutiny. This was the case of one private prison, although the government and the private company were unsuccessful in concealing these facts.
The issues involved in the legal action aimed at opening these contracts to public scrutiny were consistent with the current view that governments (and those who act in their name) must be held accountable. The problem, of course, is that “accountable” means that standards have to be set. In this Australian case, the standards tended to be inappropriate, inadequate, overly quantitative (and, as such, missing important qualitative dimensions) and overly narrow (pp.123-4). “Costs” were clearly one criterion, and it is possible that the government was concerned because costs appeared to have increased with privatization. The difficulty is that the data on “benefits” and “performance” were less available than the costs.
Part of the problem is that in order to achieve accountability, there is a need for public sector monitoring of performance. It turned out – perhaps for ideological reasons –, that “levels of accountability [for prisons] diminished” with privatization. Without doubt, some of the difficulty occurred when questions of problems with the private prisons arose. In these cases, it was the Commissioner of Corrections (who had let the contracts) who had the responsibility of monitoring whether the private sector company (which he had chosen) was doing a good job. The state’s Auditor General saw this as a conflict of interest (p. 129), and, in fact, the Director of Monitoring had developed a “close relationship” with the private providers of services. The more basic problem is simple to state, but difficult to solve: “So long as government retains the responsibility for a service, it remains accountable… The nature and extent of these non-delegable accountabilities is the subject of… debate” (p. 131).
Conclusion: When privatization is ideologically, rather than economically, driven, it is not surprising that it is governments which are anxious to hide details of contracts and performance. If privatization is to take place, the challenge is to “take the responsibility for monitoring, supervising and reporting on the private sector activities out of the hands of the public sector correctional authorities [who are responsible for the privatization decision] and place it with a truly independent authority” (p. 132). In this way, both public and private sectors could be required to meet set standards. “Failures of accountability will ultimately bring the process [of privatization] and the governments who champion it, into disrepute” (p. 132).
Reference: Freiberg, Arie. Commercial Confidentiality and Public Accountability for the Provision of Correctional Services. Current Issues in Criminal Justice, 1999, 11, 119-134.
The responses of women to the experience of incarceration may be “as much or more a product of the nature of women’s corrections at a particular time and place as they are a product of the nature of women themselves” (p. 713).
Background. The manner in which people respond to imprisonment has been seen as a function of the prison itself (focusing on either the broad coercive nature of the institution or the characteristics of the particular facility) or of the characteristics of the inmates. Most research has suggested that “women’s responses to prison differed from men’s” (p. 682).
This study diverges from previous research by examining the experience of imprisonment of women in two different Californian female facilities instead of using men’s prisons as a comparison. The first prison - the California Institution for Women (CIW) - was opened in 1952 and was built and run on a “rehabilitative” model. Physically, it is described as an example of the “campus model of prison architecture” (p. 687). Even now, this institution (built for 800 inmates but currently holding approximately 1700-1800) appears to have maintained the culture of the “old penology”, emphasizing individual responsibility, diagnosis and treatment. The second institution - Valley State Prison (VSP) - opened in 1995 for a planned population of 2500 but presently holds about 3600 women. It can be seen as a prison representing the “new penology” – “concerned with the identification, classification, and management of dangerous groups” (p. 685).
Interviews with a random sample of 70 women suggested that the manner in which women “did time” depended, to some extent, on their pre-prison characteristics and experiences – social class, age and their history of abuse. Race had no effect. More interestingly, the type of institution made a difference. “Women in VSP were much more likely than women at CIW to avoid friendship altogether” (p. 703). Women in the prison run on the principles of the new penology (VSP) were less likely to receive help from other inmates and were much more likely to describe guards in negative terms. It would be easy to suggest that doing time at CIW, compared to VSP, was doing “easy time”. However, that is an oversimplification in that “regardless of their personal characteristics or where they were imprisoned, [virtually all the women interviewed] voiced similar concerns about their families and their lives after prison. Absence from children and family was uniformly defined as the hardest part of doing time and virtually all of the women expressed fears about what they would do upon release and whether they would be able to turn their lives around” (p. 711). However, the nature of the institution was critical in a more subtle way. In the “old-penology” women’s prison (CIW), “variations in women’s pre-prison characteristics are reflected in greater variation in their adaptations” (p. 710) than in the “new penology” prison (VSP). “What women bring to prison appears to have less influence on how they experience incarceration at VSP” (p. 710). “At VSP, the newer institution designed for efficient management and control…, these individual variations were blunted and women’s ways of doing time showed more homogeneity” (p. 711). Instead, women were more suspicious, detached, etc., than they were in CIW.
