California bans private prisons
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
California would have had legal marijuana a decade sooner except for lobbing by the union, they're a major force for mandatory minimum sentences and tougher sentencing in general.
This seems like a trivial easy-PR win for some legislators that does very little to meaningfully address the problems with criminal justice in the US. Private prisons are a tiny little piece of a much bigger problem and there's still a lot of real work to be done.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers%27_Bi...
Law enforcement unions are one of the few American institutions with completely bipartisan protection. Democrats don't go after them because Democrats are pro-union. Republicans don't go after them because Republicans are pro-police. Furthermore, you really don't want to pick a fight with police unions. What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike? It's against the law in many places, but if the police are on strike, who's going to enforce that? There is a very significant risk that you'd have to call up the National Guard just to maintain public order. And even then, how many National Guardsmen does California have? How many LEOs? And most of those National Guardsmen are not actually trained in law enforcement. In effect you would be declaring martial law. It's not worth it.
> When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.
> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown.
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
It occurred to me that the result is not necessarily unexpected if it were due to under reporting (i.e. during the slowdown there was less opportunity to report major crime and therefore reports fell). The researchers discuss that in the paper. I don't have time to read the paper in detail and come to a conclusion one way or another, but I thought it might be of interest to people who might not otherwise click on an La Times link.
doi:10.1038/s41562-017-0211-5
Answer the phone Show up Take the person’a claim seriously, encourage the person to formally complain Actually write up the complaint Actually file it
I’m really skeptical those things wouldn’t be altered by a slowdown, it wouldn’t be much of a slowdown, in my opinion, without altering these things.
Edit: I understand it might be in principle possible to control for a slowdown, if you had many many other slowdowns to use as data points.
There are a number of factors to take into account when giving credit to such studies:
- Is there enough observations to have statistically significant results? (i.e. do we have enough occurences of police strikes to really have meaningful results? can we have overwelmingly influencing factors not present in the studied samples: I guess it would likely highly depend on the city where the strike happens also)
- Did the sample properly allowed the isolation of the variable being studied against other influencing factors?
- What is the collinearity between the variables used for the regression? (i.e. if violence complaints are made on the spot, then less police means harder to fill complaints, it doesn't necessarily mean less violence)
"Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" has a good introduction to the challenges of such studies, and discusses a bit the particular case of police.
Hardly-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
> Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"),[1] short for argumentum ad hominem, typically refers to a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.
You failed at the "genuine discussion" part by citing pop econ horseshit.
No, it's a general attack on anyone that cites horseshit.
Galanwe said phry was "very malicious", which is actually and not just tenuously a personal attack. Do you plan to delete their comment as well? Interesting standards on HN.
Edit: I've tracked down the comment you're referring to and indeed, no moderator saw it. I've replied to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20964408. In the future, if there's a comment you're concerned about, you should either flag it or email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
If you haven't checked specifically with us about a post, please don't draw conclusions about HN moderation—those are almost always non sequiturs. People usually jump to the idea that we secretly support the one side (where they didn't see us moderate) over the other side (where they did). That is reading patterns into randomness.
Edit: Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
You're right, I don't think either of these options is better than the other.
And yet such numbers are dropped all the time. I also do not see callouts for number drops being consistently applied. For example in political subreddits sees number drops without callouts when it supports the lean of the subreddit and number drops with callouts when it does not.
Criticism of science seems to be unequally applied, and given how important equal application of criticism is to science being reliable, it creates a reliability problem.
There is a non-trivial risk of violent, even armed conflict if there really was a police strike and the National Guard was called in to restore order. That’s not something a state governor wants on their record.
A larger motivating factor - and this is pure speculation - might be more closely related to angering an institution with such a capacity for unchecked initiation of violence (ie, that ones person, home, or family may be in danger of direct violence).
Perhaps your "democracy" needs more than 2 parties.
"What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike?"
The American culture is very antagonistic. In democratic societies, which are less antagonistic, this would become a matter of new public consensus much sooner before they would go on actual strike (there are many forms of strike and some of them do not involve stopping all work, for example, work-to-rule).
Like France?
I live in Europan country with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartism, and that's one option how to make things less antagonistic. There is lot of negotiations going on before the strike happens, and it mostly gets averted.
The current dynamic is akin to children playing one feuding parent against the other in a broken overly-adversarial marriage. You need a minimum of about 4-5 independent voices in order to facilitate civil public discourse.
Has this been demonstrated through mathematical/statistical models?
I can understand for example limiting striking by law or similar ordnances to uphold order and democracy. Is this all the parent is talking about?
