There was a story on NPR this morning about for-profit jails in Texas. It seems that municipalities agreed to have these jails built thinking they’d be good for the local economy and a source of revenue for the municipality. Now they sit empty, costing these towns and counties money; they’re now forced to increase taxes on their residents to service the debt incurred when the jails were built while prison employees lose their jobs.
Here’s the money quote:
For-profit prisons also invite mismanagement and possibly unconstitutional conditions. GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections) recently bought Cornell Companies, which operated youth facilities, including the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility in Mississippi. The facility is now being investigated by both the Department of Justice over conditions, and by the Department of Education over grants it may not be eligible to receive, and for which GEO paid senior management at the prison “supplemental salaries” for administering these grants. It seems to me that any “supporters” of the facility are willing to turn a blind eye to some of these problems because the revenue is worth it.
There are also other ways to make money. The private company, not being bound by state or local civil-service regulations, can hire guards and other employees from the local area for less money; when you live in a depressed area, any job looks good, no matter how little it pays. The company can also make money on its real estate dealings and whatever other sidelines it can get into.
Costs do not get “transferred” to the private sector. The money that Prison Corp would use to pay for their operations comes from contracts that are funded by the government/taxpayers. It is possible that there are cost savings attributable to a profit motive, but your OP makes it sound as though the taxpayer burden of paying for the incarceration of criminals had somehow been eliminated.
I think prisons-for-profit is a bad idea. Apart from the possibility of illegal kickbacks/scams to increase the frequency/length of prison sentences (some of which have been shown to already exist), prison owners will be motivated to lobby/agitate for laws/policies/mores that result in higher incarceration rates. Expect another iron triangle that seeks to increase police funding, decrease public-defender funding, and criminalize relatively innocuous behaviors.
The book Blunder has a section that documents some of the abuses that have been perpetrated upon prisoners by the private prison system, presenting prisons as a situation where privatization is not a good idea.
I would happily trade away the benefits of the few good lobbying organizations as the cost of getting rid of the bad lobbying organizations. Lobbying, by definition, costs money. Hence it’s existence, by definition, gives those corporations and special interest groups with large amounts of money to spare a disproportional say in how the government is run. Lobbyists have special privileges and access that the rest of us citizens don’t have. That makes it anti-democratic.
Think about ethanol. Think about oil drilling on public lands. Thinks about the vast amount of the military budget that’s actually pork. Think about agricultural subsidies. Think about all the good environmental regulations that have been shot down, not to mention labor laws and workplace safety protections. All of those things occur because lobbyists have the power to override the will of the people.
Profit-making prisons are a bad idea. They have all the expenses of a state-run prison plus whatever profit they are making for their owners. Either they have to charge more per prisoner than it would cost the state, or they will cut corners – fewer guards, less qualified personnel, bad food, bad medical care, fewer things to occupy the prisoners time.
Huh? This is completely untrue. Hospitals charge patients by the day for staying in them. And they charge for the number of tests and consultations they do. How do you figure they don’t make more money by keeping patients longer?
I listened to that this morning as well. Very interesting.
Privitization of government functions doesn’t often make a lot of sense. It adds a profit margin to the costs. When the government is terribly inefficient at something, you might be able to get the same function for the same cost and still have the private corporation turn a profit. But there are two issues - private corporations are usually profit greedy, they are structured to want to make more money next year (and I think that is great, it drives growth, when we aren’t talking about government functions - which we don’t want to see price increases on and we don’t want to grow - don’t we want “smaller” government?) And government itself has been under the “smaller government, no new tax dollars” pressure for so long that I think a lot of efficiencies HAVE been created from necessity. And where there are inefficiencies, they are often mandates (i.e. IEPs in public schools, which are often very expensive, but have to be done).
They were overbuilt - not surprising given the “hey, you can make a lot of money if we put a prison in your town” pitch
Governments can’t afford to keep people in jail, so they tend to go for deals that protect public safety while minimizing jail time. They’ll throw someone in jail who is seen as dangerous, but a car thief…if they can justify probation or just a short jail or workhouse term - that’s a lot less expensive for them than prison.
