Inside Private Prisons : An American Dilemma in the Age of Mass Incarceration / Lauren-Brooke Eisen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Eisen, Lauren-Brooke, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Prisons--United States.

Prisons.

Privatization--United States.

Privatization.

Corrections--Contracting out--United States.

Corrections.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (334 pages)

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Columbia University Press, [2018]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

When the tough-on-crime politics of the 1980s overcrowded state prisons, private companies saw potential profit in building and operating correctional facilities. Today more than a hundred thousand of the 1.5 million incarcerated Americans are held in private prisons in twenty-nine states and federal corrections. Private prisons are criticized for making money off mass incarceration-to the tune of billion in annual revenue. Based on Lauren-Brooke Eisen's work as a prosecutor, journalist, and attorney at policy think tanks, Inside Private Prisons blends investigative reportage and quantitative and historical research to analyze privatized corrections in America.From divestment campaigns to boardrooms to private immigration-detention centers across the Southwest, Eisen examines private prisons through the eyes of inmates, their families, correctional staff, policymakers, activists, Immigration and Customs Enforcement employees, undocumented immigrants, and the executives of America's largest private prison corporations. Private prisons have become ground zero in the anti-mass-incarceration movement. Universities have divested from these companies, political candidates hesitate to accept their campaign donations, and the Department of Justice tried to phase out its contracts with them. On the other side, impoverished rural towns often try to lure the for-profit prison industry to build facilities and create new jobs. Neither an endorsement or a demonization, Inside Private Prisons details the complicated and perverse incentives rooted in the industry, from mandatory bed occupancy to vested interests in mass incarceration. If private prisons are here to stay, how can we fix them? This book is a blueprint for policymakers to reform practices and for concerned citizens to understand our changing carceral landscape.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter one The Prison Buildup and the Birth of Private Prisons

Chapter two How the Government Privatized

Chapter three Prisoners as Commodities

Chapter four The Prison Industrial Complex

Chapter five Private Prisons and the American Heartland

Chapter six The Prison Divestment Movement

Chapter seven The Politics of Private Prisons

Chapter eight Shadow Prisons: Inside Private Immigrant Detention Centers

Chapter nine Public Prisons Versus Private Prisons

Chapter ten Wrestling with the Concept of Private Prisons

Chapter eleven The Future of Private Prisons

Conclusion

Notes

Index

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 26. Mrz 2019)

ISBN:

9780231542319

0231542313

OCLC:

1011621572