Introduction to the special issue on privatized corrections

• Date: 01 May 2019
• Published date: 01 May 2019
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12434

DOI: 10.1111/1745-9133.12434

EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION

SPECIAL ISSUE ON PRIVATIZED CORRECTIONS

Introduction to the special issue on privatized

corrections

Daniel P. Mears1Andrea N. Montes2

1Florida State University

2Arizona State University

Correspondence

DanielP. Mears, Ph.D., Florida State University, Collegeof Criminology and Criminal Justice,112 South Copeland Street,

Tallahassee,FL 32306-1273.

Email:dmears@fsu.edu

Privatization of corrections reemerged as a prominent policy focus in the 1980s. Debates and research

on privatization, however, have taken a narrow view, one aimed at examining only private prisons

and mostly ignoring the many other ways in which the “business” of corrections has been privatized

in modern society. In fact, countries—as well as local and state governments—have privatized much

more than prisons. They have turned to privatization for fine collection, community corrections, reha-

bilitative programming, medical care, and more.

Despite the ubiquity of privatization, remarkably little is known about it. When and where is it

needed? If privatization is effective, what makes it so? How well do private contractors provide their

services? Do they at least provide a service that is comparable to the amount and quality that public

corrections provides? What impact do they have? That is, how effective is private corrections? Not

least, how cost-efficient is it relative to public corrections?

Credible, empirically based answers to these questions are in largepar t missing foralmost all types of

correctional privatization. Other critical questions of relevance for advancing scholarshipand policy do

still exist, however. For example, what are the ethical considerations that go into decisions to privatize

or, alternatively,not to privatize? What does the public think about pr ivatizationin general? And about

particular types of privatized activities?

In this special issue, we seek to lay out what is and is not known about privatized corrections. In

the first article, by the two of us (Montes & Mears, 2019, this issue), we provide a roadmap of the

critical research gaps and opportunities that exist for advancing scholarship and policy. We provide

the context for, we hope, appreciating the need for and contributions of the essays that follow. Richard

Harding, John Rynne, and Lisa Thomsen (2019, this issue), in the second article, place privatization

in historical context. They demonstrate that privatization has a long and storied history, one that has

important implications for how we think about and study privatized corrections.

These two articles (Harding, Rynne, & Thomsen, 2019; Montes & Mears, 2019), then, are followed

by several investigations of what might be termed “domains” of privatization. In the third article, for

example, Gerald Gaes (2019, this issue) walks us through the state of research on privatization of

Criminology & Public Policy. 2019;18:213–216. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/capp © 2019 American Society of Criminology 213