In March, Rina Palta reported for Code Switch on a study that found private prisons were disproportionately filled with inmates of color. A broader recent study of federal data from 2005 has revealed something similar: The proportion of white inmates was significantly smaller in private prisons than in public ones, and the proportion of Latino inmates was larger.
Brett Burkhardt, an assistant professor of sociology at Oregon State University, authored the study. It lands amidst an ongoing debate over how private prisons compare to their public counterparts, in everything from cost-effectiveness to quality of service. If inmates in private prisons were found to have received worse treatment, the study points out, a racial disparity between private and public prison populations could have legal implications.
[For more of this story, written by Matt Thompson, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2014/08/10/339150805/private-prisons-house-more-latinos-than-do-public-ones-study-finds]
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