In order to cope with the rapidly rising prison population generated by the get-tough stance on crime adopted during the 1990s, federal and state governments have had to commit an ever growing portion of government resources to building and maintaining new prisons. To ease the strain on already tight state and federal budgets, some criminal justice officials have hired private corporations to run prisons.

Proponents of private prisons contend that private corporations run prisons at a lower cost than the government. According to Charles W. Thomas, director of the Private Corrections Project at the University of Florida in Gainesville, “Contracting out corrections speeds up new construction, decreases construction costs by 15–25 percent, [and] generates designs that are substantially more efficient than those chosen by bureaucrats.” Proponents of private prisons maintain that innovative prison designs used by the private sector allows private...