Overview of Dissertation. 15 2 The Failure of Simple Stories to Explain Prison Privatization 18 2.1 Privatization and Government Service Provision . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 2.2 The Decision to Privatize Prisons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 2.3 Private Prisons: The Data . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 2.3.1 What is Missing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 2.3.2 An Original Dataset . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 2.3.3 What Does the Data Look Like? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 2.4 What Determines States’ Use of Private Prisons? . . . . . . . . . . . 49 2.4.1 Private Prison Adoption . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 2.4.2 Private Prison Levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 2.4.3 Different Dependent Variables . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 2.4.4 Campaign Contributions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2.4.5 Alternative Operationalizations of Ideology and Union Mem- bership . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58 61 2.5 Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 3 The Rights Revolution and Prison Privatization 63
Overview of Dissertation. This dissertation aims to shine a light on state adoption of private prisons. To fully explore this phenomenon, I engage with common explanations of privatization, before presenting a new theory on why states choose to privatize their prisons that is centered around inmate lawsuits. Then, I test this prediction empirically. Finally, I consider how the firms themselves respond to lawsuits to analyze whether the firms’ economic outlook depends on the political environment. Chapter 2 considers a number of common explanations for the adoption of private prisons: politics, economics, unionization, and campaign contributions. I introduce the original dataset at the heart of this dissertation that is longitudinally and geo- graphically diverse and contains information on the location of private prisons in the United States from 1986 to 2016, the most comprehensive dataset of these institu- tions thus far developed. I then use this dataset to test these common explanations and find that none of these explain this policy choice, despite the many scholarly and public anecdotes surrounding private prisons. If these factors do not explain prison privatization, what does? Chapter 3 introduces the central theoretical framework of my dissertation and argues it is the advent of the prisoners’ rights movement and inmates’ use of litiga- tion that prompted the rise of private carceral institutions. I review the historical development of prisoners’ rights and the massive increase in inmate litigation before developing a set of hypotheses about how lawsuits influence the adoption of private prisons. I argue a higher number of successful inmates’ lawsuits make a state more likely to privatize their carceral facilities to avoid legal and political accountability for poor prison conditions. Alternatively, the second hypothesis argues that an increase in the number of court orders against a state will make a state less likely to privatize. Because the judicial decrees are effectively forcing states to develop coherent rules and standards, it removes the incentive to privatize to limit accountability. Chapter 4 then empirically tests these hypotheses using an instrumental variables design and the original dataset of private prisons. I use this dataset and the ex- pectations laid out in Chapter 3 and test my hypotheses and find support for both empirically. States that experience a higher number of inmates’ lawsuits are more likely to privatize, whereas those states that face more ...
