Minorities make up 89 percent of the inmate population in California’s private prisons, according to Business Insider news.
Doctoral candidate Christopher Petrella at the University of California, Berkeley, recently conducted a study on nine state prison systems with large private prison populations. The study “revealed for-profit prisons jail minorities even more disproportionately than publicly operated prisons,” said Harrison Jacobs, author of the Business Insider article.
Jacobs noted that The Sentencing Project, a reform advocacy group, put the number of minorities incarcerated in the United States as high as 60 percent.
“While minorities are disproportionately incarcerated in all prisons in America,” Jacobs said. “The percentage of minorities in private prisons is often higher than 60 percent in some states’ private prisons.”
Jacobs cited the Petrella study to show the proportion of people of color in California’s public prisons is 76 percent, but in its private (outsourced) prisons it is 89 percent. In Mississippi, the number of people of color in public prisons is 66 percent, but in private prisons it is 75 percent.
The Petrella study attributed the higher rate of minorities in private prisons to the for-profit prisons using contractual provisions to target young, healthy (and thus more profitable) inmates, Jacobs wrote, and, according to the study, younger prisoners tend to be minorities.
Petrella found that the private prison companies write exemptions for certain types of prisoners into their contracts with states to target younger and healthier prisoners and avoid “above average” health care costs, Jacobs reported.
Petrella also found that prisoners older than 50 years are predominately white, and those in the 20-to-40-year-old range are far more likely to be black, Hispanic or any other minority, said Jacobs.
Jacobs cited the Petrella study to show that in Texas’ public prisons 57 percent of inmates are people of color and in its private prisons the number is 69 percent. At the same time, the percentage of 50-year-or-older inmates in its public prisons is 37, but in Texas’ private prisons, older inmates are a mere 17 percent.
– By Chung Kao