Conclusion: It would appear that the ways in which incarcerated women respond to their imprisonment may have to do more with the nature of the institution than with the gender of the inmates. “The ability to ‘do your own time' is shaped by particular dispositions of power and practices of control” (p. 713).
Reference: Kruttschnitt, Candace, Rosemary Gartner, and Amy Miller. Doing Her Own Time? Women’s Responses to Prison in the Context of the Old and the New Penology. Criminology, 2000, 38, 681-717.
Any assessment of police efficiency or effectiveness on the basis of “clearance” rates deserves careful scrutiny. If police are evaluated in terms of the number or types of offences which are recorded, one should remember that these numbers are, in fact, produced partly by the organization which is responsible for them.
Background: When Canadian homicide laws changed in the mid-1970s, overall homicide rates drifted downwards. However, the number of first degree murder charges increased. One inference which could be drawn from this pattern is that our murders were becoming more serious. However, the most likely explanation is that police, over time, changed their criteria for defining an event as a first degree murder rather than a second degree murder.
This paper examines the manner in which British police statistics about crime (equivalent to our UCR data) are created. Additionally, it points out that, as those who evaluate the police pay more attention to these numbers as “performance measures”, it is almost inevitable that these statistics will decrease in their usefulness for this purpose. In Britain, the achievement of “crime reduction targets” is seen as a measure of police performance. The first difficulty with this approach is that, for the most part, the police are not responsible for the level of crime in a community and cannot effectively control “actual” levels of crime. As one police researcher pointed out, “one of the best kept secrets of modern life” is that “the police do not prevent crime” (p. 219).
Nevertheless, in Britain, a drop in police recorded crime has often been described as the result of more effective policing. In periods of time when only “clearance rates” were important, crimes known to the police were often not recorded (pp. 224-5). When it was valuable to record crime (e.g., when increased resources were seen as flowing from high crime rates), crime recording increased. In some instances, efforts spent in getting inmates to agree to admit to particular offences (in circumstances in which they would not receive any additional punishment) accounted for 40% of all cleared offences (p.227).
The main difficulty with evaluating police forces by their ability to reduce crime is that such practices obviously encourage non-recording of crime, especially if individual detachments have similar goals imposed upon them. The organization responsible for overseeing police forces in Britain has recently found evidence of significant (e.g., 15%-17% in various forces) under-recording of crimes reported to the police (pp. 230-1). This has been done, in part, by deciding that the crime did not, in fact, occur (“un-founding” the offence). Conversely, a “performance culture” can also lead to distortions in the opposite direction for an individual police officer. One of the ways in which this is done is to charge offenders with more serious offences (e.g., possession with intent to traffic rather than simple possession). This practice increases not only the “offending rate” but also the “clearance” rate for more serious offences. In addition, as one 1999 report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of the Constabulary found, there was evidence in one force that detectives were not allowed to earnestly investigate a serious sexual assault. This was due to the fact that, “whether they solved a rape or the theft of a car radio, the division would only be credited with one detection” (p. 234) and a serious sexual assault investigation would require significantly more police time and resources. In another instance, a system was created to avoid official recording of “difficult to detect” crimes (p. 235).
Conclusion: Like many other performance measures, crime figures can easily be manipulated by police forces in order to present themselves favourably. “Any judgement of police efficiency made on the basis of crime clearance continues to be problematical” (p. 235). The “performance measure” approach to evaluation may consequently have reduced the usefulness of the measures themselves.
Reference: Loveday, Barry. Managing Crime: Police Use of Crime Data as an Indicator of Effectiveness. International Journal of Sociology of Law, 2000, 28, 215-237.
California has a higher rate of people in prison for drug offences than Canada does for all offences combined. No criminal justice benefits appear to be reaped from this high incarceration rate. In the 2000 election, Californians voted to reduce drug imprisonment.
Background. In California, the “War on Drugs” was operationalized as a “War on Small Drug Users”. The result was that California had a drug imprisonment rate of about 132 per 100,000 of the population in 1999 - approximately 2.5 times the U.S. national average. Because of the widespread use of drugs in the “normal” population, the “supply” of potential targets of a drug war can be considered to be virtually infinite. Drug policy and the enthusiasm with which it is enforced appear to be the determinants of the number of cases processed by the criminal justice system.
California policy appears to have used “drug possession” charges as one way of ensuring that their prisons were kept at or above capacity levels. In 1980, for example, 379 people were sent to prison for drug offences. By 1999, the number had increased to 12,749. The policy appears to have been based on a belief in the deterrent impact of imprisonment and the idea that locking up people for drugs would incapacitate those involved in drug use and drug sales. Low level and first time drug offenders were especially targeted, “increasing the personal costs of drug use among incipient users” (p. 2). In 1980, most (about 65%) of drug imprisonments were for drug trafficking, possession for the purpose of trafficking, or manufacturing. By the late 1990s, more than half of the drug imprisonments were for simple possession of small quantities of drugs.
