Assessing Prison Performance from the Inmates ’ View: Comparing Private and Public Prisons Assessing Prison Performance from the Inmates ’ View:

The public sector needs to monitor the performance of the private prisons, and it is necessary to conduct the monitoring as objectively as possible. This paper demonstrates that an often overlooked source of data, surveys of inmates, can be used to differentiate prisons on areas such as gang activity, safety and security, sanitation, and food service delivery. Hierarchical linear models were used to generate the prison performance measures. Second, we show that inmates and staff largely agree in their assessments of conditions at the prison. Finally, we demonstrate that while there is considerable consistency for different measures within the topical areas examined, there is no necessary correspondence in performance across the different topical areas of gang management, safety and security, sanitation, and food service delivery. While surveys will and should never replace operational reviews and audits, we demonstrated that they can be effectively used to obtain information about operational differences between prisons. 1Assessing Prison Performance from the Inmates ’ View: Comparing Private and Public Prisons The emergence of private adult prisons has generated an industry of proponents an