I was listening to a story on NPR Friday, about a for-profit juvenile detention facility. I don’t remember the point of the story, but I do remember that they said that to make an acceptable profit the maximum age of inmates had been raised to 22 years old. They commented that it’s a bad idea to mix 13-year-old inmates with 22-year-old ones. But hey, ya gotta make a buck, right?
The story reminded me of something I think of whenever I hear about a for-profit prison. Are for-profit prisons a good idea at all? It seems to me that having a profit motive might lead to abuses. It provides an incentive to keep people locked up. Of course there are prisoners who should never be let out; but I wonder if there are prisoners who are eligible for parole – who have ‘learned their lesson’, as it were – who are being kept incarcerated longer than they should or would be if they were in a government facility. These companies make money by keeping people locked up, after all; not for letting them out. It has the rotten smell of human trafficking.
Prisons are expensive to build and operate, and the government is subject to budget cuts. It makes some sense to transfer costs to the private sector. On the other hand, if we suddenly have a Perfect World full of Law Abiding Citizens and the government shuts down all of the prisons, the government would still exist and funds that were spent on prisons would be used elsewhere. A private company would be out of business. So it behooves Private Prison Corp, LLC to lobby government to find more ways of locking people up. Not that I’m paranoid that PPC, LLC will find a way to talk government into making wearing white after Labor Day a felony, but remember that at one time a person could be sent for a long stretch for possessing a single marijuana cigarette. (That won’t come back, but PPC, LLC would probably jump at the chance to increase their profits.)
It’s a fact of life that there are Bad People out there who should be put away, and I see it as a function of the government to do so for the good of society. It strikes me as immoral though, for a private company to do the same thing for the sake of profits – even if they are acting as agents for the government.
You’re missing a vital point. Prisons don’t determine the length of sentences. That’s handled by the court system and the parole system, which are independent government-run agencies.
So the people who are determining how long a person stays in prison are the representatives of the people paying the bills not the ones collecting the money. If an economic motive arises, it’ll be to reduce prison population.
Any system is going to have individuals who illegally offer and accept bribes. My point was that there was no inherent economic motive to imprison people.
But the prison, or employees of the for-profit company concerned about their jobs or stock holdings, may be more inclined to “write up” prisoners for disciplinary violations that would be ignored or overlooked by a normal prison system as de minimis or insignificant problems. Then, public judges or parole boards start seeing parole candidates with longer disciplinary records than their counterparts at the public prisons…
The connection of actions to rewards seems pretty tenuous here. The employees who are dealing with prisoners are the level of writing up disciplinary violations are unlikely to receive any direct benefit for their efforts. You could just as plausibly argue that they, as tax payers, have an economic incentive to overlook disciplinary violations and reduce prison population (as well as the normal non-economic incentives of minimizing the amount of work they do).
Besides, routine disciplinary violations have no effect on parole - they don’t even get raised as an issue. Only serious incidents like an assault or an escape might affect a prisoner’s release.
There most certainly is. The more people incarcerated by a for-profit prison, the more money the company makes. The public pays the cost, the profits are privatized. Bill Maher and others have pointed out the million$ that CCA (the largest for-profit prison operator) has spent lobbying in favor of laws that would require more people to be locked up. CCA was one of the largest supporters of Jan Brewer in Arizona, with an implied understanding that she would push for legislation that would require detention of immigrants, and more millions in the pockets of CCA. CCA is one of the cheif supporters of ALEC, the far-right, union busting PAC that is behind Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin.
Privitization of prisons is one of the more rotten rackets going.
Prison corporations could lobby for harsher sentencing or the creation of new felonies to increase their bottom line. I’m not aware that any do. They don’t really have to as “tough on crime” is a type of posturing the whores in congress like to do on their own.
For the most part, it’s a better deal for the State (and the tax-payers) to use a private prison than a government prison because there is a motivation to keep cost-per-convict low.
Which was exactly my point. Prison corporations collect money from their customers, just like every other business. Can you explain why they have some special power to make the government spend money?
And again, how is that unusual? Pretty much every business has lobbyists that advance its interests. If I make asphalt, I’m trying to convince the government to build more roads. If I publish textbooks, I’m trying to convince the government to build more schools. If I build picnic tables, I’m trying to convince the government to open more parks.
Here in Minnesota, there is/was a private for-profit prison in Appleton. But it closed down for lack of business, leading to economic hardship in the area. (And the largest drop in population in the state, nearly 20% drop in Swift County in the latest census. Mainly because of over a thousand prisoners being moved elsewhere.)
Now the owner is in negotiation with California, to ship California prisoners to this site, near the border with the Dakotas. Long, long way from California. Will make it pretty hard for family or friends to ever visit those prisoners. But presumably the airlines & bus companies would make money from it.
Might lead to an economic boom in the town, for a while. But it doesn’t seem to be a very reliable employer.
It is difficult to equate legitimate lobbying efforts in favor of public facilities and infrastructure with an attempt to subvert the criminal justice system for financial gain. Actually, I question whether for-profit institutions ought to be involved in any way with criminal justice, except peripherally as in the case of legal consultancy. Justice, at least in terms of criminal law, is supposed to be blind - applied equally to all. When there is money, profit and special interest involved it is subject to abuse.
Historically, for-profit law enforcement has been tried and usually ends badly. From the 19th-century use of the Pinkerton Agency as a national police force to the more recent experiments with paying police officers from the fines they collect it is an enticement to corruption.
SS
Do you have the same objections to lobbyists for insurance companies? They lobby to get laws passed which favor their profits. They’ve pushed the government to enact laws on seatbelts, helmets, speed limits, cell phones, and DWI. Isn’t that subverting the criminal justice system for financial gain?
Kickbacks are illegal under any government program, though. What made this case unique was the lack of any checks on the power of the government officials involved.
Really? I can see a small town getting away with writing traffic tickets for a few hundred dollars but you think they could get away with building their own prison and locking people up for a couple of years? And nobody would notice?
And as I’ve repeatedly pointed out, it’s hard to see why a small town would want to do this even if it could. Because all the small town would get out of this would be the expense of running a prison.
I would happily support legislation that shut down all or almost all lobbying. I imagine that most Americans would say the same. Virtually all of it is harmful. But it seems to me self-evident that creating corporations who have a profit-driven desire for putting the maximum number of people in prison is a very bad idea.
I think most people would completely agree with you. And then they’d be shocked when some advocacy group they agree with gets shut down.
“What? They’re not lobbyists! Lobbyists are evil people who are trying to get bad laws passed! These were good people who were trying to get good laws passed! That’s totally different!”
And then we should close down the hospitals. It’s high time we put an end to the way they profit from people being sick and injured. It’s self-evident that they have a motive in having the maximum number of unhealthy people.
No, but they do have a profit motive that has them kicking out people who aren’t healed, or people whose insurance has hit its limit. Hospitals work the opposite of prisons - they DON’T profit, the longer they keep you. Prisons do.
Corporations show little regard for things like ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’ when it comes to profits. Why would prison corporations be any different?