The impact on crime of these policies can be estimated by looking at the variation across counties within the state. The enthusiasm with which these policies were enforced varied. The data are simple to describe: there is no evidence of a beneficial impact of harsh drug enforcement policies on crime. “The absence of differential effects between counties with strict drug enforcement policies and counties with more lenient drug enforcement policies does not support the deterrent and incapacitation arguments of drug enforcement advocates” (p. 6). However, there were some suggestions of negative impacts of harsh policies in that “[c]ounties that made fewer drug arrests, and concentrated their enforcement efforts on felony manufacture or sale rather than simple-drug possession offences were significantly more likely to experience declines in violent crime…. Counties that rarely imprisoned low-level drug offences showed the largest reduction in violent and property crime” (pp. 10-11). Minor drug arrests appear to have “no relationship to, and no impact on, either crime or drug abuse” (p. 14).
Conclusion: In 2000, Californians voted by a 61%-39% margin to require drug treatment instead of jail for those arrested for drug possession or use. It would appear that they have learned that they are not getting “value for money” from the billions of dollars being spent to imprison small drug users. California voters were not alone in demanding reform of harsh drug laws: there were drug policy issues on ballots in seven states in the recent election and in five of them, harsh drug laws were voted out.
Reference: Justice Policy Institute. Drug Use and Justice: An Examination of California Drug Policy Enforcement. [Online]. Available: www.cjcj.org (January 2001). The Lindesmith Center – Drug Policy Foundation. US: Just Vote NO – The War on Drugs Loses at the Polls. [Online]. Available: www.mapinc.org/tlcnews (December 11, 2000).
Watching local television news increases viewers’ fear of crime, particularly for people who live in high crime areas or who have been victims of crime.
Background. What makes people think that they are likely to be victims of crime? Very few people have enough “direct” experience with crime to allow reasonable inferences about their likelihood of being victimized. It has been suggested that for those most vulnerable – and most fearful –, media influences are “overshadowed by direct personal and interpersonal experience with the reality of crime” (p. 758). Others have suggested that TV representations of crime resonate only with, and therefore only affect, those whose lives are congruent with those images. This would suggest that only those who live in high crime areas or who have been victimized would be influenced by television images of crime. Finally, one could expect that only those who believe that TV images reflect reality would be affected by them.
This study examined fear of crime as measured by responses of Florida residents to questions concerning the likelihood that they would be victimized in six different ways. They were also asked about their television news (local and national) viewing as well as various demographic questions. “Actual crime” was assessed by using official crime rates for the city or county in which the respondent lived.
Several of the control variables – amount of actual crime, age, sex, and being Hispanic – impacted on the person’s perceived likelihood of victimization. The amount of local television news which a person watched had an impact above and beyond these other variables. More interesting is the fact that the effect of TV news viewing seemed to be largest in certain groups. Those who lived in high crime areas, those who had been personally victimized or had a family member who had been a victim of crime, and those who believed that local news reflects the reality of crime were more likely to show “effects” of viewing local TV news. In other words, members of these groups who watched a lot of local television news were more likely to be fearful of being victimized than were members of these groups who watched little local TV news. Those whose beliefs or lives did not resonate with the image of local crime stories (those who lived in relatively safe areas, who had not experienced victimization, or who didn’t believe in the “accuracy” of local TV news) were relatively uninfluenced by the amount of local TV news which they watched.
Conclusion: “Reality and TV are not competing explanations for people’s perceptions about crime…” (p. 780). Instead, they are “factors that interact in the social construction of fear and possibly other meanings about crime” (p. 780). The effects of local TV news on fear of being victimized overwhelmed any effect of viewing national news. “Local news effects are most often significant for viewers who live in high-crime areas, have recent victim experience, or who perceive news accounts as realistic” (p. 780).
Reference: Chiricos, Ted, Kathy Padgett, and Marc Gertz. Fear, TV News, and the Reality of Crime. Criminology, 2000, 38, 755-785.
Religious attitudes, like those of criminal justice, are complex. People who are “religious” may be seen as showing support for rehabilitation as well as for punitiveness. The issue comes down to what we mean by “religious attitudes.”
Background: Religion has never been very far from criminal justice attitudes. On the one hand, the new U.S. president identifies himself closely with organized religion and has brought this into the White House by focusing on religious groups as recipients of federal social service money. This same individual was also responsible for more executions than any other American governor in recent history. On the other hand, Canadians can claim the father of the youth who was killed in the 1999 school shooting in Taber, Alberta. An Anglican minister, he has been speaking out for forgiveness and understanding while also suggesting that the “lesson” from Taber is to comprehend why the shooting took place and to address those causes rather than focus on punishing the boy who killed his son.
