[Mb-civic] The private, nonprofit prison - David Pozen - Boston Globe Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

  The private, nonprofit prison

By David Pozen  |  February 21, 2006  |  The Boston Globe

AFTER DECADES of inaction, Congress is debating whether to pass 
America's first comprehensive plan for dealing with recidivism.

Studies have long shown that nearly two-thirds of former prisoners are 
rearrested for a felony or serious misdemeanor within three years of 
their release. With nearly 650,000 prisoners released into communities 
each year, the social cost of this repeat offending is staggering. A 
bipartisan effort, the Second Chance Act, contains a wide range of 
countermeasures, such as the creation of a national task force to 
identify the best practices in reentry programs, repeal of the federal 
law denying college loans to applicants with drug convictions, and 
provisions for post-release mentoring, treatment, and housing grants to 
state and local governments. These reforms are long overdue.

Another reform, nowhere mentioned in the Second Chance Act or the 
debates surrounding it, could go further: using private, nonprofit 
organizations to manage prisons. The United States has no adult prisons 
run by nonprofits.

Professor Richard Moran, who proposed the idea in a 1997 op-ed in The 
New York Times, and later Daniel Low, in the sole law review article on 
the topic, make a forceful case for nonprofit prisons. Nonprofit 
operators, they argue, can provide the entrepreneurial spirit of 
for-profit operators, without the latter's legal and ethical 
liabilities. Nonprofits can design and test new programs, with positive 
spillover effects for public prisons. They can save tax dollars through 
the use of volunteer labor and private fund-raising. Most hopefully, 
nonprofit prisons can do a better job at rehabilitation -- and therefore 
at reducing recidivism -- because of their mission focus, service ethic, 
and freedom from political or profit constraints.

Yet whatever the theoretical cogency of these arguments, one major 
problem has blunted their impact on policy: the absence of empirical 
support. Unlike at the adult level, America has many juvenile 
correctional facilities run by nonprofits, and new evidence from this 
population bears out the hypothesis that nonprofits can tackle 
recidivism more effectively than their public and for-profit counterparts.

In a study published in the latest issue of the Journal of Law & 
Economics, Patrick Bayer and I examined a sample of more than 5,000 
juveniles released in a two-year period from more than 110 correctional 
institutions in Florida. Florida proved an ideal site for the study 
because its Department of Juvenile Justice has been exemplary both in 
experimenting with nonprofit managers and in tracking offenders' 
post-release criminal behavior for up to a year. Because Florida keeps 
such good statistics, we were able to examine whether individuals 
released from public, for-profit, or nonprofit facilities were more 
probable to be rearrested and reconvicted.

After controlling for personal, institutional, and community 
characteristics that might affect the juveniles' propensity to reoffend, 
we found that nonprofit management led to recidivism rates 1 percent to 
2 percent lower than public management and 6 percent to 8 percent lower 
than for-profit management. (If a few percentage points does not sound 
like much, recall that around half a million recidivism arrests are made 
each year nationally.) These results held even if we looked only at 
higher-security facilities.

Nonprofits also cost the state of Florida significantly less than public 
prisons. For-profits were cheaper still, yet even under highly favorable 
assumptions their short-run savings were reversed within several years 
because of the costs of increased recidivism.

Can these results be extrapolated to the adult level? Juvenile 
correctional facilities are, no doubt, different from adult ones. And 
more empirical work needs to be done. But nonprofits can play a useful 
role in combating recidivism, and not just at the low-security end. 
Indeed, nonprofits may add more value at the adult level than at the 
juvenile level, because the rehabilitative and quality-of-confinement 
failings of adult public and for-profit prisons have been more dramatic.

Our study, and the example of the annual recidivism ratings in Florida, 
suggests a method for holding prisons accountable for their recidivism 
performance. With such a system in place, the risk of for-profit prisons 
having perverse incentives to stimulate more recidivism would be 
minimized; instead, their profit motive would be enlisted in the fight 
to decrease recidivism. Nonprofits would likewise have powerful new 
incentives to lower recidivism: maintaining their contracts and their 
reputations would depend on it.

There's one hitch. Given for-profit prisons' systematically worse 
recidivism performance in our study, one might be worried that they will 
never rise to the challenge. But nonprofits may be the only attractive 
option if we want a private sector role in the correctional system.

Experimenting with nonprofit operators would be a low-cost, low-risk 
solution. The idea has stalled in the shadow of for-profit 
privatization; now we have empirical evidence that nonprofit prisons can 
work and, with the Second Chance Act, a unique opportunity to rethink 
prison reform.

David Pozen, a student at Yale Law School, is a member of the school's 
Nonprofit Prison Project. 

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/21/the_private_nonprofit_prison/
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