This week I’m joined by Beryl Lipton of MuckRock to talk about private prisons in the United States. We discuss the difficulties of getting information from them through FOIA requests, the for-profit prison business model and why this may not be the best way to go about achieving prisoner rehabilitation.

According to the US Bureau of Justice statistics, 2.2 million people are incarcerated in US federal and state prisons and county jails. We have the largest prison population in the world. This is in addition to the 4.7 million more who are on probation or parole. According to a 2014 Human Rights Watch report, “tough-on-crime” mandatory sentencing and three-strikes laws adopted since the 1980s, have filled U.S. prisons with mostly nonviolent offenders. This policy failed to rehabilitate prisoners and many were worse on release than before incarceration. Rehabilitation programs for offenders can be more cost effective than prison.

One solution that has been proposed to deal with this is private, for-profit prisons. This is a setup where the government contracts a third party and pays them a per diem or monthly rate, either for each prisoner they hold or for the property itself whether it is occupied or not. As it breaks down now, 8.4% of the overall US prison population are in private prisons, with 19.1% of the federal prisoners and 6.8% of the larger US state prison population and these percentages have been steadily rising.

Beryl Lipton can be contacted at [email protected].

MuckRock Prison Project website: https://goo.gl/y5iFqp

Music by Pale Blue and LinoRise.com. Commercial video by RetroTy.com.