The Persuasive and Powerful Private Prison Industry

For my fourth and final blog post about my Junior Theme topic, I am choosing to write about a focus of my research, and specifically one study from it, that I have not yet described in detail: The Private Prison Industry.

The private prison industry's motive for influencing government funding for addiction treatment and prevention (i.e. my topic) can begin to be explained by the graphic below.

While this cycle is very interesting to pick apart and analyse, the step that I focused most closely on was how the private prisons sponsor lobbying groups, and do a number of other things, that pressure politicians into making certain decisions. These decisions then turn out to heavily benefit the private prison industry, over the needs of the American people. According to a 2011 study by the Justice Policy Institute, the private prison companies use direct campaign donations and strong networks and associations along with the lobbying in order to meet their end goal of higher profits, and it's worked. The same study, titled "Gaming the System," found that spending on corrections increased by 72% between 1997 and 2007. But how does this connect to addiction treatment and prevention funding? The answer to this question is largely based in how the private prisons fill their beds (also important to understand that filling beds = more profits).

Since the rise of the private prison industry can be largely attributed to the introduction of the War on Drugs, it makes sense that private prisons are primarily used to house low-level drug users. Without addiction, many of these users would not be in the position they are in, and would therefore not be sent to prison. Therefore, by focusing on eliminating addiction, the government would likely incite a decrease in the prison population, which is financially detrimental to private prison companies. Additionally, if more money is chosen to be allocated to one area, that means money must come out of another. This other area would likely be incarceration funds because, according to Shoveling Up II, this area is currently the second highest percentage of this particular allocation of funds (the highest being health care for substance abuse-related diseases, which is directly related to how damaging addiction and substance abuse is). And while I intend to leave these connections out of my paper (because the focus of my essay is on how the industry influences, not why), I feel it is crucial to understand the foundation of the situation. After all, the only way to fully comprehend an issue as complicated as this is to break it apart, piece by piece, to get to the root of everything, and then begin to make change from there.