While the trend toward prison privatization continues to increase, scant research has focused on the ways in which prison services and environment differ between private and public prisons. In particular, it is important to examine the dominant ideological orientation of private versus public prisons in order to best analyze whether the move toward privatization is the most appropriate in terms of philosophical agreement with traditional correctional system ideology. Two ideological stances, “normalization,” which emphasizes treatment and rehabilitation, and “less eligible,” which emphasizes the reduced citizenship of prisoners, were used as a basis for the study. It was hypothesized that the private sector would lean more toward a “less eligible” orientation as for-profit corporations cut costs, such as treatment services and personnel. Data from 1998 were obtained from the Criminal Justice Institute’s (CJI) Corrections Yearbook for private sector prisons. Results indicated that, first, private prisons tended to house less serious offenders for less time than public prisons. Despite the fact that more dangerous offenders were housed in public prisons, private prisons had higher incidents of violence and a greater proportion of drug-involved inmates. The findings support the hypothesis that the private sector leans toward a more “less eligible” ideological orientation than do public sector prisons. Tables, references