Thank you! Not too difficult, I trust.
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Here in California the Prison Guard Union is the biggest proponent of harsh sentences. So private prisons do not necessarily lead to more prisoners. In fact it may be the other way around.
I am not sure of the benefits or costs, but having a financial incentive to imprison fellow citizens is perverse and we should avoid it at all costs.
I think it should be expensive as possible to lock people up. If it keeps getting cheaper, who’s to say they won’t lock ME up one day? I work a lot but there are times I don’t have that much money to contribute to society. I want to be more valuable to our society working than locked up.
Since the theory of private prisons is that they are cheaper than public prisons, having more would mean less financial incentive to imprison fellow citizens.
Except that private prison corporations have lobbyists and campaign contribution arms, and those can attempt to influence politicians to imprison more people and thus enrich those corporations more.
Which is, in my understanding, entirely borne out by the past several years of state and local policy in parts of the country in which these corporations are most influential.
Not if they are supposed to have a minimum number of prisoners to keep their charter…and they do. The only way to keep them open(and not have to reopen the state-run prisons) is to make sure that a high number of people are convicted. This is an incentive to avoid paroling prisoners, an incentive to avoid sentences that avoid prison…generally an incentive to look for reasons to fill those cells at any cost and for any reason.
The benefits of any private enterprise over a public is that they weed out inefficiencies. The problem is that ‘efficiency’ is measured in dollars and cents. If it costs less to put down a prison riot than it does to treat prisoners humanely, then the riot wins. If it’s cheaper to pay a fine than to feed them adequately, then the fine shall be paid. The problem with capitalism as a whole is that more and more frequently, it is human beings who are the inefficiencies in systems, so the human beings must suffer in the name of capitalist profits. Yay, us. Bottom line is that private prisons are a horrible, wretched idea, but they are undeniably efficient. Shoot, almost 1% of all Americans are in jail, tell me that a public system could pull that off so efficiently. Not possible. Shoot, almost 1 in 10 men will spend some time in jail. That’s downright impressive to think about how successful private prisons have been.
This. The market is tremendously efficient in optimizing processes. However it does not always optimize them with regards to what human beings want optimized. In this case, private prisons are optimizing for profit for the business. This means cheap containment of prisoners. This is unfortunately at odds with the primary purpose of imprisonment, which is reducing crime.
In fact it generates what is known as a perverse incentive, in that the private prisons profit if the inmates reoffend after release. Everyone wants repeat customers. And that is before we start to consider that large businesses can influence politicians in many ways, in order to create more crime and harsher sentences.
“Always Look at the Bright Side of Life…”
I’m a physician who’s employed by the state to take care of convicted felons in prison. Before my patients get to me, they generally spend time in a county jail. Many, if not most of the county jails have their health care contracted out to private firms who supply health care for profit. And what I often see as a result is care that is delayed and deferred until they leave jail and get to prison.
Many of my patients tell me that they were told all their health care issues would be addressed when they reached prison, and not before. Including stuff that should NOT have waited, like significant GI bleeding, new cancer diagnoses, unstable heart conditions. I’ve taken dozens of patients fresh off the bus from the jail to us, and found them in such terrible shape they needed to be hospitalized.
And I’ve talked to a lot of the physicians and nurse practitioners who work for the for-profit jail health care corporations. I get told tales of how they’re instructed to not order services or refer outside the fence unless circumstances are dire. And I’ve been told of said practitioners being disciplined or fired for ‘over-referring’.
Now, working for the state, we’re trying to contain costs too, and avoid doing unnecessary care. But if a guy’s got unstable angina, they don’t belong in a cell, they need their condition stabilized.
Not all jails treat their patients that way. I’ve seen some get top-notch appropriate care in jail by private health services. And I’ve seen the ball dropped in the public sector too. But when the primary focus is the bottom line, everyone seems to devote a lot of effort into convincing themselves that the patients’ dire complaints aren’t really dire, critical labs were lab error and can be repeated in a few days or weeks, and that every inmate is just trying to manipulate the system. Because if we can assume that, we make more money!
Criticism of private prisons has also focused on differences in recidivism rates between inmates housed in private versus public prisons. But one point in favor of private prisons is that when a lower recidivism rate of its <ahem>… alumni??? figures into the private prison’s contract then there is an incentive to focus on rehabilitation. And, at least in some instances, this seems to have actually resulted in a lower recidivism rate among persons who served time in a privately run prison.
Alas, it seems such incentives are lacking in many contracts between government and private prisons. And in those cases, it is often the persons who served time in public prisons who have a lower recidivism rate, (pdf at link) or at least no better.
It is almost as if when you treat prisoners decently and focus on rehabilitation and being sure they have a means of supporting themselves after they leave the penal system that you get less repeat offenders. Now if we could just send some prison managers on a secondment to work in the penal system in Norway maybe the US could see the benefit of a major change in the penal system. Never gonna happen though.
Political campaign spending by government workers unions such as prison guards dwarf the spending of private prison companies on lobbying. The prison guard union in California alone spends, 8 million a year on political activities which is more than the two biggest private prison companies spend on lobbying combined.
The increase in private prisons has nothing to do with the increase in prisoners. 92% of prisoners are held in public prisons.
What the market optimizes for is what customers are willing to pay for. If governments wanted to they could write the contracts in a way that maximizes profits for facilities with a low recidivism rate. Currently most contracts are focused on saving money because that is what state governments are most concerned about.