This study examines religious attitudes in detail. Data from previous studies differentiate what are typically referred to as “fundamentalist” religious views (e.g., those accepting a literal interpretation of the Bible) and those that are non-fundamentalist. Fundamentalist Protestants, for example, are more favourable toward capital punishment than other religious groups. In this survey of Ohio residents, people were asked a number of detailed questions about their support for punishment (e.g., “Punishing criminals is the only way to stop them from engaging in more crimes in the future”) and rehabilitation (e.g., “It is important to try to rehabilitate juveniles who have committed crimes and are now in the correctional system”). They were also asked about religious forgiveness (e.g., “God teaches that even if someone has lived a life of crime, they should be forgiven for their offences if they are truly sorry”) and Bible literalness (“I believe the miracles described in the Bible actually happened just as the Bible said”), as well as their beliefs in a punitive God and the salience of religion in their lives.
The results show that religious views had effects above and beyond demographic variables (age, sex, race, income, political affiliation, victimization and fear). Religious “forgiveness” predicted lower support for capital punishment, less support for punishment and more support for rehabilitation (generally, and as the main goal of prisons). On the other hand, “Bible literalism” predicted less support for rehabilitation.
Conclusion: Being “religious” is not useful as a way of understanding a person’s criminal justice attitudes. Rather, it appears that the “type” of religion is important: those who support religious forgiveness support rehabilitative goals of imprisonment and are less in favour of simple punitiveness. Belief in the literal interpretation of the Bible appears to describe those least in favour of rehabilitation in prison. With respect to criminal justice attitudes, it is clearly not useful to talk in simple terms about those who are “religious” or not.
Reference: Applegate, Brandon K., Francis T. Cullen, Bonnie S. Fisher, and Thomas Vander Ven. Forgiveness and Fundamentalism: Reconsidering the Relationship between Correctional Attitudes and Religion. Criminology, 2000, 38, 719-753.
The warriors against drugs should look at the historical record of trying to suppress opium use. Attempts at suppressing drugs have had the paradoxical effect of increasing supplies and markets.
Background. Over the past 150 years, it appears that opium markets have expanded to meet the supply that is available. The end of the free trade in drugs, brought about in the first part of the 20th century, seems to have resulted in a growth in both production and consumption since that time. For much of the 19th century, drug sales (e.g., British sales of Indian opium to China) were an important part of international trade revenues. Attempts to monopolize this trade led to the opening up of new sources of drugs (e.g., Turkey). European entrepreneurial activity not only created new sources, but also new markets (e.g., in Southeast Asia).
Attempts to restrict the use of drugs after World War I shifted the emphasis to heroin. This was due, in part, to the fact that heroin was more compact, easier to ship, and highly addictive. World War II apparently also had an enormous impact on drug use (and trade). Largely because of global restrictions on shipping drugs, both supplies and markets were almost completely suppressed. However, with the end of global warfare, incomplete attempts to eradicate drug trafficking had paradoxical impacts. For example, the relatively successful eradication of the supply of Turkish opium, “stimulated both opium production and heroin consumption… The illicit world price rose, stimulating opium production elsewhere…. From this predictable, but unrecognized market logic, every short-term victory, every successful eradication or crop substitution, would become a market stimulus that brought another defeat for America’s drug wars” (p. 205). “With global demand constant, a sudden supply reduction in one sector simply raised illicit prices and stimulated increased cultivation elsewhere across the vastness of the Asian opium zone. In essence, the four US drug wars of the past quarter century extended a local law enforcement model into the international arena… that would contribute to an increase in world opium supply….” (p. 206). Undoubtedly, part of the problem is that in many “less controlled” countries, drug production has enormous advantages over conventional crops – “credit access, storability, increasing value over time, permanent marketability, and easy transportability” (p. 211). Thus, the problem is that because suppression is typically bilateral and ephemeral – e.g., the U.S. temporarily suppressing supply from one country –, a rise in drug use typically occurs when supplies increase and costs decline. Though there have been times when perfect coercion has proven effective (e.g., during World War II), “imperfect coercion unleashes a whirlwind of unpredictable consequences” (p. 215).
Conclusion. “Over the past century, each attempt at drug prohibition has produced an unexpected market reaction that has allowed the illicit traffic to adapt, survive, and even expand. After a century of such unintended consequences, it may be time to learn from the past and develop strategies for minimizing the negative impact of both bilateral and multilateral drug control efforts” (p. 218).
Reference: McCoy, Alfred W. Coercion and its Unintended Consequences: A Study of Heroin Trafficking in Southeast and South West Asia. Crime, Law, and Social Change, 2000, 33, 191-224.
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