But isn't a union basically a private organisation formed by citizens by their own free will?
What does it mean for a political organization, eg a party, to go after something like that? I mean from liberal/freedom of the individual POV.
I'm most certainly missing something important here and me being european/nordic shows ;)
The unions and their membership have a financial conflict of interest when it comes to public public that impacts incarceration rate. Prison unions have, for example, lobbied extensively to keep various drugs criminalized in states where the public was going in another direction.
It's obviously a difficult subject with a lot of concerns to balance, but the posters here are just arguing that the problems of private prisons are not all unique to private prisons-- the employees of public prisons (and their orgs) have some of the same kinds of conflicts of interest.
In the former case, harsh laws are good for them, same as the private scenario. But in the latter case -- fewer prisoners on the same budget -- more permissive laws would be an unconditional win. I don't know which way it actually works, just spelling out an unstated assumption that's being made upthread.
It’s also not purely a matter of private association. Often there are laws encouraging or mandating collective bargaining for certain public sector jobs. These laws are often what keeps unions in business, since those laws protect them and allow them to eg sign collective bargaining agreements that effectively require public employees to join the union (or at least pay dues to it) as a condition of keeping their jobs. It was the repeal of these laws that Gov. Walker faced political pushback for in 2011.
LEOs hold a sacred role of trust in our society - they maintain the potential application of the use of lethal force. With that power must come the most severe of guardrails, to which unionization is completely antithetical. Our civilian control of the military is internationally lauded, but we lack full civil control of our own law enforcement.
I think the way to go about this is to break up the law enforcement departments into smaller scoped independent roles with enough potential redundancy to be able to institute reforms via divide and conquer. Remake law enforcement from the ground up in this way, and deny the new institutions public unionization by law.
If the existing police unions strike, they must be dealt with as severely as mutinous armed forces would be; they should be subject to a court marshal form of adjudication with the same penalties that a military officer would face for desertion and endangering public safety.
Start building new parallel law enforcement institutions now, prepare for how to maintain civil order in the face of a strike, then start dissolving the old institutions. It’d also probably be wise for the FBI to maintain a comprehensive database of federal, state and local LEOs in case some go underground and attempt to undermine these efforts through domestic terrorism.
Could you please provide me some examples? I figure if California's prisons were 200% of capacity, there's no shortage of work for the prison guards anyway.
I'm not sure how/why you figure that, or how it's at all relevant.
I'm not sure how/why you figure that because "over capacity" != "will build new prisons / hire new guards". I.e., it's not at all impossible for there to be prisons that are over-capacity and also a decline in the number of prison guard jobs.
It's not relevant because the entire point of unions is to counter-act the effect of supply/demand dynamics on labor (see: "there's always another scab"). Just because there's "no shortage of work for the prison guards" doesn't mean they will lobby against changes to laws that might one day create such a shortage.
I mean I get the initial point, some police unions are an especially vile proponents of an expansion into a police state, its just not really about working conditions. Its political lobbying. In Germany you can see it every time more competences for the police are discussed in parliament. You have some police unions giving legit feedback if someone bothers to ask them, how those competences are a bad idea and are not needed. And then you have speakers for other police union (with a catchy union name to seem more important) where you can see they have the right party membership and are looking for a career in politics. As a result you can see them in every news report that wants to bring across a certain message.
Then of course there could be plenty of hidden stuff like more prison crowds means some one selling food(I hear animals eat better food than inmates) to the prison likely makes more money, and hence better bribes/commissions in the chain of people involved.
Eventually it comes down to profit per person. And they'd like to make it up on scale.
Much of the concept is that the prison's are at 200% capacity because of the perverse incentives for the state (prosecutors, police, judges) to fulfill the private contract minimums.
Mandatory minimums and the 3 strike rule are suspected to be related to private prisons contracts.
The power of unions (for a certain sector) in a given society scales proportionally to number of people involved in them.
However, the power of private companies (certain sector) in a given society is proportional to revenue of that sector.
Since the power of unions in monetary terms can be bounded from above by total wages in the sector, we can see that this is always less than the revenue of the sector.
In other words, in capital intensive industries, unions have less relative power.
The point is, the "willingness of some industry to live" is the interest of more people than just employees of that industry. It's also all the people taking a cut one way or another, that is owners, rentiers and potentially all the people involved in providing assets for the industry.
I suspect the American culture of "being tough on crime" isn't really about prison-employee unions, but has historical roots in the colonization of the American frontier.
...except when you can both be a member of a union and also exercise your vote.
