In the early years, many argued that the very idea of private companies running prisons was morally unacceptable. Fewer hold that position today. This chapter considers and tests the various ways that proposition has been stated.

Bad in principle, or bad in practice?

Critics have tended to run together ethics and outcomes: they thought the idea so bad that they were sure the results must be bad. For some, it was enough to show that bad things happen in privately run prisons: it was not necessary to enquire whether things just as bad happened in publicly run prisons (Prison Privatisation Report International). But many, when it turned out that privately managed prisons provided a service not noticeably worse (sometimes better) than the public sector, concluded that they could not, after all, be morally objectionable. Examples were Jack Straw, the Prison Reform Trust and, indeed, Sir Martin Narey, Director General of HMPS (Narey, private communication).

Only a few have been sufficiently clear-headed – or stiffnecked – to argue that however good the service privately run prisons run might provide, the idea is nevertheless quite unacceptable. (There is a story, sadly I suspect apocryphal, that Lord Longford wrote in the visitors’ book at Blakenhurst prison, ‘If I was not a man of principle, I’d have to admit this was a good prison!’ (quoted in Crewe and Liebling, 2012).)

‘Punishment is the preserve of the State’

There is extensive literature on the most fundamental objection, namely that the right to inflict punishment rests with the State alone, and cannot legitimately be sub-contracted to private persons or organisations (DeIulio, 1990). The Israeli Supreme Court accepted this argument against contracting out in 2005, thus ending privately run prisons in that country (Feeley, 2014). A different version is that imprisonment must remain in public hands, because that involves us all morally in its implementation, and also conveys a moral message on our behalf to the prisoner (Christie, 2000). One wonders what ‘moral message’ was being conveyed to the prisoner moved from Bristol to Scrubs so that that he could be more efficiently beaten up there (see ‘Four prisons in trouble’).