Privately Contracted Prisons: New Setting, Same Condition

Abstract

The growth of the market for privately managed prisons and prison services is an important part of the story of chronic capacity stress (CCS). Accounting for around 15 per cent of total capacity in 2012, private-sector firms have established themselves as designers, builders, operators, and financiers of new prisons, as well as running other key services such as prisoner escorts and electronic-tagging schemes. The sector has done much to impact capacity. It has been a near-exclusive provider of new prisons since the early 1990s. And it has been used, in theory at least, as a source of leverage and innovation for improving the existing public-sector system. As the concept of constrained autonomy by now would have us suspect, it has partly been allowed to do this, and partly not.

People in the public sector want to do good things, but the system does not allow them to do it. Whereas people in the private sector want to do good things, and the system supports them and enables them to do it. Everything about the public sector is just lack of trust all the time. If we didn’t browbeat you all the time, if I didn’t keep telling you all the time, you’d be out doing this and that. You mustn’t do this and you mustn’t do that. It’s a very different way of looking at things in the private sector. (Former public-sector and now private-sector senior official)