I wasn't aware that in the USA joining a public sector union meant giving up your right to vote ;-)
I think it seems counter-intuitive to you but you cannot articulate why. I was also surprised when I realized it.
Or think about it this way: All citizens in democratic society are free to enter any number of associations that advocate for their interests. For example, unions. But membership in these associations doesn't "add up" to more power, in particular, it doesn't affect the "one person, one vote" principle of democratic elections.
> your vote has always larger weight in society than your union membership.
Yes, but the next step in your logical deduction is flawed because union membership does not necessarily dilute the power of your vote to signal other preferences (at least in countries with secret ballots and no proxy voting).
You're comparing these two things as if there's some sort of trade-off or mutual exclusivity. There isn't, especially in countries where politics is dominated by two parties such as the USA.
Here's how those mechanics tend to play out in the USA. A union voter leverages their union membership to make kings in the primaries. Then, after winnowing the field to a list of candidates who exclusively support their union's major priorities, union members are free to use their vote to exercise preference on other issues. That's not hypothetical -- it's exactly what happens in most US states with strong public sector LEO unions.
> But membership in these associations doesn't "add up" to more power
But this is obviously false when broadened to include all associations.
Politics in literally every modern democracy is dominated by associations called political parties. That's not an accident, and it's not like that status quo happened without opposition. A lot of politicians in the history of democracy have attempted to limit the role of associations in democratic processes, and they mostly failed.
I don't really understand the argument you're making. Maybe your logical deductions are bulletproof, but in that case, there must be something wrong with your premises. Because hundreds of years of extraordinarily compelling empirical evidence contradict your final conclusion.
Large associations of voters really do have more power than the sum of their votes. Maybe not "theoretically", but certainly "actually" and "empirically".
If the government takes more input from associations than from voting, I think it's a reasonable conclusion. (See also my comment about tripartism above.)
But what seems to me closer to the truth is that people simply heavily underestimate the power of their vote.
Parties are still highly effective at consolidating power in countries with many parties.
Imagine a layperson read a news article about a complex topic in your field and instantly discovered a trivial easy win.
What are the odds they’d be correct?
edit: Do you have any articles to recommend that would shed some lights on this matter ?
Do you have some sources ? (I don't live in the US, but I find the idea that guards somehow lobby fascinating)
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=california+prison+guards+lobby
And yet I see this constantly on almost every thread. What is it with HN and asking for sources on everything?
True, I could google for it but then I am on an hunt to discern the truths and the lies and to understand why someone lies or tells the truth to whom and how it is pertinent to the original request (and there's the bubble search, of course).
The thing is, I don't know - in that case - if it's obscure or not.
Plus, our comments aren't born in a vacuum. Parent likely has additional information or an outlook on the subject that I wouldn't find (or more likely find but likely dismiss because of a lack of context) in a 15 minutes google search.
Then, on the other hand, you actually have snipers around here who are quick to derail conversations by not participating, not giving information or sharing outlook and just shooting "Sources ?" and then never coming back to the thread.
You have to trust me on that one but I assure you I don't do that.
Now, asking for sources is most of time a given when someone makes extraordinary claims meant to shut an argument (eg: "X is bad 98% of time don't talk about X" when everyone was considering X safe from the get-go).
edit: I should have asked something like "Do you have an article to recommend that would shed some lights on this matter ?". The "Do you have sources ?" is a bit harsh and inquisitive, my bad.
edit (2): On the other hand, I clicked your link, without looking at the URL, thinking "ah cool, this person is telling me that in this case a simple google search will yield pertinent results. But all I got was a "fuck you, use google".
Ideally, citing your sources should be done without being asked.
And, when asked, people want to know which sources you have used, not the ones they can find for themselves. So even if you think it's common knowledge, we want to see the base of your thinking.
Do you have a source for why that would be ideal ?
While it seemed annoying at first, I quickly came to love the fact that this happens. I feel like this might be a natural tendency starting to be developed in the wake of fake news, and opinion-generating bot armies on the rise.
Better to ask for a source one time too many, than one time too little.
>...The CCPOA is deeply involved in a variety of political activities. Most spending is done through political action committees.[citation needed] Although its membership is relatively small, representing only about one tenth the membership of the California Teachers Association, CCPOA political activity routinely exceeds that of all other labor unions in California. The union spends heavily on influencing political campaigns, and on lobbying legislators and other government officials. CCPOA also hires public relations firms and political polling firms.
... >Lobbying efforts and campaign contributions by the CCPOA have helped secure passage of numerous legislative bills favorable to union members, including bills that increase prison terms, member pay, and enforce current drug laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_...
