The issue isn’t the lock-up quotas themselves, though, it’s that they highlight that the underlying motives for the private prison industry are actually directly counter to the overall public good. For-profit prisons require a regular stream of customers, just like any other business, but unlike most other businesses, a significant function of civilization as a whole is to reduce or eliminate their customer base. You can write laws forbidding governments from entering into contracts that include provisions for these sorts of quotas, but it doesn’t change the fact that the for-profit-prison industry is directly harmed by successful efforts to reduce recidivism, limit incarceration terms, decriminalize certain victimless crimes, or really do anything that reduces the amount of tax dollars we spend on the criminal justice system.
In the real world, this is something (just like many recent causes that were ignored until recently) that Libertarians I know have been against for at least 10-15 years (and in many cases 40 or more).
All true, but you don’t think the Dept of Corrections doesn’t have a similar conflict of interest when it submits its budget every year? I personally have no dog in the game of privatized prisons. I just don’t see where a contract can’t be set up such that the corporation running the prisons has financial incentives to reduce recidivism. Sure, they’ll have to predict how many inmates they need to plan for, but that’s not so different from other market analyses. Crime happens, just like purchases happen.
You don’t have to be an anarchist to believe that privitization wherever possible is a good thing because you believe that governments are inefficient, corrupt and incompetent. Everything from schools to tax collection to prisons. Our brave men and women serving in the military and police OTOH are the cream of the crop while all other public employees are leeches.
Oddly enough, governments rarely ever seem to get those contracts right. Its almost as if you CAN’T get those contracts right because there is some flaw in the underlying premise.
The libertarian rebuttal is that this is not a privatization but a public private partnership where you get he worst of both worlds. All the inefficiency of government and all the profit requirements of a private business.
Of course they have an excuse for all the things that go wrong when these principles are applied, we’re just not doing ti right, or free marketing hard enough.
So what are you saying? That the TRUE central principle of libertarianism isn’t smaller government or more freedom, it is lower taxes? Or is it just freedom from coercion as long as you don’t coerce anyone else?
Being penny wise is frequently easier to prove than being pound foolish.
And we’re into La-La-Libertarian Land. For all the definitive, black and white, stand-up shouting LIbs do, when you try to pin their notions down to either a coherent picture and/or reality, they slide around like a blob of mercury. No restatement of their claims is ever quite right, or “not believed by most/real/true Libs” or just “not what I said” - even when it’s just a restatement of the same sentence.
What Libertarians want is for the world to fuck off and leave them alone, no matter what they do… but still be there, warts, Democrats and all, where it so personally benefits them.
Are economies of scale not workable with the government?
Absolutely, and barring the unavoidable exceptions, that’s how it does work. The government can do things at a scale few corporations can touch, and do it on an absolutely nonprofit basis, and do it for the benefit of all who need it, regardless of whether they represent “profitable” clients.
And other than the nearly untouchable military and defense budget, every other department has been under the endless hammer of budget restriction for decades, and they still manage to do their jobs - except where the cuts have reduced them to ineffectiveness, meaning that their budget “waste” is much higher because they keep at it with fewer positive results.
The maxim that “government is too large and has to be cut by some large percentage” has had its day, and achieved little but damage - starting with things like the whopping damage Prop 13 did to California.
The premise is faulty all over the place. Private prisons are not a libertarian concept, it’s old fashioned anti-government pro private industry conservatism. We have a prison problem partially due to a lack of libertarian practices in drug laws. The problem is a lack of government responsibility and competence which can be blamed on the major political parties but not libertarians who barely exist in the lawmaking process. There are numerous other problems that affect the justice and penal system, lack of jobs, failing education system, entrenched bloated police bureaucracy, revolving door recidivism, some of these things addressed by libertarians, others not.
OTOH, it’s a total indictment of the private prison system. No one would want to operate such facilities if held to the same standards as public prisons for the same amount of money. Public prisons already fail from lack of funding an the other problems already mentioned, there’s not going to be any capitalistic magic that will make things work better.
