Privatization

There has been a stunning build-up of prisons and a growing trend in prison
privatization in the last 30 years, including the rise of maximum security units. The goal of my dissertation is to understand the ideological, historic, political, and economic processes behind the changes in the criminal justice system of the United States. I analyze this problem from multiple angles—labor and policy history, discourse and public opinion, and race in America. The aim of this analysis is to uncover the reasons why crime legislation became progressively more punitive, reaction to African Americans gains in post-Civil Rights more hostile, and the manifold ways in which these phenomena drive the expansion of the prison system and its increasing privatization. In the process of this expansion, a racial caste system which oppresses young African Americans and people of color has become recast and entrenched. Specifically, I offer the notion that in the last three decades, punitive crime legislation focused on African Americans and served to deal with labor needs and racial conflict with harsher penal legislation; in doing so, it depoliticized race, institutionalized racial practices, and served the interests of private prison businesses in new ways oppressive ways. Using interdisciplinary methods which weave together qualitative and quantitative analysis, I find that punitive crime policies in the last thirty years used the concept of crime as political currency by government officials in order to appear tough on crime, and by business representatives interested in exploiting the prison industry. The conflation of business and political interests, and the recasting of crime as a race problem, served to taint public institutions and media dissemination with racist imperatives which stereotyped poor African Americans. The end result is a constant re-positioning of young black males as fodder for economic exploitation. The dissertation also addresses the high cost of imprisonment and the multiple social problems brought from shifting inmates from wards of the State to profit-making opportunities in the hands of private entrepreneurs. The result is high numbers of recidivism, and a growing underclass of people who will always be unemployed or underemployed and return to low income communities that suffer from the endless cycle of poverty and imprisonment.

In recent years it is widely believed that an increase in economic activity determined by market forces, contributes to higher productivity, faster economic growth, and lower budget deficits. Developing countries, in particular, are attempting to increase the share of the private sector in their economies in order to accelerate the process of development. This thesis describes the concept of privatization and alternative models of the privatization process. A cross-section of forty-nine countries is utilized to empirically assess the impact of privatization on economic growth.

Public administration scholars have raised serious concerns about loss of democratic accountability when government services are outsourced to private forprofit businesses because of the very different values and missions of the two sectors. Particular concern for democratic accountability arises when administrative discretion is delegated to governments' private sector agents. Furthermore, if contractors may adversely impact individual rights or interests, or may adversely impact vulnerable populations, special democratic responsibilities arise. It is these three features of outsourcing transactions that constitute the elements of the proposed framework used in this research in order to assess need for heightened attention to democratic accountability. Some scholars argue for application of constitutional and administrative law norms to some government contractors.

Governments across the country have been outsourcing traditional government services at an ever-increasing rate. Researchers debate the efficiency of privatization, and evidence exists both for and against increased private production of public goods. At the local level of government, a growing trend is privatization in the form of public-private partnerships. To determine the efficiency of these partnerships between municipal governments and private companies, this study examines the "most" privatized city in the United States, Sandy Springs, Georgia. I compared spending in Sandy Springs to five similar nearby cities and derived cost estimates of government services. I found that the "Sandy Springs Model" of local government lowered costs and increased efficiency when compared to traditional municipalities.