>...ROUGHLY HALF OF the money raised to oppose a ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana in California is coming from police and prison guard groups, ...
More members equal more funding.
More members equal more possibility of existing members to become senior.
And I don’t remember prison guard unions being the ones principally pushing for 3 strike laws. Most of those went through when it was politically advantageous to be backing them, unlike now.
This is such a bizarre and twisted sentence to hear without a hint of irony. It's like dream/nightmare logic except in real life. In 100 years private prisons are going to be a hideous stain on our history and this is such a huge step in the right direction that it really makes me proud to be living in California and supporting the state with my tax dollars.
But if it is a serious violent crime, it should still be prison. Comfortable like in Europe or better, but preventing convicted from doing harm to others.
It should not be a punishment. It should be just an isolation. Separation of bad people from good people.
Otherwise there are a tonne of options from before prison became the norm. Community service, restitution, fines, public shaming, exile, corporal punishment, capital punishment. Some more acceptable today than others.
> I think things like prison, corporal punishment, exile, etc., are good deterrents but they're horrible at reintegration
An example would be the prison phones / video visitation industry. It's absolutely abhorrent what's going on there (removing in-person visits, replacing them with stupidly expensive phone calls that prisoners can hardly afford).. and yet public prisons / jails are using their services just the same. [1]
[0] - https://worthrises.org/picreport2019
[1] - https://www.prisonpolicy.org/phones/state_of_phone_justice.h... Just look at how expensive those phone calls are :(
This also ignores known stories such as an example where a judge had a stake in a private prison company (or was bribed outright?) And as a result was sentencing school kids to prison for things which probably needed detention at worst. And this went on for a decade.
The prison system in the US is not good to begin with. Largely because the citizens look at prison as retribution rather than rehabilitation. But the private nature only adds to and exacerbates issues.
Offering cheap phone calls isn't exactly rocket science.
FWIW, the judges you mention are probably the two in the Kids for cash scandal [1]. They're currently serving sentences ranging from 17 to 28 years. Good riddance.
Thank God they opened their mouths, pissed off the judge overseeing their plea agreement who then yanked it, and got sentenced to about 3 times the jail time they would have had otherwise.
We see this time and time again. There really needs to be a better protocol for this. It takes so much time and effort to make these laws, yet they can be undone in a heartbeat. It's an inherently flawed system.
Which would just make them subject to switching when the legislative majority changed, rather than actually fundamentally changing the situation.
But I'm not sure either is really a problem: otherwise, bad laws would be impervious to change, too. If you want good laws, you have to keep electing good government.
The whole problem is that these were not laws. The FCC does not make laws. If it had been done through Congress, it would have been a more lasting change. But anything one president can unilaterally do, the next can unilaterally undo.
I think it makes more sense to focus on specific aspects of the criminal justice system rather than simply the private/public distinction. There should be standards for the pay and training of prison staff, security of inmates, quality of food and nutrition, medical care, etc.. It might be true that private prisons skimp on these things more than public prisons, but the standards are what is important.
Of course, this may very well mean that the best way to implement and enforce these standards is to have as much "public" (state) direction as possible in the development and operation of prisons, and I'm not at all against that if it is in fact the best implementation.
That 15 minute maximum includes a mandatory waste of 38 seconds of a recorded message telling the receiver that the person on the other end of the line is in federal prison. Additionally you waste approximately 1 minute during the call when a woman's voice reminds you all that the call was placed from federal prison. That's just the time the voice is talking.. it doesn't account for the fact it is seemingly random and derails any train of thought. All in all you waste over 1.5 minutes of the call...
Outside of Unicor you're screwed if you expect to make more than 20 dollars a month.
Oh and the email system ha ha ha haaaa you pay by the MINUTE to email. Imagine how many people can't type well at all? I spent so much time typing up messages for people because they couldn't type well. It's just pretty sad. Huge rip off for every one in a vulnerable position.
Internet access is non-existent without a cell phone. The higher up in security level you go the harder it is to get a cell phone. Camps at Fort Dix, Petersburg, Morgantown, etc. without a fence.. they're readily available for anywhere from 100-300 USD. A low that has an attached camp a little harder and more expensive. A low with a fence you're looking at maybe 1,000+ USD. Beyond that good luck. These are the shitty prepaid 30 dollar Android phones. Get caught with a cell phone you'll lose up to 200 days of good time and get an automatic shipment (through the horrible OKC facility...) to the next security level. Camp -> Low -> Medium -> High.