ETA: Some people have this idea that we lock up illegal aliens - and some of these were built on the premise that was going to be happening. The problem (one of many) is someone has to pay for that. Right now, no one is really eager to increase any governmental budget line.
If the patient can’t pay for a longer stay, and insurance won’t pay for a longer stay, then the hospital loses money by increasing the length of the stay.
Likewise, you’re not getting that MRI or blood test unless someone - either you, or your insurer - can pay the bill.
Because there are too many beds in prisons and not enough people to fill them. Crimes that might have sent people to prison in the past are now being handled through alternative means, such as drug courts. And some of these towns were relying on other counties and states to send prisoners to their prison, but that’s not happening now.
That being said, hospitals are lousy analogies. Insurance companies essentially cap the number of days they’ll pay for, barring some documented complication that requires additional hospital days; if the insurance company says they’ll cover four days for a mastectomy, that’s what they’ll pay for. Every day past that costs the hospital money in terms of nursing and other clinical staff, and it’s a bed that gets tied up by someone who probably isn’t going to pay the difference, and isn’t being filled by someone whose insurance is paying. Procedures done by the hospital are reported as line items on a master claim form, so there is very little incentive to inflate the bill that way. Physicians, on the other hand, are the ones who benefit from individual procedures and consultations, but they have no incentive to keep a patient around who has no need to be there because they’re sanctioned by the hospital if they do.
A better analogy would be for-profit colleges where the profit is made from federal and state funding, particularly student aid. There is incentive to cut costs by hiring part-time instructors who don’t have standard academic qualifications, and by not offering the standard extracurricular offerings that a traditional college has. Conversely, there is pressure to enroll and retain as many students as possible, because an empty seat is a seat that isn’t generating revenue for the company.
Basically, the argument against for-profit prisons (and schools) is that, by taking these services out of the “public good”, overall quality suffers because costs and profit become the primary considerations.
But the premise people are using for private prisons is that the government somehow has no choice in the decision. The prison corporation wants more money so the government has to pay.
You’ve spotted the obvious fallacy in this idea. The government, like the insurance company, has an incentive to not pay. The result is that prisons, like hospitals, do not have an unchecked power to demand money.
No, it’s not. It’s just the first one that you’re not rejecting out of hand.
Surely you see a difference between building unnecessary roads (where the worst effect is that money is wasted ) and building unnecessary prisons (where the worst effect is that people are unnecessarily imprisoned for years)? Both are bad, but the degree of harm is much worse in the latter case.
A lot of people love to believe that the free market can solve just about anything, but there are a lot of fields where government is a much better solution than the free market. Prisons, health care, defense, law enforcement, and education, for example. Just as you don’t want to privatize law enforcement, you ought not privatize prisons.
I assume corporations that run prisons operate under the same economic rules that other corporations operate under. I’m not convinced by repeated claims that prison corporations are somehow different - especially when nobody seems clear exactly how they’re different.
One budget cutting avenue that has recently been considered in the Netherlands is to have our citizens in prisons abroad. Not thirld world country abroad, but for instance to have Dutch inmates locked up in Belgian prisons, when the Belgians didn’t have the saem shortage of cells the Ducht had.
And those economic rules can lead to trouble, especially when they encourage longer and more prison time. In your first post you said
and then, when everyone pointed out to you that private prisons have an incentive to lobby for longer terms, you defended lobbying. Lobbying creates all sorts of inefficient behavior in government, as lobbyists encourage legislators to support a corporate instead of a public interest.
Yup, that’s one of the biggest industries in Upstate New York besides agriculture and tourism, housing prisoners from The City (which is of course the same state but as far geographically removed as your case.)
How do you define efficient? If the private prisons cut back on guards to be more efficient, and there is a big riot or prison break, the government and the surrounding people pay the price. If they save money by not trying to cut recidivism, they don’t pay the price of released prisoners committing more crime, in fact they benefit from repeat business.