Libertarians like to think that anything a government agency can do, the private sector can do better. It’s kind of their thing. However most of it is in the realm of the theoretical. You can compare how things work in different countries but they often get bogged down with cultural differences that make an apples-to-apples comparison difficult.
Not so the privatization of prisons in America. Although there have been cases of this country employing others to handle prisoners, it was in 1984 when the modern private prison business first emerged when the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) was awarded a contract to take over a facility in Hamilton County, Tennessee. This marked the first time that any government in the country had contracted out the complete operation of a jail to a private operator.
In the past three decades privatized prisons have steadily grown in terms of how many prisoners (as many as 10% of all US prisoners reside in outsourced prisons) and how much money they make (according to Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi, the prison industry as a whole took in over $5 billion in revenue in 2011).
So what is the result of this privatization of prisons? Not much to crow about.
If we look at privatized prisons as a cost-saving measure, they don’t stand up to scrutiny. From the New York Times (5/18/11):
Additionally given that the main incentive of private enterprise is to profit, private prisons have come under fire for having contracts that contain so-called “Lock Up Quotas.” From the Prison legal News (August 2015):
And all businesses want to keep their customers, a conflict of interest for a system where the best outcome is a low recidivism rate. Unsurprisingly, privatized prisons are failing society while filling their pockets. From the University Of Wisconsin-Madison (6/10/2015):
These criticisms finally came to a head earlier this month when the Office of the Inspector General for the Department of Justice released a scathing “Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Monitoring of Contract Prisons” (Warning - links to a PDF). The report caused the Obama administration to start to phase out all private prisons for Federal prisoners immediately. Says the Washington Post (8/18/2016):
The result…
So here we have an example of something the government has traditionally done outsourced to private industries for several decades and the result is so bad that the Federal government will stop using them in a move that opponents have said is long overdue.
Some Libertarians will claim that prisons are one of the few things that they allow as something the government is actually there for. For them, this is evidence they are likely correct.
Other Libertarians will probably fault the actual corporations who have done such a poor job. Their attitude will likely be that better companies could do a better job than they - and naturally the government - could do and now they won’t get the chance.
I feel that is not likely. I think that Libertarianism is a flawed concept as a whole, but even more so when you start incorporating things such as dealing with people we as a society have decided need to be separated from the rest of us. And I think that this failure is more evidence that Libertarianism as a philosophy is flawed.
Faulty premise. Libertarians are not anarchists. They believe in limited, not non-existent, government. Some might argue that prisons should be privatized, but most Libertarians recognize a judicial system as one of the few valid functions of a government. The same would go for the police force and the military.
But even if we accept your premise, this is hardly an indictment of privately run prisons. It’s just an indictment of the way the federal government has managed that system. You get what you pay for, and if you want the prisons to perform to X, Y and Z standards, you have to pay them as measured by those standards. It’s pretty obvious from some of the quotes you gave from the article that our government did a not so good job negotiating the contracts. For example, there is nothing inherent in private prisons that requires “lock-up quotas”.
There certainly is, if they want to stay in business. If a McDonald’s branch doesn’t sell enough hamburgers, the corporation closes it. If a privately-run prison has too many empty beds, the corporation closes it.
Here is something that is not an essential part of Libertarian policy, it looks like it’s not working the way the US government did it, therefore it proves that my “feeling” about Libertarianism is correct. That’s not even a logically consistent argument.
Now, I am not a Libertarian, and I also think Libertarianism (in it’s mainstream form) doesn’t work, but I can still call out a faulty premise when I see one. Libertarianism does’t work because it’s basic premise, that people value Liberty above all else, is simply not true. People show over and over agains that when the going gets tough, they want the Nanny State to step in and save them. The majority of people feel that way, and as long as Libertarianism ties itself to democracy, it’s not going to stay in power more than one or two business cycles.
We can argue all day about whether Policy X working/not working in the US proves/disproves the validity of Libertarianism, but you picked one of the worst policies imaginable in order to do that. It’s simply not a part of what the Libertarian Party is trying to accomplish (you won’t find “privatize prisons” in the Libertarian Platform), and
it is in no way essential to a Libertarian system. The judicial system and the system for National Defense are two of the basic functions of government that most Libertarians recognize as a legitimate function of government. You just want to ignore that, and skip to the part where some private entity has not worked out well and jump to the conclusion that Libertarianism has been shown to be deficient.
