Privatisation of Prison: Profit-Making or a Way Forward?

The Prisons are a significant part of Criminal Justice Administration. A private prison is where people are confined or incarcerated by a third party contracted by a government agency. Private prison companies enter into a contractual agreement with governments that commit prisoners into the facility and then pay for each incarcerated individual. Till date, the debate over private prisons has focused largely on the efficiency of private prisons as compared to public prisons, and has assumed that, if private contractors can run the prisons for less money than the state without any degradation in quality, then states should be willing to privatize. The paper aims to highlight the scope and limitations of public-private partnership in prison system. Prison system in India has been replete with various problems for a long time which include overcrowding, mistreatment, lack of services needed for inmates' rehabilitation and reintegration into the society upon their release as well as the mismanagement by the callous jail authorities. The Public-Private Partnership Model entered the Indian Prison System through the most famous Tihar Jail, as early as the 90s. The article examines the significant considerations that policymakers, administrators and private entities will deal with as privatization of corrections becomes a more serious option. Privatization of prisons is one of the mechanisms that is being considered an alternative for coping with the growing corrections crisis in countries like India, USA, UK, Brazil etc. Moreover, the corporations running private prisons inevitably claim that they are saving the government money, but their true focus is on protecting their own bottom lines. In order to lower operating costs, these private facilities cut corners, hiring fewer employees and paying and training them less. These are some of the intricacies of Public-Private Partnership model that this article aims to analyse and present.