PaulsJusticeBlog

I had the opportunity to Chair and present at an excellent session at the 4th Annual East Asian Law and Society conference in Tokyo, Japan. The session itself was titled Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships with Prisons and Corrections: Benefits, Concerns and Models.

My paper was titled Models of Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships with Prisons: An Incomplete Survey.

Abstract: Israel has no private prisons, thanks to a decision by the High Court of Justice that privately run prisons were unconstitutional; that having a profit motive in running a prison nullifies the legitimacy of punishment and violates the rights of the people it holds. In contrast, the United States has bred a multi-billion dollar multi-national private prison industry that recently became Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT) to avoid corporate taxes. Japan’s Private Finance Initiative (PFI) prisons/rehabilitation centers are kept small in number and draw on a wide variety of profit and non-profit organizations. Australia is embracing a rehabilitation center to be built, run and financed by four major corporations. This paper provides an overview of these various thoughts of, and experiments with, privatization. The conclusion comments on the perils and promise of the apparent trend of using the private sector to bolster rehabilitation efforts.

Models of Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships with Prisons: An Incomplete Survey (2015) by Dr Paul Leighton

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August 08, 2015

Private Prisons: An Incomplete Survey