Quality of Operations at Private and Public Prisons: Using Trends in Inmate Misconduct to Compare Prisons

A model-based approach was used to develop performance measures from inmate misconduct data to compare public and private prisons. The performance measures indicated the impact of different prisons upon raising or lowering the probability of inmate misconduct. Data for all misconduct and for two categories of misconduct, violent and drug, were generated for the 36-month period between January 1999 and December 2001 for all prisons within the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) and one low-security private prison under contract to BOP. The private prison performed within the lower range of performance for low-security prisons within BOP.