Desk Report
Oniket Research Group
Last week, our desk explored the current state of prison conditions and the suggestions for reform in the rehabilitation of the convicts post their prison period. This week, we dive deeper into the rehabilitation reform suggestion.
The Prisons Act of 1894 must be fully replaced by a modern Correctional Services Act that enshrines rehabilitation as the primary purpose of incarceration, establishes independent oversight mechanisms, and creates enforceable standards for prisoner treatment and facility conditions.
Bangladesh has named its intention through the renaming of its prison service. It must now build the laws, institutions, and resources that give that name its meaning. One of those stakeholders is the private sector.
Private Sector Engagement and the Profit Motive and Perverse Incentives
Private sector engagement is indispensable to making the rehabilitation model work on a scale. The government must create formal legal and fiscal incentives, including tax benefits and public procurement preferences, for companies that hire released prisoners with certified skills. Industry associations in the ready-made garment, construction, light manufacturing, and hospitality sectors should be brought into structured partnership agreements with the Correction Service, committing to apprenticeship and employment pipelines from specific facilities. Some facilities may be redesigned to include production units where prisoners work on real contracts under supervised conditions, earning modest wages, building professional habits, and accumulating a work history that supports their post-release job applications.
Private sector partnerships in prisons carry a distinct and well-documented set of challenges that span contractual design, accountability, staff quality, human rights, and market incentives. The research evidence from multiple countries reveals that the outcomes of such partnerships are highly context-dependent and can deteriorate significantly when governance structures are poorly designed.
The most fundamental challenge is the structural tension between profit maximisation and the social purpose of rehabilitation. In the United States, where private operators are typically paid on a per-inmate, per-day basis, the financial incentive is to keep prisons full rather than to reduce reoffending. This payment structure directly discourages investment in rehabilitation programmes that would reduce the prison population and, consequently, the company’s revenue.
Research on Florida’s juvenile correctional facilities found that for-profit facilities were less expensive but produced significantly higher recidivism rates than their public and non-profit counterparts, meaning that short-term cost savings were negated by long-term social costs. The profit motive also drives budget cuts in staff training, food quality, and inmate services, with private prison staff often receiving lower wages and less professional training than their public sector equivalents.
Accountability Gaps and Blame Diffusion
When correctional responsibility is delegated to a private party, the state’s accountability extends only to the boundaries of the contract, after which its control over day-to-day operations is substantially reduced. Critics argue that this creates a diffusion of responsibility in which the government and private operators deflect blame onto each other when problems arise. The government may also be encouraged to neglect its inherent responsibilities through over-reliance on contractual supervision as a substitute for active governance. In South Africa, the lack of thorough feasibility work before contracts were signed and the subsequent departure of senior officials who understood the contract terms left the public authority unable to optimally manage the partnerships it had entered.
Contractual Design Failures
Designing effective contracts for prison services is exceptionally difficult because many of the most important outcomes, such as the appropriate use of force, staff capability, quality of relationships between officers and inmates, and genuine engagement in rehabilitation, are either non-verifiable or impossible to specify precisely in advance.
Where contracts reward occupancy rather than outcomes, private operators have strong incentives to reduce quality to maximise profit margins. Where contracts reward quality on easily measured indicators, operators may perform well on those specific metrics while neglecting unmeasured dimensions of prison life. Research comparing the US, French, and Brazilian models found that outcomes varied dramatically based on how incentive schemes, decision rights, and oversight mechanisms were combined, with no single contractual design producing reliably superior results across contexts.
The anticipated cost savings of privatisation have also been regularly overstated; rather than the promised twenty per cent reduction, the average saving in the US has been estimated at closer to one per cent.
Staff Quality and Turnover
Private sector prison staffing tends to be leaner, less experienced, and more volatile than public sector staffing. Lower pay, weaker union protections, and less investment in training produce higher turnover rates, which in turn undermine the accumulated relational knowledge, or jailcraft, that experienced officers develop over time and that is critical to maintaining safety and legitimacy within a prison.
Research in England and Wales found that while private prison staff often held more benign attitudes toward prisoners than their public counterparts, the practical weaknesses of thin staffing and inexperience manifested in persistent problems in areas of security, safety, and consistent professional conduct. The risk is a race to the bottom on staffing costs that compromises the institutional quality of both private and public sectors as public authorities emulate the private staffing model.
Human Rights and Prisoner Welfare Concerns
There is documented evidence from multiple jurisdictions of human rights concerns in privately managed facilities. In the United States, the Corrections Corporation of America was found to have used excessive force on juveniles, and Wackenhut Corrections Corporation was ordered to cease corporal punishment and the use of mechanical restraints. Private facilities have shown higher rates of drug use, higher rates of inmate misconduct, and worse sanitation and food services than comparable public facilities in several studies. Inmates transferred between private facilities to maximise bed occupancy may lose access to court-mandated treatment programmes and find rehabilitative programming disrupted entirely.
Competition Failure
A core justification for private involvement is that market competition will drive performance improvements in both private and public facilities. The empirical evidence does not support this claim. Research analysing correctional facility performance across multiple American states found that of 48 statistical tests of a beneficial competition effect, only two provided supporting evidence, with the overwhelming majority showing no significant difference in performance between newly competitive and monopoly public settings. Constitutional protection, professional accreditation standards, labour opposition, and the limited market share of private operators together constrain the ability or motivation of public correction agencies to respond to private competition in meaningful ways.
Stigma and Employer Reluctance
For vocational partnership models specifically, private companies are often reluctant to engage with prison labour programmes because they reproduce the same social prejudices and stigmas directed at incarcerated workers that exist in the wider community. A large proportion of the prison population lacks adequate educational qualifications for skilled work, and this lack of qualification, combined with societal prejudice, hinders effective insertion into labour activities. During economic downturns and fiscal constraints, attracting private companies to expand prison employment partnerships becomes considerably more difficult, and tax incentive legislation to encourage such engagement faces significant political obstacles.
Implications for Bangladesh
For Bangladesh, these challenges are amplified by contextual factors: a nascent regulatory environment with limited experience of complex public-private contracts, documented corruption risks in public procurement, a low average educational level among the prison population that complicates vocational partnership design, and a social stigma against employing ex-prisoners that discourages private sector engagement.
The international evidence suggests that Bangladesh would need to invest as heavily in the governance architecture of any partnership arrangement, including independent oversight, recidivism-linked performance incentives, and mandatory public monitoring presence within any privately run programme, as in the partnerships themselves, for such models to deliver genuine rehabilitation rather than simply transferring cost and risk from the public to the private sector.
