Contracts, Prisons, and Public Law

Abstract

Abstract In the second half of the 1980s correctional authorities in the United States began to contract out the management and daily running of prisons. Tennessee with its Private Prison Act 1986 was the first state to authorize the contracting out of an adult general purpose prison. In the early 1990s England and Wales followed suit. Contracting out was authorized by the Criminal Justice Act 1991 and the first private prison, a remand centre, opened at the Wolds in April 1992. From these beginnings the practice of contracting out has expanded on both sides of the Atlantic. To date the total number of adult prisoners held in private prisons remains small in both jurisdictions, but in both the proportion of private prisoners is due to rise significantly. In the US the prison population had grown to just over one million by 1991, whereas by the end of 1990 there were only 44 secure adult facilities operated by private firms in the US holding approximately 15,000 inmates. At the time of writing there are three new privately run prisons operating in England and Wales, the Wolds, Blakenhurst, and Doncaster with a capacity of up to 1,639 between them, and the refurbished Strangeways with an ultimate capacity of 971, out of a total prison population of nearly 50,000. This relative insignificance in quantitative terms should not, however, belie the importance of private prisons not only to prison policy but also more generally to public law.