What Is The True Purpose Behind The Creation Of The Private Prison System?

Since the early 1980’s the private prison system in the United States has expanded immensely. This is mainly due to lobbying between corporations and politicians including big investors gaining record high profits within Wall Street. Through such lobbying this movement has been baptized as the Prison Industrial Complex where the main goal is making money by sending individual bodies to the confinements of the prison system. With the U.S. prisons housing approximately more than 2 million inmates through the federal, state and private prison systems, we must ask ourselves; What is the true purpose behind the creation of the private prison industry and how it’s affected on our society?

The private prison systems are institutions where inmates
However it wasn’t until the 1980’s where the private prison system as we know today was first established. Until this time privatization within the prison system existed in the form of services provided to the prison, whether it was medical, laundry, or food services provided, that was the extent of where privatization inside the prison system existed. However, the overall management of the prison system was always held by federal or state authorities until 1984, when a group of investors from Tennessee with close ties in the legislature recognized and took advantage of a business opportunity forming the now very profitable Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). Their main objective was to use venture capital to build a new prison and lease or rent their beds to the state in a profit earning endeavor almost like a hotel. CCA alongside the GEO Group are two of the largest “players” or firms in the privatized prison industry system. These firms not only construct new prisons or takeover existent ones, they also get contracted by government agencies to house a growing number of undocumented immigrants and resident aliens, as well as owning facilities in countries outside the US. Today, approximately twenty percent of U.S. prisons have been privatized. The US Department of Justice statistics show that, as of 2013, there were 133,000 state and federal prisoners housed in privately owned prisons in the US, constituting 8.4 percent of the overall U.S. prison population. Broken down to prison type, 19.1 percent of the federal prison population in the United States is housed in private prisons and 6.8 percent of the US state prison population is housed in federal prisons. Prison privatization has been confronted with severe criticism. From economists, human rights activists, religious and community leaders, criminologists and