In 1844, Louisiana privatized its penitentiary, a prison for those who committed serious crimes, nine years after it opened. The company that owned the prison, McHatton, Pratt, and Ward, used the penitentiary as a factory, where inmates were subjected to forced labor in company production. As soon as the prison was privatized, one prisoner wrote in a memoir that his jailers reinstated “the most cruel tyranny, to eke out the dollar and cents of human misery.”
For-profit prisons, or private prisons, in the U.S. are owned by a third party, usually corporations or organizations contracted by the government or government agencies to imprison criminals. While the goal of a public prison owned by the government is to remove individuals from society and house them for rehabilitation, a private prison’s goal is simply to earn money, which means that they do not prioritize rehabilitation, leading to more previously incarcerated individuals reoffending and being arrested again. Since private prisons are permitted and contracted by government agencies, the government earns monetary compensation as private prisons pay a per diem. The more private prisons thrive, the more money the government receives.
Currently, private prisons in the U.S. enter into contracts, which state the basis to the payment to the corporation, usually based on the number of inmates that the prison houses, with the U.S. government. This means that a higher inmate count in private prisons would increase the profit gained by these prisons. According to Sally Q. Yates, former deputy attorney general under the Department of Justice of the U.S. Government, “the federal prison population increased by almost 800 percent between 1980 and 2013, often at a far faster rate than the Bureau of Prisons could accommodate in their own facilities,” which led to an influx of inmates in private prisons; more private prisons were created to accommodate the growing number of inmates. By 2013, when both the “federal prison population and the proportion of federal prisoners in private facilities reached their peak,” according to Yates.
Section I of the Thirteenth Amendment states,“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction”. This amendment seems to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude in the U.S., but it includes a crucial statement: except as a punishment for crime. This amendment shows how corporations such as the $1.8 billion private prison corporation, Corrections Corporation of America (CoreCivic), and the U.S. Government. that are connected to them, go around the legality of running private prisons. Through the 13th Amendment, individuals, corporations, and the government alike were and still are able to use private prisons as a source of income.
As prison privatization increased after the Civil War, this amendment was used to justify the treatment of prisoners in private prisons. The reason for increasing prison privatization in the past is the same as the reason used by states today to justify creating private prisons owned by corporations: since incarceration rates rise, leading to a higher prison population, there was an overflow of incarcerated individuals in public prisons, leading to more people being housed in private prisons. As the 13th amendment had abolished slavery “except as punishment for crime”, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, individuals such as former slaveholders built empires and kept “southern prisoners … on private plantations and on company-run labor camps where they laid railroad tracks, built levees, and mined coal,” according to Shane Bauer, an American journalist who went undercover for Mother Jones while employed for six months as a prison guard at the Winn Correctional Center, a private prison in Winn Parish, Louisiana managed by the Corrections Corporation of America. (he went undercover as an entry-level prison guard (earning $9 an hour) at a private prison in Winnfield, Louisiana).
The main problem with private prisons is the fact that they are profit-driven. This leads to these private institutions not putting in the sufficient amount of effort to rehabilitate prisoners they house to reduce recidivism (the tendency of a convicted criminal to reoffend). Private prisons treat not just inmates worse than public prisons (owned by the government) but also treat their officers and laborers worse by paying them significantly less compared to their public counterparts. The lack of effort and pay leads to higher rates of violence and recidivism in private prisons.
