For-Profit Prisons Pros And Cons Essay

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With the ever-increasing prison population here in America, we find that we are running out of room in state run prisons. How do we accommodate the influx of prisons? you may ask, well one way is to house them in For-Profit Prisons. For-Profit Prisons are a way for the state to house prisoners in a way that saves money, since For-Profit Prisons are essentially a privatized business. However, there leads to questions being asked, such as, Are For-Profit Prisons effective? Do they operate in an ethical/humane way? Security Concerns? Questions like these will be discussed in this paper in a Pro/Con fashion. This paper will address the concerns one may have for For-Profit Prisons, whether they be for or against For-Profit Prisons.
Keywords: For-Profit, Prisons, Pros, Cons
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Cons
When it comes to For-Profit prisons, there are cons as well. Since For-Profit prisons, whether the crime rate is decreasing or not, there is an incentive to keep people incarcerated. “If the government cannot keep these prison beds full, it must foot the bill for those empty beds.” (Pitario, 2015)
Additionally, there are ways at which the For-Profit prisons meet their prisoner “quotas” and that is to house undocumented immigrants. Annually, For-profit prisons earn about 3 billion dollars and which about half comes from facilities that house undocumented immigrants. Moreover, For-Profit Prisons operate about 50 to 55 percent of undocumented immigrant detainment facilities. For example, between 2012 and 2013 the CCA (Corrections Corporation of America) and GEO Group spent approximately $4,350,000 on lobbying the federal government with the intent to win immigration related contracts upon which the CCA and GEO Group were remunerated $1.4 billion between them both (one-third of their total

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