I wrote a previous article detailing Harvard and Harvard affiliates’ connections to CoreCivic. I explored some of the ethical particularities of private prison investment and some of the documented abuses at CoreCivic facilities. However, the public carceral system has had its fair share of documented abuses as well. When the Independent spoke to Dr. Anna Gunderson, political scientist and professor at Louisiana State University, she made sure to emphasize that point. “Saying that private prisons are worse than public prisons neglects to mention that public prisons are terrible, I mean truly,” said Gunderson. “Holding them up as this yardstick for private prisons to live up to […] it’s not the case that they’re bastions of rehabilitation and private prisons are not.”
In Alabama, it was abusive practices in public prisons that caused Governor Kay Ivey to seek a private prison deal in the first place. In December of 2020, the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state over the unconstitutionality of Alabama prisons. The lawsuit alleges that Alabama has failed to protect people who are incarcerated from violence and sexual abuse, and that Alabama prisons subject incarcerated individuals to unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, including “excessive force at the hands of prison staff.” And just like in private prisons, abuses at public prisons continue into the present. In early February 2021, for example, incarcerated activist Kinetik Justice two other individuals were beaten by prison guards at Donaldson Correctional Facility and had to be airlifted to the hospital at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Some scholars argue that even more prison privatization could result in a greater degree of accountability and transparency when it comes to incidents of abuse. “It might be the case that the activist concern against privatization has it all backwards,” said Dr. Daniel D’Amico, economist and Associate Director of the Political Theory Project at Brown University. “We could imagine a world in which the incentives of competitive private businesses would be better arranged for accountability and transparency than public administration.” D’Amico cites the German carceral system, which has a much lower incarcerated population relative to the U.S. and a greater degree of privatization.
While more privatization might lead to greater accountability and transparency in theory, it’s not clear whether that would be the outcome in practice. The Independent posed Dr. D’Amico’s hypothetical to Gunderson. “The main drawback of an argument like that,” she replied, “is that the hesitance to privatization is so strong that I just don’t think that we would get to that point where people might think that it would help with accountability. […] People are moving away from privatization as a policy and they don’t want to necessarily increase their use of privatization.”
Prison privatization is often seen as a question of economics in the eyes of policymakers. When justifying her mega-prison deal to Alabama taxpayers, Governor Ivey claimed, “given the failing state of the ADOC’s existing infrastructure and that the Department already is faced with more than $1 billion in deferred maintenance costs alone, pursuing new construction without raising taxes or incurring debt is the fiscally sound and responsible decision.”
According to Brian Highsmith, Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, arguments like this one centered on fiscal responsibility and the potential for profit can be attributed to the negotiation tactics utilized by companies like CoreCivic. “Beginning in the 1980s, private prisons began pitching themselves to states as a way to control costs,” Highsmith explained. “But the supposed savings that result from outsourcing are not achieved via efficiencies in service provision. The cost of those functions has not fallen—it has simply been shifted onto the individuals processed through the legal system and their loved ones.” The potential for savings or even profit is there; however, it comes at the expense of those incarcerated and their families.
D’Amico objected to the assertion that private prisons provide a unique ethical conundrum when it comes to profiting on incarcerated people. “The catchphrase that you hear is profiting off of other people’s punishment, profiting off of other people’s misery,” stated D’Amico, “It’s not clear that public officers don’t do similarly.” Highsmith, however, does see private prisons as providing ethical problems, as “the basic business model of these corporations is to extract wealth from already vulnerable communities.”
It’s also possible that the point of Governor Ivey’s plan was never to save money or to profit off of people who are incarcerated but instead to deflect blame from the state of Alabama to privately owned companies. Much of Dr. Gunderson’s work centers around an investigation of why states choose to privatize their prisons in the first place. “Contrary to popular wisdom,” she said, “I don’t find that some of these common determinants like partisanship or economics or unionization play a significant role in shaping states’ aggregate level of privatization.” Instead, she believes privatization is fueled by an “incentive to remove accountability for whatever happens within these prisons, and allow the state government to pass the buck on what happens within prisons which is, of course, a lot of bad stuff.”
