Florida Senate Votes against Privatizing Prisons

Yesterday, the Florida state senate voted down a bill that would have privatized 27 of the state’s prisons. The shift was projected to save $16.5 million in a state with a $2 billion budget deficit. Theoretically, private prisons are projected to save money because they operate under a profit motive, putting them in a better place to find operating efficiencies compared to state run prisons.

While from a budgetary perspective prison privatization may make sense, the issue is not straightforward. Privatizing prisons creates an interest group that stands to profit from higher incarceration rates. The case of two Pennsylvania judges who accepted bribes from private prison interests in exchange for incarcerating 5,000 juvenile offenders, many of whom appeared in court for minor offenses without attorneys, brought light to this issue. Of course this illegal corruption does not represent the typical interaction between the justice system and private prisons, but does demonstrate the danger of crony capitalism in the industry.

In a paper for the Reason Foundation, Adrian Moore points out that prison interest groups are by no means exclusive to private prisons. Public sector employee unions also have incentives to grow their bureaucracy and protect their jobs by seeking harsher prison sentences. In Florida, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, a union representing public sector prison workers, played an important role in the defeat of the privatization bill. The California Correctional Peace Officers Association is perhaps the most studied public prison lobby. The CCPOA has made extensive contributions to both political campaigns and to groups that fight for harsher sentencing laws.

Aside from the complicated issues that special interests bring to the US prison system, it’s important to take a critical look at the alleged budget savings that private prisons provide. While these prisons are privately run, they of course are not really private businesses, but rather government contractors. This means a layer of bureaucracy separates them from their consumers (taxpayers) and the market process is not in play as it is in a competitive industry. Rather than having an incentive to provide the best service at the least cost, private prisons face incentives to fulfill the most lucrative government contracts at least cost.

Some studies, including Moore’s, have attributed substantial cost savings to prison privatization, but other studies have found the opposite. In Arizona, private prisons actually cost more per inmate than public prisons, according to state data, even though they do not typically house the highest security, most expensive inmates that state-run prisons do.

Florida Governor Rick Scott still has the opportunity to use his executive power to increase the role of private prisons in Florida but said he had wanted legislative support for the measure. While the budgetary and policy impacts of privatizing prisons are ambiguous, one policy change would bring certain cost savings to Florida taxpayers. By some measures, Florida currently has the strictest laws against marijuana possession in the country, including potential jail time for possession of misdemeanor quantities of the drug. By reducing sentencing for victimless crimes including possession and distribution of marijuana, the state could certainly save money and potentially improve outcomes for the states youth who face drug charges.