Another Factor That Must Be Taken Into Account Due To The Reliance Of Private

Another factor that must be taken into account due to the reliance of private contractors on prisoner numbers for profit is the issue of overcrowding. One of the key ideas promoting privatization is the improvement of standards and living conditions for prisoners, private prisons may develop a tendency towards increasing prisoner numbers in order to raise profits leading to overcrowding and its inherent problems This argument clearly reveals how the underlying commercial motivation of private organisations can have serious repercussions for the manner in which private prisons are run, posing serious and seemingly unanswerable questions to those who absolutely support privatization.
Another major concern with privatization is that there will be an increased emphasis on security, to the detriment of attempts to reform or rehabilitate prisoners. The contract between the Home Office and a private company does not require the contractor to help inmates lead good and useful lives' (Joyce, 2001: 221). Most criminologists agree that the rehabilitation and education of prisoners is a crucial function of the penal system. 'It is hard to disagree with both Durham (1989) and Shichor (1995) who maintain that the changing penal trend away from rehabilitation and training towards containment, incapacitation and deterrence has hastened the acceptance of privatization as a viable policy option. From a financial perspective, more prisons means more outlay. Prisons are expensive capital items with high running costs. Thus, there is considerable attraction in any policy designed to reduce those costs. In addition, the incapacitation or protection of the public function is an easier administrative task to hand over to private companies and their employees than the treatment and training of offenders' (Genders, 2002). By failing to provide any rehabilitation and training to offenders, private prisons become institutions with the sole function of punishing prisoners through incapacitation for profit.
Another potentially serious pitfall of widespread privatization is that the government may become reliant on the services of a handful of powerful companies; this could result in the government to some extent being held to ransom and thus be forced to pay higher prices in order to continually increase the profits of the private sector organisations. This potential problem is magnified where private prison operators are contracted to take over the entire running of an institution, including initially building it, owning it and managing it, as is now to be the case for all future tendered contracts in England and Wales.