WITNESS
Sharon Dolovich is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, where she teaches Criminal Law, Ethics of the Legal Profession, and Prison Law and Policy. Dolovich is spending the academic year of 2005-06 as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study in Cambridge, MA, where she is conducting a study of the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment as applied to prison conditions.
Following completion of her Ph.D. at Cambridge University in 1994, Dolovich attended Harvard Law School, first as a Liberal Arts Fellow and then as a law student. While at Harvard, she served as Articles Chair of the Harvard Law Review. After law school, Dolovich clerked for the Honorable Rosemary Barkett of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. During the academic year 1999-2000, she was a Faculty Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Ethics and the Professions.
Dolovich's article, "Legitimate Punishment in Liberal Democracy," appeared in the spring 2004 issue of the Buffalo Criminal Law Review accompanied by comments on the piece by leading scholars of criminal law and political theory. On the basis of this article, Dolovich was selected by the Cornell University Program on Ethics and Public Life as the Young Scholar for 2004-05. Dolovich's forthcoming article, "State Punishment and Private Prisons," will appear in Vol. 55 of the Duke Law Journal. Her writing has also appeared on the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times and in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
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STATEMENT
What does the study of private prisons tell us that might shed light on the dynamics of violence and abuse in American prisons? My work in this area suggests that the danger posed by the state's use of private prisons to the possibility of safe and humane prison conditions stems from three identifiable practices:
- the delegation to prison officials of considerable discretion and power over a largely vulnerable and dependent inmate population, without either adequate strategies for sustaining corrections officials or adequate accountability mechanisms for preventing prisoner abuse;
- the contracting out to for-profit entities for the provision of prison services directly affecting the health, safety, and well-being of prisoners, in order to save states money on the cost of corrections; and
- the unquestioned acceptance of the idea that sentencing policy is appropriately shaped through advocacy by interest groups with a strong financial interest in increased incarceration rates and longer prison sentences.
These practices are not exclusive to private prisons. To the contrary, each is a standard feature of the prison system in general. We should thus expect the dangers they pose to extend equally to public prisons. …each of the practices enumerated above creates dynamics likely to compromise the possibility of safe and humane prison conditions. A meaningful commitment to this possibility thus requires that these practices be curtailed, or at the very least that they be engaged in warily….
Excerpted from a written statement submitted to the Commission
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