Intercultural Human Rights Law Review
First Page
217
Abstract
This paper examines the present criminal justice system in the United States and specifically the privatization of the prison system by using Professor Jeffery Reiman's Pyrrhic Defeat Theory to decipher and dissect the privatization of the prison system. Further, this theory will be used to explain such severe social control measures for not only the purposes of profit maximization on behalf of private corporations building, managing, and writing prison policy, but to concretize the existing racial and class structure in the U.S. Using Pyrrhic defeat theory (success through failure), one could expound the intentions and consequences of American privatization of the prison system. Through examining these policies, a clear pattern emerges. Examination of this pattern demonstrates that the criminal justice system in general-and the process of privatization of prisons in particular-has revolved around a policy of failure for decades. Such failure, although may have been originally unintended, works out to maintain the sociopolitical status quo, ensuring a lasting economic and political structure in the form of prison industrial complex Keynesianism.
Recommended Citation
Abdy Javadzadeh,
Pyrrhic Defeat Theory: The Lucrative Failure of Prison Privatization,
17
Intercultural Hum. Rts. L. Rev.
217
(2022).
Available at:
https://scholarship.stu.edu/ihrlr/vol17/iss1/11