The article is focused on the analysis of the current state of prison privatization in the United States and other Western countries. Although the practices of using prisoners by private actors has been known in the USA and some other countries for a long time, the phenomenon of prison privatization in its modern sense emerged only in the 1970s in response to the “war on crime” declared in the USA and, as a result, in response to serious increasing of prison population. Harshening of criminal policy in many Western jurisdictions has led to establishing of international private prison companies, many of which have entered the world market, offering their services to the governments of many countries. In modern conditions, the phenomenon of prison privatization more than seriously challenges the traditional notion of the execution of criminal punishments as a public function, which puts on the agenda the political, economic and ethical problems associated with prison privatization. These problems are exacerbated by the fact that private prisons have not proved that delegating the “right to punish” from the state to private actors could solve the problems of contemporary national penitentiary systems (especially in the area of reducing the prison population.

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