Changing the Guard: Private Prisons and the Control of Crime - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0945999879 ISBN 13: 9780945999874

Verlag: Independent Institute, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

Changing the Guard is an authoritative survey of one of the most controversial aspects of criminal justice and corrections: the growing use of private prisons.

When prison privatization began in the United States in the early 1980s, many policy analysts claimed it would increase costs, decrease quality and erode state authority. Has it? Changing the Guard brings together leading criminal justice researchers to tackle this and related questions: Does prison privatization make economic sense? What are the prospects for enlarging prison privatization?

Changing the Guard also examines the broader questions that surround the prison privatization debate: What are the historical precedents for prison privatization? What do we know about punishment and recidivism? How long must a prison sentence be to deter crime? Are too many people in prison or too few? Should legal reform take precedence over prison reform to ensure that privatization does not simply make the criminal justice system more efficient at abusing civil liberties and executing legal injustices?

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Alexander Tabarrok is Senior Fellow and former Research Director at the Independent Institute, Assistant Editor of The Independent Review, Bartley J. Madden Chair in Economics at the Mercatus Center, Co-founder of Marginal Revolution University, and Director of the Center for Study of Public Choice and Associate Professor of Economics at George Mason University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from George Mason University, and he has taught at the University of Virginia and Ball State University.

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Changing the Guard

Private Prisons and the Control of Crime

By Alexander Tabarrok

The Independent Institute

Copyright © 2003 The Independent Institute
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-945999-87-4

Contents

Foreword Charles H. Logan, 
1 Introduction Alexander Tabarrok, 
2 The Economics of Prisons Kenneth L. Avio, 
3 Correctional Privatization in America: An Assessment of Its Historical Origins, Present Status, and Future Prospects Charles W. Thomas, 
4 Prison Privatization and Public Policy Samuel Jan Brakel and Kimberly Ingersoll Gaylord, 
5 Do We Want the Production of Prison Services to Be More "Efficient"? Bruce L. Benson, 
Index, 
About the Authors, 

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Alexander Tabarrok

We now have several decades of experience with prison privatization. Judging from the continued controversy, we have learned little from this experience. Yet if we look behind the controversy and evaluate the accumulated evidence, it becomes clear that we have learned a great deal.

We now know that private prisons can be built more quickly, operated at lower cost, and maintained at a quality level at least as high as government-run prisons. To be sure, some private prisons are better than others, and the worst-run private prisons are not as good as the best-run government prisons. But as Samuel Jan Brakel and Kimberly Gaylord demonstrate in chapter 4, we now have ample evidence to say that on average private prisons offer substantial cost savings with no loss in quality. (All the authors in this volume discuss the cost issue but, in particular, see chapters 2 [Avio], 3 [Thomas], and 4 [Brakel and Gaylord].)

You Get What You Contract For

What we have learned from prison and other types of privatization is that you get what you contract for. The early critics of prison privatization were correct that if governments were to write prison contracts solely based on price, then they would get cheap prisons of low quality. What the critics didn't understand, however, was that with experience it has become possible to write effective multidimensional contracts that include procedures for the careful monitoring of prison output. Such contracts provide incentives to produce high-quality prisons that are nevertheless considerably less expensive to run than their government counterparts.

The argument that privatization works when governments write multidimensional contracts with procedures for the careful monitoring of output does contain a hint of inconsistency. One of the arguments for privatization is that owing to a lack of incentives, government tends to be inefficient. But if government is inefficient at producing the output of prisons, why should we expect it to be any more efficient at producing prison contracts? This point surely has merit, which is one reason to maintain a distinction between the terms contracting out (in which the government remains as buyer of privately produced goods and services) and privatization (in which the government exits the industry as both buyer and seller).

The inefficiency of government as a contract writer is a real problem. In his chapter, Charles Thomas points out that in many cases privatization has turned into "governmentalization" because contracts with private suppliers are made so detailed that the private suppliers in essence are required to duplicate public facilities down even to the prisoner meal plan (see also Benson's chapter). It is a tribute to private industry or perhaps an indictment of government production tha

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Independent Institute
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0945999879
• ISBN 13: 9780945999874
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 248
• Herausgeber: Tabarrok Alexander
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV; info@simonandschuster.nl; ; Herculesplein 96; Utrecht; 3584 AA; Niederlande