Several states in the country, including Arizona and Oklahoma, have considered legislation to change the incentives of private prison contracts to better align with the desired outcomes of incarceration in the United States.
While private prisons only hold about 8 percent of the total prison population in the United States, they have come under public and legislative scrutiny for a myriad of issues including inmate care, safety, understaffing, performance, and misaligned incentives.
Texas is not immune from these controversies. According to the Prison Policy Initiative, Texas has a higher incarceration rate (751 our 100,000 population) compared to the rest of the country, with 657,000 Texans behind bars or under community supervision.
The state has several private prisons including the Bridgeport Unit, Kyle Unit, Lockhart Unit, and Mineral Wells Unit.
According to Texas 2036, turnover among staff, extreme heat, budget constraints, and recidivism have been among the issues discussed by legislators regarding Texas’ prisons.
The Cicero Institute, a nonpartisan policy organization that focuses on trying to fix broken government systems through accountability and innovation, has advocated for creating incentives for private prisons on the state-level that improve outcomes of incarceration, including staff retention, post-release employment, and recidivism.
“The strength of performance based reforms to prisons is that they re-orient prison operation towards programming, rehabilitative interventions, and vocational training while ensuring that those changes actually deliver on their intentions: more jobs, less substance abuse, and less crime,” said Public Safety Policy Director, Devon Kurtz.
His 2023 policy paper, Improving Prison Outcomes: Performance-based funding for staff retention, post-release employment, and recidivism reduction, lays out a variety of performance incentive proposals for lawmakers to consider.
The paper advocates for Officer Retention Performance Funding that would “financially reward prisons and their staff” for improved officer retention rates. He argues that 75% of the bonuses should go directly to staff.
To improve post-release employment, Kurtz recommends creating incentives that are directly tied to full-time employment rates post release. If the rate increases, additional funding could be provided that can go toward expanding educational and vocational training, work release programs, and job coaching.
While Kurtz recognizes that recidivism is a bit more difficult to measure due to the need for better data and longer-term tracking, he still thinks the state should provide financial incentives to private prisons who reduce recidivism rates.
While these types of incentives for private prisons are largely untested in the United States, both Kurtz and the Brennan Center for Justice highlight the success of similar types of incentives in other countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.
Among the success stories is one program at the HMP Peterborough in the United Kingdom that provided bonuses and a return-on-investment for private donations for a reduction in recidivism. The pilot-program achieved a 8.4 percent reduction in recidivism.