General rule at a camp is expect to pay 4x the street price for anything you want. Multiplier gets to be more like 5x-7x if it's something bulky and unusual.
Federal prison was progressive in many ways compared to the states.
Truth be told, if you have some minimum level of funds available and you are within regular travel distance of visitors the federal system is not bad at a camp or a low.
The existence of a straight-to-camp prisoner is a little silly to me. Camps should really only be a stepping stone down from higher security level on your way to release. The feds could save a lot of money by sending people with 18-36 month sentences to a modified RDAP program while living at a halfway house or home confinement. I fully believe every one in the federal system should be participating in an RDAP-type program to evaluate their criminal thinking and have better availability to skills training. Prison and Oren Cass' book "The Once and Future Worker" really influenced my thinking on what should be done to help.
So I see this as cutting off a potential source of greater problems down the line.
But you're 100% right, there are already massive incentive systems in place that we need to overcome to achieve real change.
Frankly, I think a great first step would be eliminating prison guard unions or at least putting pressure on them (e.g. other unions refusing to recognize them).
https://nypost.com/2014/02/23/film-details-teens-struggles-i...
10% of 2.2 million is 220,000, and that is 220,000 more people than deserve to be a human sacrifice to a corporation and its bottom line.
While this is true, that's still 133,000 people. An attempt to make the system more ethical for over 100,000 people makes a significant difference.
I'd wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.
[EDIT] Surprise surprise, when Canada experimented with private prisons, they found measurably better outcomes in public prisons [1] and took the private prisons back over.
Obviously this is not a uniquely US issue another countries are expanding their use.
Also, many politicians seem to like appearing to be tough on crime, and their constituents like that.
I remember the news of Ontario shutting down their privatized project and taking it over. But I also remember the Harper conservative government later suggesting private prisons could again be in Canada's future.
I know there's lobbying going on (and probably more, now, as some of the US state gravy trains dry up) but does anyone know the state or politics of privatizing prisons in Canada?
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/cntrng-crm/crrctns/bt-crr...
[1] https://www.straight.com/article-119340/stephen-harper-opens...
I did not notice such a thing. What do you think constitutes a "relentless march right", that the Conservative party is engaged in?
I can’t imagine for instance a Joe Clark conservative jumping at these ideas but maybe it was always like that?
The one that really got to me was the F-35 purchase order, which they did not even try to explain to the public.
I hope the PPC can bring some competition and vigour back to our parliament, and get them actually talking about issues, and talking to their own constituents rather than to the fourth wall.
I don't agree with all of their framing, and the English is not native, but their platform documents actually name the laws and procedures that correspond to their legislative priorities, in plain language, and that gives me the warm fuzzies.
Two parties rounds down to one.
The Price of Prison Guard Unions https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-price-of-prison-guar...
PORAC's contribution to California's prison crisis http://www.cjcj.org/news/5423
If anyone's interested in actually learning about the causes of mass incarceration, I'd strongly recommend John Pfaff's _Locked In_: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L6SLKK8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...
In short: a) It's not the war on drugs. b) It's not private prisons. c) It's not sentencing laws.
You could get rid of all of those and America would still lead the "free" world in incarceration.
"a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before"
Although the root fault is that a "guilty" plea costs the court less resources than a "not guilty" plea. If you wanted to solve this properly, you'd require that even if the defendant pleads guilty, there still has to be the full process of jury selection, presenting evidence and arguments (even if the defence's argument is "yeah, I did it") and deliberation (which, by design, gives twelve opportunities for someone to say "what the hell are we doing; this is clearly bunk" without that person being under threat of twenty-five-to-life for contempt of cop).
Edit: oh right, and you also need to make offering plea bargains (outside of state's-evidence cases) a twenty-five-to-life felony for the prosecutor.
The motivations are better. No one is saying it's going to solve world hunger, but it's a good first step.
Next you need to find good people that strongly want to accomplish the organization's goals. And who are smart enough to actually do that.
And you need to make sure those leaders have adequate funding and time to make the necessary changes. As well as having a legal system that is at least half-way working correctly.
Outlawing private prisons is probably a good step, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to eliminate the vested interest in mass incarceration.
Thing is, private prisons are 10% of prisons. Which means public prisons are 90% of prisons, and so public-sector prison guards are at least 90% of prison guards (maybe 100% if they get the state to require collective bargaining in private prisons). That means a majority of the special interests are there either way. There is a conflict of interest with private prisons, but private prison owners are a small and not-very-powerful special interest compared to others.
