Prisoners’ Rights and Correctional Privatization

Abstract

By no later than the 1960's, the United States began to witness fundamental philosophical and structural changes in dominant understandings of the proper role of government as a provider of essential public services. Earlier times found much support for the view that the obligation of government was three-fold: (1) to identify the types of services which were essential to the health, safety, and welfare of the public; (2) to mandate by statute that identified services be provided; and (3) to identify-and often to create-the public agencies by means of which mandated services would be provided. Experience, however, suggested that government often failed to serve the public interest when it attempted to shoulder this broad set of responsibilities. In particular, experience suggested that such important goals as accountability, efficiency, and effectiveness often were not served by government being cast in the role of service provider. With increasing frequency, critics began to suggest that government agencies which provided essential public services often assigned a higher priority to serving agency interests than to serving the public interest, that the creation of non-competitive governmental monopolies in a broad array of service areas resulted in bureaucratic organizations within which few incentives for productivity or for quality could be found, and that it was highly probable that the private sector could provide better services at a lower cost.