The federal Bureau of Prisons’ move to phase-out private prisons is a largely symbolic one.

Last week, the Department of Justice announced that it would end its use of private prisons. Brett C. Burkhardt writes that while the move will eventually reduce the number of federal inmates in private facilities to zero, it will have no effect on the 90,000 held in state private prisons, and on Immigration and Customs Enforcement or the US Marshals Service which together hold 21,000 in private facilities. He also comments that one likely response to the move from the private prison industry will be to double-down on contracts for immigrant detention

Who Punishes Whom? Bifurcation of Private and Public Responsibilities in Criminal Punishment

This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by Taylor & Francis and can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1080/0735648X.2016.1174619Who holds the legitimate right to punish criminals? While previous work has identified several factors that influence states' decisions to delegate punishment duties to the private sector, it has not considered variation in the level of security required to implement the punishment. Delegating coercive power challenges commonly held assumptions about the appropriate locus of coercive power, and resistance is likely to be strongest when delegating highly secure services that require the greatest levels of physical coercion. Using data on American adult correctional facilities from 1990 to 2005, this article describes the current bifurcation of correctional contracting, wherein private contractors house increasing numbers of inmates in less secure correctional settings (e.g., low-security, community-based facilities) and public authorities retain near-monopoly control over inmates in highly secure settings (i.e., medium and maximum security prisons). Multinomial regression analyses reveal that states' decisions to privatize highly secure facilities were associated with ideological and economic factors. However, the decision to privatize lower security facilities has become commonplace, and as a result has grown irrespective of state-level factors. These results suggest that handing over low security services to the private sector has become a legitimate policy option, while privatizing the most secure services remains shrouded in illegitimacy

Where Have All the (White and Hispanic) Inmates Gone? Comparing the Racial Composition of Private and Public Adult Correctional Facilities

A great deal of research has documented racial disparities in imprisonment rates in the United States, but little work has been done to understand the process by which inmates are assigned to individual correctional facilities. This article extends research on racial disparities in imprisonment rates to consider racial disparities in inmate populations across prisons. Specifically, it examines the racial pattern of inmate placement in privately operated and publicly operated correctional facilities. Analysis of American adult correctional facilities reveals that, in 2005, white inmates were significantly underrepresented (and Hispanic inmates overrepresented) in private correctional facilities relative to public ones. Results from multilevel models show that being privately operated (as opposed to publicly operated) decreased the white share of a facility's population by more than eight percentage points and increased the Hispanic share of a facility's population by nearly two percentage points, net of facility- and state-level controls. These findings raise legal questions about equal protection of inmates and economic questions about the reliance of private correctional firms on Hispanic inmates.This is an author's peer-reviewed final manuscript, as accepted by the publisher. The published article is copyrighted by the author(s) and published by Sage Publications. The published article can be found at: https://doi.org/10.1177/215336871453935

The Politics of Correctional Privatization in the United States

Research Summary: Private correctional firms are political actors. They work to create favorable conditions to market their services. At the same time, they are constrained by external political forces, including political parties, social movements, and public opinion. This article reviews what we know about the reciprocal relationship between the private corrections industry and politics. Policy Implications: The review of extant research yields several implications for practitioners and policymakers. First, correctional privatization is not uniformly accepted, a fact that presents challenges for the industry and opportunities for critics. Second, punitive policies that appear beneficial to industry (particularly, those related to tough immigration policy) may in fact pose real reputational risks. Third, new forms of privatization—namely, social impact bonds—may prove more tolerable to the general public. Finally, consideration of political activity by private industry should not distract from political activity by public sector actors (e.g., prison guard unions)

Private Prisons in Public Discourse: Measuring Moral Legitimacy

New policies require legitimacy to survive. Prison privatization represents a policy challenged by initial perceptions of illegitimacy. In the 1980s, governments began to allow private firms to run correctional facilities, thereby shifting an inherently coercive, traditionally governmental function—incarceration—to the private sector. With data from 706 articles in four major American newspapers spanning 24 years, this article uses the concept of diversionary reframing (Freudenburg and Alario 2007) to measure and track the moral legitimacy of prison privatization across time and place. Findings suggest that initially high levels of moral legitimacy facilitated some states' adoption of private prisons, while initially low levels of moral legitimacy stunted the growth of prison privatization in other states. The article thus presents a novel way of measuring moral legitimacy, demonstrates how the concept may be used to help explain controversial public policy changes, and documents the cultural content of private prison debates in the United States.Keywords: Private prisons, Prison privatizatio

Who is in private prisons? Demographic profiles of prisoners and workers in American private prisons

Who is in private prisons? This seemingly straightforward question has received surprisingly little attention in the United States. This paper analyzes national prison data to provide demographic profiles of prisoners and workers in private prisons in the United States and to compare them to prisoners and workers in state and federal prisons. It summarizes data on jurisdiction, sentence length, race, and citizenship of prisoners, as well as the race and gender of correctional officers. Results reveal differences between private and public prisons with respect to both prisoners and workers. Specifically, private prisons detain inmate populations that are disproportionately non-white, under federal jurisdiction, and serving short sentences; and they employ officers that are disproportionately female and black or Hispanic. These results depict the private prison sector as distinct from its public counterpart—both in terms of prisoner and staff composition. A discussion considers the implications of these findings for equity in punishment

Herschel observations of EXtraordinary Sources: Analysis of the full Herschel/HIFI molecular line survey of Sagittarius B2(N)

A sensitive broadband molecular line survey of the Sagittarius B2(N) star-forming region has been obtained with the HIFI instrument on the Herschel Space Observatory, offering the first high-spectral resolution look at this well-studied source in a wavelength region largely inaccessible from the ground (625-157 um). From the roughly 8,000 spectral features in the survey, a total of 72 isotopologues arising from 44 different molecules have been identified, ranging from light hydrides to complex organics, and arising from a variety of environments from cold and diffuse to hot and dense gas. We present an LTE model to the spectral signatures of each molecule, constraining the source sizes for hot core species with complementary SMA interferometric observations, and assuming that molecules with related functional group composition are cospatial. For each molecule, a single model is given to fit all of the emission and absorption features of that species across the entire 480-1910 GHz spectral range, accounting for multiple temperature and velocity components when needed to describe the spectrum. As with other HIFI surveys toward massive star forming regions, methanol is found to contribute more integrated line intensity to the spectrum than any other species. We discuss the molecular abundances derived for the hot core, where the local thermodynamic equilibrium approximation is generally found to describe the spectrum well, in comparison to abundances derived for the same molecules in the Orion KL region from a similar HIFI survey.Comment: Accepted to ApJ. 64 pages, 14 figures. Truncated abstrac