Now, I don’t doubt that there are some Libertarian thinkers out there that would favor privatizing prisons. But again, such a system would not be a sine qua non of a Libertarian System. You’ve done the equivalent of proving that democracy doesn’t work because a certain ballot machine has been shown to be hackable.
The quote in the OP clearly states that not all prison contracts have such quotas, even if a majority do. They were found in “around 65% of the more than 60 private prison contracts it [ITPI] analyzed”
Well…if they don’t have capacity quotas, and they still intend to stay profitable, they’d have to be asking the government for a subsidy. (Or take a short-term loss and hope the crime rate goes up…)
Agreed that taking government subsidies is not particularly libertarian. But privatization of government roles is a concept favored by a great many libertarians (and other “invisible hand” free-market advocates.)
(One of the reasons I’m against private prisons is that any abuse falls upon the prisoners themselves, who have the least voice in the distribution of resources. With government-run prisons, abuse is pointed out to inspectors, who get paid to expose shortcomings. Private industry is famous for not paying attention to in-house auditors when it comes to exposing short-cuts and inattention to regulations. Ask any quality-assurance inspector: they are sometimes given maximum quotas of flaws they are allowed to point out in finished products.)
How do you think Hotels stay in business? They don’t get a state guarantee of overnight guests. Or Apartment Complex Owners.
They probably need a commitment from the state that it won’t suddenly build over-capacity itself and put them out of business. But that doesn’t prevent the state from contracting with several different firms, none of whom is going to get al the business nor a guarantee of X% full house.
Many don’t. I gave the example of a hamburger restaurant that doesn’t sell enough burgers: it gets closed.
Also, hotels can fire employees, reduce cleaning from daily to weekly, fire the gourmet chef and hire a slop cook, and so on. The free market has ways to respond to this. But prisoners don’t have any free-market recourse, and are captive victims to service cuts.
(This is another reason private prisons are bad libertarian models: they depend upon a captive market.)
Other libertarianists consider that the huge and disfunctional prision system is evidence that the war on drugs was an abuse of power by the government.
The failure of one idea does not mean the failure of an ideology. One thing that us conservatives/libertarians need to learn from the past few decades of experimentation is that government delivers government services best. THat’s because the incentives don’t change just because you hand the job over to a private company. Competition is what creates excellence, and in order for competition to work there have to be customers. Prisons do not have customers to please.
If libertarianism has failed because we made a mistake, then liberalism failed a long time ago, what with 80 years of government proving its inefficiency and incompetence and unaccountability. At least the liberals got social issues right.
But isn’t libertarianism predicated on fewer government regulations, not more? Shouldn’t libertopian private prisons be free to manage prisoners according to their own standards, and let the market determine what is appropriate?
Demonstrably untrue. A significant number of people clearly did think that prisons should be privatized, or it wouldn’t have happened. If that wasn’t due to the libertarians, then whom was it due to?
Compare the cost of insurance for healthcare which necessarily must cost more than the actual healthcare, being a middleman operation, plus advertisements, plus profit, versus what it would actually cost to see a doctor with no middleman involved. The free market adds layers of profit to a system which is already expensive, profit is like taxes, except they provide no societal benefit for the cost since all it does is line the pockets of already rich people.
Reflexive response: But* jobs…*
Public sector jobs would be less expensive, since there would be fewer millionaire CEOs and advertisement branches involved, and a government managed healthcare system would cost the consumer less and eliminate much of the middleman cost. As I mentioned in another thread, I saw a doctor in Norway twice for a couple of procedures that would have ended up costing me 2 grand in the states, might have cost me five percent of that amount.
The idea that profit motive makes a system better, when the system is based on caring for people who may or may not be able to pay, is ludicrous. Prisoners, students, sick people, the elderly and unemployed, should not be at the mercy of profit vultures.
No one has to believe in prison privatization in order for our system to produce prison privatization. Prison corporations don’t have to believe in it, they just have to pretend to because it makes them money, even if they privately know that it doesn’t make sense. Legislators don’t have to believe in it, if the personal rewards are high enough. Voters don’t even have to believe in it, if your representative is a much better fit for your other beliefs than the alternative candidates are.
The private sector only works when their product or services has an open, competitive market. Providing a service that by definition, can only be provided to the government, is just an open door for fraud and abuse.
