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This government has made competition a corner stone of its public service reform agenda.
As David Cameron said in 2011, "We will create a new presumption...that public services should be open to a range of providers competing to offer a better service". Nowhere has this had more impact than in the Ministry of Justice where the coalition government has set out its intention to open up all services, from prisons to probation to rehabilitation, to competition.
Governments of all parties have used the private sector in the management of prisons to drive better performance since 1992. These two decades gives us a more robust and long term evidence base about the relative performance of the public and private sectors than we have in any other public service.
However, in November last year the Ministry of Justice performed a u-turn. Now the government's "new approach" limits the role of private companies to smaller contracts, such as for rehabilitation services and facilities management. Public sector prisons will see the momentum of competitive market pressures replaced with an "efficiency benchmark" instead.
The government's own statistics show that reducing the scope of competition in prisons is the wrong call. New Reform analysis of official Ministry of Justice figures show that private prisons are more effective at preventing prisoners from committing further crimes and they perform better than comparable public sector institutions on most official performance measures, from operational effectiveness to relationships between staff and prisoners.
Evidence suggests that this delivers benefits across both public and private prisons as competitive pressures incentivise improved outcomes in more cost-effective solutions. Whether public or private, the best providers must be allowed to set the pace of innovation.
The private sector has delivered these more efficient, better and cheaper prisons through freedom from national workforce regulations as Reform has showed in 'It Can Be Done'. Market facing pay and adaptable staffing arrangements in prisons have not only reduced cost considerably, but also improved staff prisoner relationships and internal cultures within prisons. With personnel costs typically making up at least two-thirds of prison expenditure, these freedoms are essential for achieving more for less in prisons.
The government needs to build on these achievements in privately run prisons by expanding not limiting competition. Market testing prisons would allow the best providers to take over delivery to improve quality and drive down costs. Fixed term contracts would ensure both more meaningful accountability and a more effective focus on outputs across the board.
Put simply, the government cannot afford to close the doors to competition. Contracting prisons has delivered better services at a lower price; the current financial challenge means this transformation in service delivery is more important now than ever.
Twenty years of private prisons has created an effective market which is ready to grow. Only by opening up prison services to greater competition will the government advance the "rehabilitation revolution" which Ministers want to deliver.
Prison privatisation should be a national scandal | Chris Poyner ...
Five of the seven private prisons held up for lower than average re-offending rates turn out to be in probation areas with lower than average re-offending; attributing success to an individual prison is problematic.
Within some probation areas private sector prisons are performing significantly worse than comparable public sector institutions. The private male local prison HMP Forest Bank has a re-offending rate of 60.48% amongst short-term prisoners. This is below the national average of 62.33% but significantly higher than HMP Manchester; a public sector male local prison within the same probation area.
Beyond its dodgy re-offending claims, 'The case for private prisons' utilises very selective statistics to support its other key arguments.
The report claims that per-place costs are lower in private sector prisons, again relying on research from 1998. This ignores statistics provided by the National Offender Management Service in 2007 which showed that the per-place costs of private prisons were significantly higher than public sector prisons.
Reform's clumsy, agenda driven research and bad statistics only go to show the inherent weakness of their position.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/joe-cottrellboyce/against-private-prisons_b_2734193.html
And that's something to be proud of?
Secondly, "reducing costs" simple means screwing workers down. "Adaptable staffing" means no job security. Please take a moment there to appreciate the delicious irony!
If that doesn't sound too appealing to you, why is competition in other fields of executive power such a great thing?
The problem here is not the least that a key point of "quality" in prison administration is the prevention of recidivism. But you only see how well that works out years after the inmates have been released. Especially with the suggestion of "short term contracts", that will make it nigh impossible to hold those responsible accountable.
What prison privatisation leads to is one or more of three things: a)skimping on security, as it is expensive, b)skimping on recidivism prevention, as it is expensive, c)if holding prisoners is profitable, expect a strong inclination towards corruption not just getting prison contracts, but also prison sentences passed by the courts...
Filling the private prisons in the US means that you cannot change laws which could reduce the prison population. The author does not have a clue apparently that 'adaptable' staffing, work hours etc makes it impossible for people to buy a house, because they can't get a mortgage, which then affects fhe finance industry, construction etc.
The Americans have already privatised part of their defence, i.e. Blackwater and similar organisations. I watched Louis Theroux's Florida prison docu and thought that the training regime of those who could gain an early release through that, would fit traning for Blackwater - but that was just my thought; he did not say that.
The profit motive, with target driven policy will lead to no good. Look at the US, people farms.
So no bias there, then.
There are a lot of these article on here today, lots of right wing groups calling for privatisation of the police, under the banner of independant research.
so who, or what is this article for ? It's to give a faux objective sense of credibility to an otherwise biased, right wing ideology, and sell it to us as if it is the most sensible and practical way forwards.
What is known is that the 'Market' isn't suitable for every area in public life.
This seems like one of the more obvious ones.
What next, the private prisons going 50/50 with the old lags on staying out for 6 months, so as to claim the bonus.
Why don't we allow the crooks who would want to run our prisons for profit to come forward, give them £1m each to go away and leave the prisons in the public sector? It will be cheaper.
Run down houses in Liverpool are being sold for £1 each with the proviso that they are renovated, what do you think the chances are of an unemployed builder being allowed to buy one? If you are an Eton educated property developer though, you are sorted!
But yes, it can take a while to write something succinctly and its upsetting for it to disappear.
But all the evidence to date indicates that deregulating to the private sector generally is a disaster for social cohesion and efficiency. Some things are just not profitable, and the consumer is always at the bottom of the pile while being told they are 'central' to the process. Whether it's splitting the rail network into regional monopolies who deliver poorly and expensively, G4S fiascos, Southern Cross' tender ministrations to our elderly, PFI making profit from NHS trusts and LEA schools, etc -the result of (often incompetent) government outsourcing is always very expensive for the taxpayer and very lucrative for the private provider.
We now have a government which is dodging it's responsibilities to the people by fragmenting services among myriad private providers like never before. It means ultimately that those responsible for our social welfare are not our elected representatives, but the CEOs, employees and (crucially) shareholders of these private companies.
We'll be clearing up this fiasco for years to come.