Like, let’s talk marijuana legalization. I’m pretty sure fast food franchise owners are already a bigger special interest than private prison operators. They probably would be even if 100% of prisons were privatized.
On the other hand, the prison guard union has some real power. If they go on strike, you have to call up the National Guard and panic to get the prisons in working order before the prisoners start rioting and/or starving to death. If a private prison owner pulled that shit, it’s just one private prison owner, and regardless, they’re ruined for life. It only even becomes a remotely comparable risk if there was a single private prison monopoly across the whole state, whereas public prisons already have a prison guard monopoly in the form of the union.
That there are things we also need to fix with public prisons is an orthogonal issue. private prisons are clearly a problem. The idea of commercializing the locking up of human beings is horrifying from a moral perspective.
The government won't lobby itself; the prison guards unions may, however.
Pfaff is convinced that aggressive prosecution is the biggest cause of over-incarceration. His argument here is compelling. He notes that while incarceration rates began to climb in the 1980s as a response to rising crime, those trend lines continued through the Nineties, even though crime was steadily falling. Why did that happen? Examining all the relevant variables (crime reports, arrests, charges filed, and convictions), Pfaff found himself looking squarely at the prosecutor’s office. As less crime was reported, arrests dropped proportionately, and among those who were charged with a crime, conviction rates held steady. But prisons continued to fill, because prosecutors were filing felony charges against ever-growing percentages of their dwindling arrestees.
From https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2017/02/20/john-pfaf...
https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2019/09/in...
PS. Don't downvote me if you don't know economics morons.
It is a feature of our system that is only accelerated by income inequality and labor price suppression.
For all of its faults, I can't agree with you that the public sector is just as bad as the private sector.
Private prisons aren't always worse: Florida study showing lower recividism in private prisons https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249718665_A_Compara...
When you see "Private Prisons Are The Worst!!!" check the studies to see if the groups are comparable; I know someone in the industry years ago and when they opened the first private prison in the state they were sent the worst offenders in order to try and break them, yet they ended up performing better than average for the state.
Prison lobbying comes from both.
The point of this is that by the time they hit their late teens and start entering the prison system, they don't see it as prison but simply a temporary time out from 'the life.' And when they get out, their time in lock up is something that's worn as a badge of honor showing how 'hard' they are. And of course since this culture starts to take a grip quite early, individuals that fall into this trap are generally going to be extremely uneducated. You're looking at adults with elementary or middle school level educations, and generally who have a very strong aversion to education in general.
And so how do you rehabilitate against this? When these guys get out of lockup their options are returning to the life where they're going to met with adulation and respect. Or they can try to go get a minimum wage job bagging groceries or asking if you'd like fries with that. Even look at things such as all the dead rappers. Many of these guys had millions of dollars and could have just retired into self indulgent hedonism on a beach somewhere if they wanted. But even those millions of dollars can't take them away from 'the life', until it eventually takes their life.
I'd predict here that we're going to be able to gradually see Sweden start to migrate towards a punitive based prison system as well. Before they had a negligible crime culture, but now they've entered an era where they're left engaging in hand grenade amenesties. [1] It's that sort of environment where rehabilitation gradually gives way to punitive responses.
[1] - https://www.thelocal.se/20181015/give-up-your-hand-grenades-...
I'm not sure that any actually do that. The ones I've seen turned out to be misunderstandings of the contract. The contracts were of the form that the private prison would be paid a base amount of $B to house up to C prisoners, plus an additional amount of $V per prisoner for each prisoner over C. C is typically something like 90 or 95% of the maximum capacity of the prison.
The contract actually makes more profit for the private prison if it has fewer prisoners, with the total profit going down for each additional prisoner up to C. Whether profit goes up or down for additional prisoners beyond that depends on whether $V is less than or greater than $B/C. If it is greater, than profit will go up as the last 5 or 10% of the capacity is used, but it will still be lower than the profit when the prison was at around 80 to 85%.
From the state's point of view the total cost is $B to house anywhere from 0 to C prisoners, and $B + (n-C) $V if the number of prisoners, n, is > C. From the state's point of view, $B is essentially a sunk cost.
This does provide some incentive to politicians to keep the private prisons occupied up to at least C prisoners, because if they have n < C prisoners, the per prisoner cost to the state is $B/n. If that is too high, the opponents are going to say the politician is spending too much on prisons. Increasing n lowers $B/n, so the politician might be tempted (and it also makes them look tough on crime). That's probably easier for the politician that trying to explain to voters that the total is $B regardless of many or few prisoners are there, and so per prisoner cost is not really what you should be looking at.
