What Are The Pros And Cons Of Private Prisons

Private prisons are not practical and do not offer rehabilitative services for offenders. According to Eber and Winter, companies like GEO were “starving the mentally ill prisoners,denying them basic mental health care, punishing them with solitary confinement and exposing them to systemic abuse and neglect.” This has been going on so much that “suicides and attempted suicides are rampant amongst prisoners” (Eber & Winter 2012). Other companies were reported to have a “lack of regard for prisoner health which has resulted in their deaths”(Eber & Winter 2012). The idea of private prisons “is that the more prisoners a company houses,the more it gets paid. This in turn leads to a conflict of interest on the part of privately run prisons where they, in theory, are incentivized to not rehabilitate prisoners” (Eber & Winter 2012).
Private prisons tend to cut back on staff costs and training, they pay their officers less, provide fewer hours of training and have higher inmate to staff ratios, a combination which may account for their much higher turnover rate among correctional officers as well as the uptick in inmate assaults