Corporate interests at odds with penal system
Florida Atlantic University’s football team, the Owls, will be playing college football in GEO Group Stadium next year. The GEO Group bought the naming rights earlier this year, raising a firestorm of controversy surrounding how the GEO Group could even afford to buy the stadium through the operation of its for-profit prisons, among other things. Students have protested the change, but university officials have stated that the name is here to stay. But the biggest issue here is why we have for-profit prisons in the U.S. anyway.
We are immersed in an age of mass incarceration, and the U.S. leads the world in persons incarcerated per 100,000 citizens, with 718. When you start to look at lower-income levels and minorities, these already high numbers skyrocket. Put simply, we are not approaching incarceration correctly.
The entire focus of prison should be rehabilitation, not punishment. Sure, people should pay for committing a crime, but no one really benefits from our current system. However, if we can reduce recidivism, or an inmate’s tendency to leave prison only to return to crime and subsequently prison, then everyone benefits. The No. 1 goal of prisons should be to facilitate a change in the inmates. And, of course, all who go to prison aren’t going to miraculously transform their ways, but the principle is worth it if even a few will. Many convicts have changed without the help of the system; others could assuredly do the same with proper guidance.
For-profit prisons inherently violate the idea of rehabilitation because they are the only ones in our society who stand to gain from recidivism among inmates. The only argument that stands in favor of these prisons is that they save money, but even that has been disproved. Multiple studies have shown they do not actually cost any less than other prisons, and when they do, it is often because they fail to meet basic requirements. The number of persons incarcerated in private prisons in the U.S. has steadily grown to more than 125,000 in 2010, but these prisons fundamentally should not exist.
Prisons in the U.S. cost up to $63 billion a year. And while that number is staggering, for some reason it is rarely one of the statistics that deficit hawks throw out to demonstrate runaway government spending. But that is exactly what it amounts to: money wasted enforcing a system of mass incarceration. For example, sequestration has resulted in many detained illegal immigrants being freed from detention centers, and this isn’t a bad thing. Though illegal immigrants are technically criminals they are not the type of criminals who need to be incarcerated.
Crime is a problem in America, and perpetrators of crime deserve punishment. However, the American people deserve a nation with less criminals and a nation that can afford to put a lot more resources into schools than prisons. Rehabilitation is the way to get there.
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