Private Prisons and Just Punishment

UCLA law prof Sharon Dolovich's new paper, State Punishment and Private Prisons (via Solum), appears relevant to our recurring conversation evaluating the American system of punishment from the perspective of Catholic legal theory:

[I]f our penal policies and practices are to be legitimate, they must be consistent with two basic principles: the humanity principle, which obliges the state to avoid imposing punishments that are gratuitously inhumane; and the parsimony principle, which obliges the state to avoid imposing punishments of incarceration that are gratuitously long. After sketching the foundation for this legitimacy standard, I then apply it to the case of private prisons. Approaching the issue of private prisons from this perspective helps to reframe the debate in two ways, both long overdue. First, it allows for a direct focus on the structure and functioning of private prisons, without being derailed by premature demands for comparison with public-sector prisons. It thus becomes possible to assess directly the oft-heard claim that the profit incentive motivating prison contractors will distort the decisions taken by private prison administrators and lead to abuses. Second, it makes it possible to see that the state’s use of private prisons is the logical extension of policies and practices that are already standard features of the penal system in general, thus throwing into sharper relief several problematic aspects of this system that are currently taken for granted. In this sense, the study of private prisons operates as a "miner's canary," warning that not just the structure of private prisons, but also that of American punishment practices more broadly, may need reconsideration.

Rob