I’ll bet some do, because they figure in a slippery-slope factor. They figure any statist system will eventually degrade into totalitarianism. At the same time, they believe that libertarianism is a simpler system - one that cannot be so thoroughly degraded by that either-all-good-or-all-bad thing called human nature. (I would tell them they’re focusing on the system’s parts and ignoring its potential outcomes.)
People who wanted to break the prison guard union, wanted to reduce the pension costs of more government employees, and who didn’t want to pay to upgrade / build / maintain state owned prisons.
However - as someone with Libertarian leanings - prisons don’t fit the model. A hotel can drop prices to attract new people - offering less for less (think Motel 6 vs the Hyatt). Prisons already operate under a model of offering the least amount of services necessary - so a race to the bottom to attract new tenants won’t work. Private prisons also don’t own the supply - they can just go out and arrest new people.
Put simply - Private prisons to don’t work in a capitalist model.
Now, as a LIbertarian-esque person, I would say that we have too many people in prison due to overreach by government in the police system, a poorly run court system where “swift justice” is a lie, and overwhelming power on the part of the DAs office when constructing deals. Fix that, and we could drop our prison costs significantly.
Where might the privatization work? How about halfway houses and job training for prisoners? Privatize that, and make the payment based on getting former convicts into jobs and turned into contributing members of society.
You’ve managed to not answer this, so I’ll step up and ask for a cite.
In addition, if we’re getting rid of private prisons because of conflict of interest we’ll have to get rid of all prison labor unions. Surely the union will fight to keep jobs.
The other reason you might want to privatize something even like a prison is to take the politics out of it. When the government builds the prison, it gets to decide where it goes, and that’s a coup for whichever Congresscritter gets it built it in his district. Then just try and shut it down if it’s ever not needed…
Anyway, there are problems associated with privatizing prisons, but let’s not forget that the government doesn’t always do things that are in the best interest of the people either.
Indeed aside from private prisons those most opposed to marijuana decriminalization have been the DEA and police organizations.
Thing is the will of the people can override those organizations (as has been happening in several states). The private prisons though get a guaranteed minimum of cash from the state no matter how empty their prisons are.
Economies of scale are rarely linear. A corporation with 100 employees can’t be made into a working corporation with 200 employees, simply by having two of everyone they used to have one of.
(Two CEOs? Two VPs of Finance? Meanwhile, only moving from two to four building maintenance guys or warehouse workers might not be enough.)
It’s cute that people are claiming that privatized prisons are not a Libertarian ideal or that Libertarians somehow are not in favor of this.
From the Libertarian Reason Foundation:
Libertarian Presidential candidate Gary Johnson on privatized prisons in the Raycom News Network (1/30/2013):
And the Koch Brothers - David was a Libertarian Vice Presidential candidate - are all in favor of the privatized prison movement.
Now of course this doesn’t mean that *every *Libertarian is in favor of privatized prisons. But since “Libertarians want to replace as much government as they practically can with private, voluntary alternatives,” how much of a surprise is it that prisons would make the list for many of them? Hell, they want to privatize Social Security.
But as I said in my OP, some Libertarians might feel that prisons shouldn’t be privatized (all but the most fanatical allow that government has some role and some responsibilities) but even in this thread we have seen the Libertarians who still think it’s a noble idea that is failing because of other factors, but really would work great if only there were different contracts, different private corporations, different rules.
But that’s why I feel that this is an indictment of Libertarianism because it’s the same old song and dance - the government attempts to outsource something they usually handled, results show no measurable changes in cost, a lot of the same problems as when the government handled those things and a whole bunch of new issues as well, and they cry out that it just can’t be because the government could possibly do something better than the free market! It had to be something else.
That’s exactly what Reason reasoned in response to the DOJ report: make excuses and point to the situations that they deemed were favorable to the concept.
Ask any Libertarian. They’ll make every excuse in the book why such experiments fail, but never actually concede that the flaw is actually their silly philosophy.
So no, the scathing reports of the failures of privatized prisons are not the only reason Libertarianism sucks. But, as the thread title points out, it’s more evidence. Add it to the pile; there’s a lot more where that came from.
Is the failure of the V-22 Osprey a failure of libertarianism?