Racial and Ethnic Divides in Privatized Punishment: Examining Disparities in Private Prison Placements

Abstract

Scholars have identified diverse ways in which get-tough policies adversely affect minorities. An interest has also emerged in privatized corrections and the potential for exploitation of those who experience it. Drawing on these literatures and on focal concerns theory, we hypothesize that some groups of individuals may be more likely to receive private prison placements. We employ regression analyses of official data to examine whether racial or ethnic minorities are more likely to receive private placements and whether such effects are moderated by age and violent history. We find that some Blacks are more likely to receive private placements, while, in some instances, Hispanics are less likely to receive such placements. There was no evidence that younger and violent minorities are more likely to be assigned to private prisons. This study advances scholarship on privatization, punishment, and the potential racial and ethnic divides in the consequences of the punitive era.

Keywords:

• Private prison
• corrections
• focal concerns
• racial disparity

Acknowledgments

We thank the Florida Department of Corrections for providing the data used in this study. We also thank Dr. William Bales for helping to secure access to these data and Jennifer Brown for assisting us with answering data-related questions. Thank you, too, to the Editor and to the anonymous reviewers for the helpful insights and recommendations that improved this paper. Points of view expressed in this document are solely those of the authors and do not represent those of the Florida Department of Corrections.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 In 2015, a pilot program that gave some incarcerated individuals access to Pell Grants was implemented. In 2019, some lawmakers sought to make this pilot program permanent, and to make incarcerated individuals eligible to receive Pell Grant assistance, by introducing the Restoring Education and Learning (REAL) Act (Nadworny, 2019; Schatz, 2019). This bill remains in committee.

2 These data do not include individuals whose preprison or in-prison records were unavailable or individuals who had their sentence vacated or commuted, escaped from prison, or died in prison. When an individuals’ education status was unavailable they were dropped from the analyses. Ancillary analyses were conducted excluding education as a covariate and, therefore, including all cases previously dropped because of missing education information. The pattern of results for the primary variables of interest were similar to those presented in this study.

3 Individuals who were younger than 18 when admitted to prison are not included in this study. A related note—in the state of Florida, the maximum age cutoff for being considered a youthful offender is 24. However, not all individuals aged 24 or younger are given a youthful offender status. In this study, the adult female and male groups do not include youthful offenders.

4 The one exception is gang membership, which is measured at some point during an individual’s term of incarceration and not necessarily at prison admission.

5 One percent of youthful offenders males placed in a private prison were not incarcerated in a youthful offender private prison and instead were placed in an adult male private prison. Because of their youthful offender status, these individuals are included in the youthful offender analyses; in these analyses, they receive a “1,” indicating a private prison placement.

6 In the analyses of female inmates, one conviction county had too few cases to estimate the regression models; these cases were dropped from the analyses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andrea N. Montes

Andrea N. Montes, PhD, is an assistant professor at Arizona State University, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 411 North Central Avenue, Suite 600, Phoenix, Arizona 85004, phone [phone]), email ([email protected]). Her work has appeared in Crime and Delinquency, Criminology and Public Policy, and Criminal Justice and Behavior. Her research focuses on theories of crime and punishment, crime prevention and school safety, and privatization.

Daniel P. Mears

Daniel P. Mears, PhD, is the Mark C. Stafford Professor of Criminology at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 112 South Copeland Street, Tallahassee, FL 32306-1273, e-mail ([email protected]), phone [phone]). His research focuses on crime and criminal justice. He is the author of American Criminal Justice Policy (Cambridge University Press), Prisoner Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration (with Joshua C. Cochran, Sage), and Out-of-Control Criminal Justice (Cambridge University Press).

Eric A. Stewart

Eric A. Stewart, PhD, is the Ronald L. Simons Professor of Criminology at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, 112 South Copeland St., Tallahassee, FL 32306-1273, e-mail ([email protected]), phone [phone]). He is a member of the Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice Network. His research interests include racial inequality and criminal outcomes; crime over the life course; and contextual- and micro-processes that affect adolescent development.