Advantages and Disadvantages of Private Prisons Essay

Fourth some people believe that the government is becoming too dependent on private prisons. Due to it being cheap to create them now and if the government allows private prisons to run all prisons the companies that own the prisons could raise the prices of the contracts which could cause problems with the cost. The Market entry costs for single, low-security, facilities according to Logan "are well within reach of small businesses or groups of investors. As a new corporation, CCA was able to site, finance, build, and open a 350 bed prison within 7 months, for $5 million. The U.S. Corrections Corporation, founded by two men with an initial investment of $1.9 million, opened its first facility at a seminary purchased for $695,000." If that is all it take to create a prison it is within the resources of competitors to enter the market. Agencies can defend against companies lowballing by evaluating the proposed budgets for their realism, rather than looking for the lowest price. Competing contractors have the ways to control each other's' prices to a much better degree than the way taxpayers can use to control government costs. The issue of dependency, as a reason for disagreeing to private prisons, has a self-destructive characteristic. Would the problem be fixed if there were no private vendors? If a public service can only be provided by government employees isn't that a form of dependency. Maybe the most important job of all is that private prisons provide a way to gage how well of a job they are doing. How do we know that the government is running prisons in an effective and efficient way? Just like with any service, the best test, of quality is competition and comparison (Logan).
Finally is the quality of the prisons. Studies conducted so far, have been quite positive.
"An evaluation of a privately contracted secure training school for delinquents produced mixed findings, including a list of 36 positive results and 22 negative results. A survey of inmates at a privately run prison in Tennessee elicited 320 responses, of which 49% were positive, 21% were ambivalent, and 30% were negative. However, prisoners who were able to compare the private management with previous management by the county were overwhelmingly positive (24/28 comparison responses)." (Logan)
Another study compared the performances of private juvenile facilities in Massachusetts and a private prison in Kentucky with their government counterparts. On the majority of performance indicators, the private facilities had an advantage. "By and large, both staff and inmates gave better ratings to the services and programs at the privately-operated facilities escape rates were lower there were fewer disturbances by inmates and in general, staff and offenders felt more comfortable at the privately-operated facilities (Logan)." Private prisons are required by contract to meet the standards of their contract like said above. Certification does not always mean a high quality, but the requirement of it being there is evidence that private prisons have the expectations to meet high standards, and their