Politics of Privatization: Exploring the Causes and Consequences of Prison Privatization

The private prison and jail building boom peaking in the 2000s revealed significant variation between states in the use of private correctional facilities. While it seems that the decision of state governments to privatize their prisons are driven by the desire for more efficient services and lower operating costs, political influences also seem to be undeniably instrumental in determining the rise of privatization. The first part of this study aims to explore this question by evaluating the role that state fiscal standing and lobbying efforts by private prison corporations play in the growth of the private prison system. Using a newly constructed panel dataset, I find a significant negative correlation between fiscal standing and privatization, and a significant positive correlation between lobbying and privatization, suggesting that the state decision to privatization is heavily financially motivated. The second part of this study is dedicated to understanding how private jails differ from public jails facilities, ultimately finding that there is a universal increase in population measures across both private and public facilities, with private facilities having a higher proportion of unconvicted prisoners, which supports the hypothesis that private facilities may lead to higher overall incarceration rates.