Peer Review Articles on Minorities and Private Prisons

A new report past a UC-Berkeley graduate student has surprised a number of experts in the criminology field. Its chief finding: Individual prisons are packed with young people of color.

The concept of racial disparities behind confined is not exactly a new one. Study after report after working group has found a version of the same conclusion. The Sentencing Project estimates 1 in iii black men will spend time backside bars during their lifetime, compared with one in 6 Latino men and 1 in 17 white men. Arrest rates for marijuana possession are four times as high for black Americans as for white. Blackness men spend an average of 20 percent longer behind bars in federal prisons than their white peers for the same crimes.

These reports and thousands of others take the cumulative effect of portraying a criminal justice system that disproportionately incarcerates blackness Americans and people of color in full general.

An inmate walks through the yard at the Due north Primal Correctional Institution in Marion, Ohio, which recently switched to individual management. Ty Wright/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide explanation

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Ty Wright/Bloomberg via Getty Images

An inmate walks through the one thousand at the Northward Central Correctional Institution in Marion, Ohio, which recently switched to private direction.

Ty Wright/Bloomberg via Getty Images

African-American studies Ph.D. pupil Christopher Petrella's finding in "The Color of Corporate Corrections," however, tackles a different brute.

Beyond the historical overrepresentation of people of color in county jails and federal and land prisons, Petrella found, people of color "are further overrepresented in private prisons contracted by departments of correction in Arizona, California and Texas."

This would mean that the racial disparities in individual prisons housing country inmates are fifty-fifty greater than in publicly run prisons. His paper sets out to explain why — a question that starts with race simply that takes him down a surprising path.

Age, Race And Money

First, a fleck of background. Private prisons firm 128,195 inmates on behalf of the federal government and state governments (or at least they did every bit of 2010). There'southward a continual debate among legislators and administrators as to which is more cost-constructive: running a authorities-operated prison house, with its government workers (and unions); or hiring a private company (like GEO or Corrections Corp. of America) to firm your prisoners for you. States like California, Arizona and Texas use a combination of both.

In the 9 states Petrella examined, private facilities housed higher percentages of people of color than public facilities did. Looking back at the contracts the private companies signed with united states, Petrella figured out the reason behind the racial disparity: private prisons deliberately exclude people with high medical care costs from their contracts.

Younger, healthier inmates, he found — who've come into the system since the state of war on drugs went into event — are disproportionately people of color. Older inmates, who generally come with a slew of wellness problems, skew more white.

Steve Owens, senior manager of public affairs for Corrections Corp. of America, 1 of the largest private prison companies in the nation, calls the study "deeply flawed."

In an email, Owens says, "CCA's government partners determine which inmates are sent to our facilities; our company has no role in their selection."

Furthermore, he says, "the contracts we have with our government partners are mutually agreed upon, and every bit the client, our authorities partners have meaning leverage regarding provisions." It'due south upward to the contracting bureau, he says, to decide how information technology wants to distribute inmates and manage health care costs.

Owens does not, still, dispute Petrella's numbers.

Gloria Browne-Marshall, an acquaintance professor of constitutional law at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a quondam civil rights attorney, says information technology'due south a "very interesting" report.

"What I take abroad from it is how prisoners are looked at every bit commodities," she says. "It'south all about how the private prisons can make the nearly money."

Petrella says he used data compiled by state correctional departments, which are divided by census-designated categories and included African-Americans, Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders, nonwhite Hispanics and Latinos, and essentially anyone except those defined by the census every bit white.

"I know these categories are fungible, but this is the data we have to work with," Petrella says.

Browne-Marshall points out that Petrella'southward findings don't necessarily point to a racial motivation on behalf of private prison companies, and Petrella agrees. "Profit is the articulate motivation," he says. The racial component is more incidental.

Still, he says, "the study shows that policies that omit race proceed to have negative impacts." He says in that location'south a larger dialogue to be had about what gimmicky racial discrimination actually looks like.

Barry Krisberg, senior boyfriend at the Chief Justice Earl Warren Found at the University of California, Berkeley, says the findings surprised him. "I had assumed private prisons were taking a lot of low-run a risk inmates," he says, "that if you went to a private prison, you'd discover a lot of quondam, Anglo prisoners. That's not the case."

Prison Conditions

This raises questions nigh prison conditions for different kinds of prisoners. "The rate of violence is higher at individual prisons, and backsliding is either worse or the aforementioned than in public prisons," says Alex Friedmann, the managing editor of Prison Legal News and the associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, a group that opposes private prisons. Friedmann says part of the trouble is attributable to lower-paid, lesser-trained staff used in private prisons. Simply some of it, he adds, may be due to this higher-risk, younger population in private prisons.

So, Browne-Marshall asks, what are private prisons doing for their historic period-specific populations?

"Public prisons are devoting a lot of resources to the age-specific needs of their prisoners," she says, such as edifice medical facilities, bringing in highly paid medical staff, and providing expensive mental health care services. "What about the specific needs of the private prison house population?"

Younger, higher-risk individual prisoners need unlike kinds of services — particularly since they're likely to get out of prison, back into society. And historically, younger prisoners are more probable to reoffend, which Browne-Marshall suggests addressing with education, drug counseling, anger management and other social services.

The trouble: While courts accept intervened to require prisons to take expert medical and mental health intendance as constitutional necessities — things that benefit older and sicker prisoners — programs that mainly do good younger prisoners aren't usually required. (Some other reason why they're cheaper to firm.)

"How practice nosotros get corporations to practice what the incarcerated person needs when the government's not dictating it?" Browne-Marshall asks.

That, she says, is the side by side question for written report.

Owens says CCA offers "safe, secure housing and quality rehabilitation and re-entry programming at a cost savings to taxpayers. Our programming includes education, vocational, organized religion-based and substance corruption treatment opportunities." Each year, he says, CCA inmates acquire "more than than 3,000" GEDs.

A Footnote

In compiling his data, Petrelle deliberately excludes private prisons with federal contracts from the study. He does so because a large portion of federal prisoners in private facilities are there every bit immigration detainees, not sentenced criminals. Were he to include federally contracted prisons, the disparities would surely be greater.

Federally contracted facilities also come up with their own baggage and civil rights questions.

Federal prisoners in public facilities, every bit well equally state prisoners in individual and public facilities, accept the correct to bring lawsuits based on alleged civil rights violations. This ways state inmates in California could sue the state prison system for providing inadequate health intendance. Arizona inmates in a individual facility could do the same against the private corporation that owns their prison and against the land of Arizona.

However, federal prisoners in private prisons cannot bring such lawsuits, co-ordinate to a contempo U.South. Supreme Court ruling.

A prisoner of this status could sue for actual damages only could non bring a civil rights suit confronting a private prison — the kind of suit that usually forces major changes in how prisons operate in the public sphere.

"We've gotten to the indicate where courts intervene in public prisons, but only nether extraordinary circumstances," Krisberg says. For federal prisoners in private facilities, there'southward even less legal recourse, he says.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/03/13/289000532/why-for-profit-prisons-house-more-inmates-of-color

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