Punitive Profit: An Analysis of Privatization and Prisons as Engines of Economic

During the Prison Boom period (late 1980s through 2000), the US saw a dramatic increase in the number of prisons across rural America. Increasingly, policy makers came to see and use prisons as vehicles of economic growth intended to invigorate stagnant economies. This paper seeks to analyze the effectiveness of these promises by analyzing the effect of prisons on per capita income, unemployment, and poverty rates. I build on previous scholarship by differentiating between public and private prisons in my analysis. My results suggest that prisons are ineffective in spurring long term growth and that private prisons perform significantly worse than their public counterparts