Critics of Governor Ivey’s plan claim that these new mega-prisons fail to address the issues with Alabama prisons outlined in the DOJ lawsuit and earlier reports, and they will not solve the root problem of overcrowding. In an op-ed for AL.com, Alabama State Auditor Jim Zeigler writes, “Like moving into a new house to save a broken marriage, new buildings will do nothing to address the real problem: failed leadership.” Grassroots opposition to Governor Ivey’s CoreCivic deal is still growing despite the fact that the plan has already been signed. Recently, Regions Bank elected to withdraw its financial support from CoreCivic after Alabama Students Against Prisons (ASAP) staged a protest at the bank’s Birmingham location. ASAP and other community groups are continuing to oppose the plan by organizing protests and contacting local legislators, businesses, and community leaders.
D’Amico believes that private prisons, as of now, are less of a cause of the American crisis of mass incarceration and more of a symptom of it. “If it’s true that privatization is a coping strategy to deal with the challenges of prison excess,” D’Amico advances, “then the question becomes, what causes prison excess?” In his eyes, the answer to this question is multifaceted, but it partially comes down to “an overzealous criminal legislature, that we have too many things that are illegal.” Gunderson agrees that the issues with our current legal system are complicated and numerous. “What aren’t the most pressing issues with our legal system?” she said. “It’s such a complex set of institutions that all rely on each other.”
Because the mass incarceration crisis is such a complex issue within an even more complex web of institutions and policies, there’s no one silver bullet solution. But people of various political backgrounds agree that building new prisons does little more than kick the problem down the road. “Our incarceration rate is already so high that I’m not sure how new prisons would solve anything,” stated Gunderson. Similarly, Highsmith stated, “The alternative advocates are seeking is not public prisons; the alternative is to end our oppressive system of mass punishment and social control […] mass incarceration is a political choice, not some naturally-occurring phenomenon.”
If building new prisons is a band-aid solution for a much deeper problem, then the question becomes: what should we be doing to ensure that new prisons don’t need to be built in the first place? Gunderson believes “the solution lies in a multi-pronged reform approach from police reform to prosecutorial reform, sentencing reform, all of that I think should be higher priority than building new prisons.” D’Amico also advised a multi-pronged solution which focuses on providing economic opportunity, promoting human capital development in the education system, and de-incentivizing hawkish prosecution tactics. “If you had more vibrant and prosperous cities,” he concluded, “then I would assume there would be less crime and therefore less punitive responses to crime.”
Until the underlying causes that contribute to the mass incarceration crisis in the U.S. are addressed, companies like CoreCivic will continue to build new prisons and the incarcerated population will continue to grow. However, companies like Vanguard, Arrowstreet, and Harvard do not have to continue to invest in these companies and fund this non-solution to a massive problem. But Dr. D’Amico would caution against “symbolic” divestment movements, arguing that “everytime you divest, everytime you sell a stock, there’s someone else who’s interested in buying.”
Walsh agrees that divestment, especially from Harvard’s standpoint, is symbolic to a certain degree, but that does not mean that divestment is not a goal worth pursuing. “We need to set an example,” advocates Walsh. “Harvard alone won’t solve it. It needs to be a mass effort by institutions across the country, but there needs to be […] a precedent set in order for mass action to occur against the Prison Industrial Complex and those companies that support it.”
The jury is still out on the ideal solution for the mass incarceration crisis. But from Libertarian economists to prison abolitionists, many agree that new prisons, public or private, do nothing more than exacerbate a crisis that is already ruining the lives of millions of U.S. citizens.
Cade Williams ’23 (cadewilliams@college.harvard.edu) is the Associate Editor of the Independent.