Abstract
New public management, a reform movement that shifted the provision of public goods and services towards private institutions, is firmly entrenched in the United States. The Hollow State, a metaphor often used synonymously with contracting out, reflects the growing trend of using non-governmental networks–often nonprofits but also for-profit organizations–to deliver social services to vulnerable groups. This article, which draws from the author’s dissertation, examines differences in nonprofit and for-profit prisoner reentry agencies. The findings suggest that nonprofit/for-profit differences are eroding as the nonprofit sector becomes more competitive with the private sector for government contracts.
Highlights
Years of decentralization and outsourcing have caused contracting out to become one of the most prevalent mechanisms of alternative service delivery for making government more efficient and less costly (Amirkhanyan, Kim, & Lambright, 2007; Kettl, 2005; Provan, & Milward, 2001; Prager, 1994)
The findings indicate that the capacity building efforts differed for the nonprofit and forprofit organizations according to the ease by which each could access resources, as well as by the constraints imposed by their tax status
The challenges associated with trying to monitor the growing network of contractors in the Hollow State have grown (Agranoff & McGuire, 1998; Brown & Potoski, 2003; Cooper, 2003; Milward & Provan, 2000). Among those challenges is the tendency to analyze third party contract relationships as though there were no differences between them even though, as stated by contract expert Cooper (2003), “Just as contracting for services is different from contracting for goods, contracting with nonprofit organizations is different from contracting with for-profit firms”
Summary
Years of decentralization and outsourcing have caused contracting out to become one of the most prevalent mechanisms of alternative service delivery for making government more efficient and less costly (Amirkhanyan, Kim, & Lambright, 2007; Kettl, 2005; Provan, & Milward, 2001; Prager, 1994). The Hollow State has been used to characterize the growing trend whereby government has turned extensively to the use of third party networks, often nonprofits and for-profit agencies, to take a leading role in solving pressing societal problems, such as the more than 750,000 individuals released from prisons and jails each year (Langan,&., Bureau of Justice Statistics [BJS], 2002). This article examines key distinctions between private nonprofit and private for-profit organizations that contract with federal and state corrections to facilitate prisoner reintegration to society. That a growing number of states allow both nonprofit and for-profit organizations to bid for reentry contracts tests the question by Graham Allison (1979) as to whether the two private sectors are fundamentally alike “in all unimportant respects”
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