"It's like a hotel with a guaranteed occupancy"

The Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke made headlines this week with his inflammatory rhetoric about a “feral underclass” charged with instigating the recent riots in Britain. However in amongst his comments about the “criminal classes” of Britain there was a serious point about how the British people are being failed by our criminal justice system. An unbelievable 73% of young men who have been to prison will reoffend within a year of their release, not because they are feral members of a criminal class but because their time in prison destroys any opportunities they may have had for gainful employment and leaves them ill-equipped to re-enter society. To his credit, Clarke has recognised this and during his time as Justice Secretary has sought to promote prison as a place of rehabilitation rather than simply incarceration.

However the recent decision to implement a mass privatisation of Britain’s prisons, which was barely registered by the mainstream press, represents a worrying deviation from Clarke’s relatively enlightened attitude to the penal system. Handing control over prisons from the state to private companies may lead to dubious efficiency gains (although this has yet to be proved conclusively) however it also produces new entities which have a vested interest in an ever-growing number of our population being locked away, something which Clarke is ostensibly trying to avoid. This is not just a theoretical objection; there are two concrete examples which are particularly instructive on this point: one is America’s partially privatised prison system and another is our own immigration detention centres, of which 70% are run by the private sector.

The concept of a “prison-industrial complex” has existed in the United States for some time now but has yet to fully enter our lexicon. Like the military-industrial complex the term describes an ever-growing network of contracts and relationships between the state and the private prison industry, which uses its expanding revenues to gain political influence. A report published in June 2011 by the Justice Policy Institute detailed the full extent of how private prison companies have influenced American sentencing policy through lobbying, campaign contributions and “building relationships, networks and associations”. Since 2000 the three main prison corporations, Corrections Corporation of America, Cornell Companies and GEO (which incidentally runs the Harmondsworth immigration detention centre in London) have donated around $7 million to federal and state politicians. The majority of this has been concentrated in California and Florida, home to America’s highest and second-highest prison populations respectively. Unsurprisingly there has been a corresponding increase in prisoners held in private federal facilities over the same time period, specifically a 120% rise as compared with a 16% rise in the total prison population. The role of private prison companies in influencing Arizona’s harsh detention policies which discriminate against Central American migrants has also been recently exposed. Officials from Corrections Corporation of America were present at the meeting at which the draconian Senate Bill 1070 was drafted and within six months 30 of the bill’s 36 co-sponsors had received campaign contributions from the corporation.

Placing state services in private hands has evidently had distortionary effects on America’s criminal justice system, but can we draw any conclusions about what effects it may have in Britain? There is no certainty that increased privatisation will lead to increased incarcerations here, however the record of privatised immigrant detention centres in Britain suggests that it may. Detention centres have been in private hands since their introduction in the early 1970s and over time the rise in detentions has vastly outstripped the rise in asylum claims. In fact Christine Bacon, an Oxford University researcher, wrote in 2005 that “asylum applications in the UK have decreased significantly in recent years, while the use of immigration detention continues to expand.” From 1993 to 2005 the use of detention grew by over 900%, from 250 people to 2,644. It would be wrong to assume that this is entirely due to pressure from private security companies, however it would also be naïve to assume that they have not influenced this upwards trend. The aforementioned Harmondsworth detention centre is now the largest of its kind in Europe after its capacity was trebled last year. Remember that it is run by GEO who have no qualms about using their financial clout to influence politicians in the United States. Bacon concludes that the involvement of the private sector in detention of asylum seekers has “given momentum to the growth of a detention regime which may otherwise have been more restrained.”

It is certainly not inevitable that the mass privatisation of Britain’s prisons will lead to harsher sentencing and increased incarceration for non-violent crimes, however from looking at the precedential evidence there is clearly a grave risk that this will occur. We should be wary of placing our trust in companies that seek to profit from the misery and misfortune of others.