Prisons of industry: The recent history of American private prisons, 1978-1985.

The purposes of this thesis is to examine the key factors and events within the immediate political foreground which led to the acceptance of private prisons as a viable policy option on the American correctional agenda in the early to mid-1980s. There has been an evident failure in criminology to provide a proper historical account of the recent origins of private prisons, as the concentration on questions of pragmatism and philosophy left other important issues unexamined. The history of prison privatization is approached from a position that embraces multiplicity and complexity, where it is contextualized within the dynamics of the policy process and the cumulative pressures faced by individual policy-makers. To this end, the work is essentially a literature review, which analyzes the multitude of factors which interacted to produce the necessary conditions favourable to considering the privatization of prisons as a viable policy option, an approach which is critical to assessing the past, present and future developments in their proliferation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.