ABSTRACT
Accountability, then, sounds straightforward. Evidently, all one has to do is identify the areas of an activity that require supervision, specify them in sufficient detail, establish an appropriate regulatory structure, and let the responsible organization and persons get on with it. In the particular case of private prisons this would seem to involve setting up, in addition to all the general accountability mechanisms applicable to public prisons, a special mechanism to monitor or audit contract compliance. In this way, the body responsible for letting the contract would have an open window through which to view the standards being applied in the private prison. Unfortunately, the organizational and human realities are liable to be very different.
