ABSTRACT
The role of private industry in United States correctional systems has ebbed and flowed since the eighteenth century, when public and private jailers would hold debtors and inmates awaiting trial in colonial America to when low-cost prison labor was leased to private businesses in early New York penitentiaries and in the south during the post-Civil War reconstruction era. The dramatic rise of US prison populations throughout the 1980s and 1990s was rivaled only by the rise in private prison facilities. There were 110 privately owned or operated correctional facilities in 1995, little more than 10 years after Corrections Corporation of America's (CCA's) takeover of Tall Trees and Silverdale. The Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), more than states, has relied heavily on private prisons to house their inmates. The most recent comprehensive analysis of public versus private prison costs came from the Arizona Department of Corrections.
