Promoting private prisons: an analysis of the justificatory discourses for privately-operated prisons in Australian news media

Australia has one of the highest proportions of people in privately-operated prisons in the world. It also has a highly concentrated media landscape, dominated by two powerful corporations. Examining the intersection of these two industries, this article explores how private prisons are promoted to the Australian public via mainstream news media. Applying quantitative source analysis and qualitative discourse analysis methods to a sample of news reports, we find that politicians’ perspectives dominate media coverage of new private prisons and identify key discourses that attempt to justify the privatisation of corrections and corporate profiteering from incarceration. These include private companies’ purported abilities to: relieve ‘bed’ shortages in the public prison system; provide cost-savings and other localised economic benefits; and deliver ‘innovative’ rehabilitation through financial incentives for recidivism reductions. These justificatory discourses are challenged, in part, by anti-privatisation discourses, stemming primarily from prison staff unions. Drawing upon insights from critical prison studies, our analysis suggests that although the legitimacy of privatised imprisonment is unstable in Australian media, imprisonment generally remains normalised and prison expansion is largely unquestioned. This highlights the need to challenge dominant media narratives and conceptualise both private and publicly run prisons as part of the prison-industrial complex.