Also, note that this kind of incentive goes the same way with public prisons. A public prison also has a bunch of fixes costs, and so if you look at cost per prisoner you are going to see a lower cost per prisoner with higher occupancy because of those fixed costs.
Ruth Wilson [2,3] has worked for years analyzing and working to end the expansion and privatization of California's prisons, through both academic and grass roots efforts [4]. Her "Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California" [5] book is both accessible and rigorous, I highly recommend it. I am a bit shocked that their and foundational work were not mentioned in the piece.
There's a discussion between Davis and Wilson here [6] where they surface the mass incarceration/private prison issue, and detail the pathology of California's prison system.
[1]https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1583225811/ref=dbs_a_def_r...
[2]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTPjC-7EDkc
[4] http://criticalresistance.org/
[5] https://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gulag-Opposition-Globalizing-C...
The whole premise of private, for-profit, prisons has always seemed deeply troubling to me. The focus of a healthy prison system should be to rehabilitate people and help them turn their lives around so that they contribute positively to society. That can take years of hard work by the individual, and require assistance from professionals (therapists, teachers, ...).
A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits. Expensive rehabilitation is therefore immediately off the table, or given at the minimum allowable level. That is just not in the best interest of neither the individuals in the prison system, nor the rest of society.
Lets not be against efficiency for the sake of political orthodoxy.
There's no reason a for-profit company wouldn't be able to provide a high quality service here if the customer actually insisted on (and paid for) such.
I don't see a way where the incentives to cut corners vs the cost and effort of monitoring to deny the effects those incentives would actually work out.
Competitive capitalism is good at being efficient. It is NOT good at avoiding examples of negative results. Even if we say "here's the desirable target" and enforce it, the incentives will be that a large number of the participants will go below that desire in their efforts to maximize profits.
If we want them to be exceeding the targets for things like safety, recidivism, and humane treatment, we can't set incentives that are "profit = how little can you do", even WITH a minimum required.
Besides, most of these sorts of private/public relationships are unlike other true markets anyway with very little competition and only one customer to appease. We end up with a system with even more opaque responsibility/liability chains and encourage crony business deals.
Without any discernible benefit for the private nature and creating negative incentives that encourage more violence by correlating the success of an industry on the greater imprisonment of people, I can’t see any net-benefit for them to exist.
I tend to be a fan of markets in a practical sense but I wish we had clearer distinctions between these public/private operations that are spun as being more “efficient”. Plus a ton of people use these failures of public/private organizations to disparage markets. So it’s not doing anyone any favours to support these half baked pseudo market arrangements, even if you are pro market. In most situations we need purely public or market solutions. I’ve seen few examples of mixing the two that left us better off (the US health insurance ‘market’ is the shining example).
[1] as opposed to the more fringe absolutist anarcho-capitalist stuff ala Mises which does push for private everything
On the right you've got some varieties of anarcho-capitalism that support systems of polycentric law that emerge from markets for law enforcement and criminal justice. On the left you've got anarchist movements like anarcho-syndicalism which propose a decentralized or federated system of social institutions that would be determined by direct action and direct democracy.
I think libertarians would benefit from creating a clearer spectrum within their own community between the more practical (and popular) small government/minarchist side and the more extreme anarcho-capitalist privatize everything group. Too often they seem to be happy having these lines blurred. Plus I don’t think there is any contradictions or significant compromises in doing so. If anything pushing for pipe dream imaginary economic systems or half solution public/private stop gaps isn’t helping anyone.
I also made no claims regarding the viability or merits of any of the viewpoints I was describing. That's not a conversation I'm interested in having in this context.
Ideology often gets in the way of providing the best solution to the greatest amount of people. I personally don't see much value in keeping a broken half-market like health insurance putting along in the name of "free markets". That just makes people blame markets for the failures of the public/private arrangements, which hurts them in other areas where it does make sense, where markets should be the default.
Others like private prisons and private military contractors makes the public lose trust in public institutions. Having a trustworthy justice and government system is critical for all markets to succeed.
Additionally a harder public/private distinction will put greater weight in these decisions and more responsibility. It's very easy for a politician to grab the half-measure public/private mix while pretending to appease both sides.
FWIW, one should also consider that in a Libertarian system FAR fewer people would be in jail in the first place - perhaps as few as none, since Libertarian ideology is not big on forced imprisonment in the first place. The typical Libertarian view of justice is rooted more in the idea of restitution for damages caused (where applicable) than "punishment".
When in fact, research points to private prisons being better at dropping incarceration rates through the programs offered at them. Therefore increasing ones chance at correct rehabilitation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249718665_A_Compara...
