Uppingham Junior Debating Tournament – 26/6/18
Over the past couple of month, a number of Year 10 students have been competing against each other in a friendly debating tournament for a spot at the Uppingham Junior Debating Tournament for the winners. The teams and motions were as follows:
- James and Oli VS Alex and Ahren – This house would legalise marijuana
- Harry and Lottie VS Charlie and Chloe – This house would ban homework
- (Final) James and Oli VS and Lottie – This house would go to a co-ed school
The overall winners were James and Oli, but as Oli couldn’t make it to the competition at Uppingham because of sailing commitments, I stepped it to compete with James. We were told the motion – This house would support the privatization of prisons – around two weeks before the debate, so we got to work straight away, as we knew we had lots to research and plan. We decided which areas we were each going to focus on so that we didn’t end up writing about the same topic – I focused on mass incarceration, lack of necessary facilities and mental health problems, and James focused on community, profit and scandals. Below are copies of our speeches for you to read (if you’re interested!).
1st speaker, opposition, Lottie Pike
Today I’m going to be arguing the point that we shouldn’t support the privatization of prisons because they are unethical and immoral, and I’m going to be doing this by addressing the points of mass incarceration, lack of necessary facilities and mental health problems.
The debate on mass incarceration in private prisons is that their corporations make more money for shareholders when more people are incarcerated for longer periods of time; this significant vested interest in mass incarceration leads to convicts’ sentences being unnecessarily elongated, as well as overcrowding, which results in unsanitary conditions and compromised mental health. Statistics published by the Adler University state that inmates convicted of the same crime face up to 7% more time in private prisons than in state prisons. It has also been proven that mass incarceration rates have no impact on reducing crime. This fixation on making prisoners’ lives considerably worse purely for profit is perverse, unethical and completely immoral. And this predicament of profit is certainly not the only component that doesn’t conform to basic moral standards in a private prison. There is also a severe lack of crucial facilities. So much so, a plethora of private prisons have been shut down because of this. In fact, 13 were shut down simultaneously last year in America, because “They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security [as state prisons]”.
The definition of morality is ‘a system of ideas designed to improve your life and create a society that improves the general condition in which you live’. Without sufficient rehabilitation services, how can the private prisons even begin to improve the prisoners’ lives for the future? Without sufficient rehabilitation services, how can we trust that the prisoners will not re-offend, and therefore not create a society that improves living conditions? We simply can’t – ergo, private prisons are strictly immoral. The Department of Justice recently announced that they would begin to phase out the use of private prisons for federal inmates, since they “compare poorly” to state prisons, as said by Sally Yates, deputy attorney general of the Department of Justice. This is because it has been statistically proven that they provide fewer correctional services, which inevitably jeopardises the safety and security of both the inmates and the staff.
Furthermore, solitary confinement within private prisons has detrimental effects on mental health, which is one of the most concerning and worryingly prevalent issues in today’s society. Therefore, we should be extremely wary over the use of it not just in private prisons, but all prisons. Thankfully, state prisons are obliged to routinely share their solitary confinement records so they can be easily monitored, but this is not the case for private prisons, which makes it very hard for the government to monitor what they’re doing. However, the ACLU recently interviewed hundreds of immigrants who were detained in solitary confinement within private prisons, and the report by Carl Takei, staff attorney of the ACLU, stated that “people were being put in solitary confinement on intake and kept there for days or weeks because there were no beds in the general population”. Solitary confinement statistics are directly related to the statistics on mental health, so private prisons using solitary confinement as a ‘backup plan’ for spare inmates purely to fulfill their 90% occupancy quota to get payed is a clear violation of human rights. Article 3 of the Human Rights Convention protects the right not to be subject to torture or inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment. Of course, solitary confinement doesn’t always breach this article, but the way private prisons are using it definitely does.
Solitary confinement was actually prohibited in the early 1800s because of the devastating effects it had on mental health. It evidently still has these effects today, so why do we continue to torture prisoners with it? 25% of women and 15% of men show symptoms indicative of psychosis in solitary confinement, but the rate among the general public is 4%. Suicide is 8.6 times likelier in solitary confinement than anywhere else.
Just to briefly sum up, I believe that private prisons are absolutely immoral because they use mass incarceration as a prism of profit; they fail to provide adequate facilities, consequently hindering the progress of inmates, which puts the public, staff and inmates at risk; and they cease to work to fulfill basic mental health needs through the misemployment of something as destructive as solitary confinement.
2nd speaker, opposition, James Farrow
So my first point is how private prisons are detrimental to communities. I will divide this into sections about why this is so – my first point on this topic is that private prisons leave communities with costly facilities that are empty. On one recorded instance in 2007, Two Rivers Regional Detention Facility – a 464 bed, £205,000,000 prison – was completed. Since then it has received no contract from the government and has remained a completely unused and desolate place. It was built with the optimism and indication of bringing jobs and stimulating the economy, but it did the polar opposite. Not only has it left the town with an empty facility, but also a severe lack of money.
What if many projects don’t work and prisons aren’t contracted out by the government? What happens to the people nearby the prisons? How does it affect them? Well, in the case of the Rivers Regional Detention Facility, the area now can’t invest in the things that really matter, like education, the council and local transport. The area and company became so desperate for money to make up for losses that they said they would house some of the world’s worst prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. Is it fair to allow this to happen to people and their communities?
My next point is on how prisoners tend to spend longer sentences in prisons that are privately owned, as mentioned briefly before by Lottie. In 2007, two colleagues pleaded guilty to income and tax frau, taking more than $2.6m in kickbacks to send teenagers to two private prisons. Thousands of juveniles have been sentences by one of these two judges and some are still in prison, even though they were minor first time offenders. As previously mentioned, inmates are incarcerated for up to 7% longer in private prisons than state ones. This is more damaging than it seems. Let’s imagine someone receives a sentence and goes to a privately owned prison. They have to stay there longer than other people who are sent to state prisons, which is not only unfair, but also the additional time spent there could have mental effects on the prisoner. This is because private prisons cut corners, which state prisons do not, as it is wrong to cut corners because it risks the safety and wellbeing of prisoners and the public just to save a few pennies. And how do they cut corners? Well, they employ fewer experienced guards, who are more likely to hand out infractions. An infraction is a violation or infringement of a law or agreement. So in terms of prisons, when prisoners do something wrong they receive an infraction. Parole is carried out externally, but imagine if prisons were in control of it. As corrupt as they are now, imagine how much more corrupted they would be if they were in charge of parole too. Small infringements would equal longer sentences, which would mean more money for the company.
But what is the underlying argument here? Well, it’s that if private prisons cannot stay away from trouble themselves, how can they be trusted will prisons full of people who are in trouble? Private prisons have more safety and security-related incidents per capita than any comparable state institutions. 10 different reports of incidents found that private prisons had higher rates of assaults and uses of force.