Conflict Theory Of Private Prisons

Introduction: There are many different ethical issues in our society. One ethical issue that has been risen are if prisons are really being used as a deterrence for crime, or have the economic tags to the inmates overlooked that? The issue of whether the reasoning behind private prisons are ethical or not will be further addressed in the paper using two theoretical perspectives: the functionalism theory and the conflict theory. However, I will be arguing that private prisons plays a beneficial role in our everyday lives.
Ethical Issue and Theoretical Perspective 1: The conflict theory pertains to one of the main social justice issues raised in class of whether private prisons are being used as a rehabilitation for inmates or used for labor.
This theory states that it’s a “sociological approach that emphasizes the ways in which the parts of a society are structured to maintain its stability” (Altrichter, 2016a, slide 3). An example of this would be how inmates play a role in society. They aren’t technically in the same environment as majority of the world are, but they do have different roles to fulfil. They work inside of the private prisons and do labor for private corporations like Wal-Mart, Target and Sears. Every day essentials such as dormitory desks, denim jeans, and law enforcement equipment are produced every day in prison (Altrichter, 2016c, slide 3). If inmates didn’t have jobs like these, they would be sitting in an isolated cell from sun up to sun down not doing anything. Functionalists like Durkheim agreed that crime is an inevitable and delinquent behavior is an aspect of social life. A key assumption in functionalism is the societal consensus which is “a majority of members share a common set of values, beliefs, and behavioral expectations (Altrichter, 2016a, slide 5). With that being said, when crimes occur, reactions happen amongst society and are used to give society a way of defining what is moral and which moral norms to abide by. These norms are then led to rules and boundaries for society. Davis and Moore (1945) stated that social stratification has beneficial consequences for the operation of society (p. 242). If we didn’t have people in the private prisons, we wouldn’t have people to perform the tasks because the average citizen in society wouldn’t voluntarily go to prison to fulfil those roles. According to Davis and Moore (1945), “social inequality is thus an unconsciously evolved device by which societies insure that the most important positions are conscientiously filled by the most qualified persons” (p. 243). In this case, inmates are the most qualified