Is Our Current Penal System a Warehouse of Inmates?

The typical voting public of middle class, white America is not generally concerned with what goes on in our society's prisons. However, the issue bears a closer look in light of the fairly recent trend of reintroducing prison privatization. When private corporations take over the criminal justice system, ethical, financial, and practical concerns are raised. Privately owned prisons subtly encourage the increasing rate of Americans incarcerated, endanger the public's safety, and allow for basic humane and civil rights to be stripped from prisoners. This system is nothing new; medieval England commonly housed privately run prisons and North America saw several privately owned prisons in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the United States, the management of prisons was systematically transferred to the state at the beginning of the twentieth century when the public became aware of the dismal living conditions and regular abuse that prisoners suffered. The government was in control of almost all prison facilities up until the 1980s when President Reagan's wide scale privatization campaign pounced upon the prison system to "liberate" its factions (Sinden 41).