An Assessment of Private Prisons and Inmate Deaths using the National Prisoner Statistics Database

• In Event: Death in Custody

Abstract

On August 18, 2016, the U.S. Department of Justice, under the Obama Administration, issued a directive that would phase out the use of private prisons due to an assessment that the facilities are not as safe as and provide few economic advantages over federally run institutions. On February 23, 2017, the Trump Administration rescinded this directive, directing the Bureau to return to its previous approach on private prisons. As there is much contention as to whether privately-run correctional facilities are less advantageous than publicly-run correctional facilities, this research focuses on whether jurisdictions with a greater proportion of prisoners held within private institutions have a higher rate of institutional deaths of inmates. This paper analyzes the National Prisoner Statistics study, collected yearly by the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, to answer the question “is an increase of inmates of private facilities correlated with an increase in inmate death?”

Author

• Alyssa Purdy, American University