I don't think it's valid to draw concrete conclusions about the current crisis from the study you linked. There are far more variables at play than were studied in the paper, and those variables - such as racism, increasing societal inequality, etc - matter.
Also, reasons cited in that paper for the reduced recidivism are to do with the programs offered by the private prison. Are private prisons in all states / California allowed or incentived to offer similar programs? Do they choose not to?
These things affect the statistics, and drawing strong conclusions from that paper about private prisons in California today may lead you to invalid conclusions.
Besides that, it's inarguable that for-profit entities need profit to exist. You could claim that some for-profit prisons have lower recidivism but a non-profit entity will, on average, have more incentive to help inmates than one who's lifeblood comes from profits.
- https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/may/5/report-says-...
- https://news.wisc.edu/study-finds-private-prisons-keep-inmat...
- https://www.brennancenter.org/blog/how-create-more-humane-pr...
Imprisonment is and should be a deterrent punishment - it is not a support group.
One can both be in favor of abolishing for-profit prisons and also in favor of severe deterrent sentences for law-breakers. Profiteering private corporations naturally seek to maximise the number of prisoners in their facilities, because they are paid per inmate - so they have every incentive to ensure future "custom". This motive naturally conflicts with deterrent imprisonment - the whole idea is to forcibly prevent criminals from breaking the law again.
And frankly if I had to choose between a reformed inmate who won't do it again but wasn't punished with cruelty and a hardened inmate who thinks he owes nothing to society I will always go for the former out of pure egoism.
It takes a certain transactional mindset to believe that harsher punishment result in less crime or that the suffering of the criminal will make up for the crimes commited. The lack of effectiveness for punishment to prevent future crimes is a well researched topic.
Unless you kill them, permanently incarcerate them, or lobotomize them, this is impossible.
The support group's intent is to help prevent re-offending after they are released.
While I agree with your assessment of private prisons, I think we've begun to use the legal sure and imprisonment for things it wasn't intended for, such as minor vice crimes, based on flawed broken window thinking and making police terrified of the communities that they serve.
I do believe it to be a universal truth that a reformist approach is superior. Treating it as opposed solution is certainly short sighted.
Exactly. This is your belief, and clearly not everyone believes it.
It sure could be both at the same time. Many people believe that too. It could also only be one or the other. Lots think those ways. There is no universally accepted truth here, and pretending like there is is not fruitful.
Crime rates in the U.S. vs other developed countries, where rehabilitation is the focus, suggests rehabilitation is a much more efficient solution. See for example the crime rates in the Nordic countries.
This is an opinion, not a fact. And you don't even back up your opinion with any data to support it.
The operative word you used is should. You hold the view that the purpose of justice is rehabilitation, which is one theory of justice. Other popular views are deterrence and retribution.
From what I've observed about the United States, preferences for these competing theories of justice tend to fall along well-trodden political lines. That's why it can be so hard to make the legislative changes that California has just made.
Compare with this statement: "A well-run private prison system would be given financial rewards based on recidivism rates and internal violence, and could do so at less cost than state-run prisons". I suspect your response will probably be along the lines of "that's nice dear, but that's not the system we actually ended up with".
The alternative to privately-run prisons that actually exists in CA is not the healthy prison system that you have described, but is the state-run prison system: a revolving door into criminal training centres, with all the abuses you could expect from a system in which certain sets of people have near-arbitrary power over other sets of people.
> A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits.
Yep, people who make money from a thing have an incentive for that thing to continue happening. Now, I challenge you to take a less narrow view of "profit", one that would include (say) a secure job that pays a good wage and comes with a cushy pension (and power over others for those that relish that sort of thing), and apply your reasoning to the state prison system.
- Convicts could choose whether to be sent to a public or private prison.
- Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus.
Those changes would create enough competition and align incentives such that we could see some real innovation in the criminal justice system. Sadly, I don't think these sorts of experiments will ever be tried. If someone ever proposes such a system, they'll be branded a supporter of "private prisons".
More broadly, I don't think it's that easy to think that private prisons can even work well as a solution, regardless of whether they should be allowed to exist as a matter of public policy and ethics. Consider one summative look at this issue provided in this evaluation[3] -- it's dubious whether they're even cost effective, one of the strongest pro-private-prison arguments there has been in public debate, and how there's much better alternatives than the kind of perverse incentives bundled with private prisons, like re-evaluating whether parolees should be allowed in public housing, and providing more transition housing so when sentences are complete, inmates aren't forced to spend even more time in prison because they don't have an address to go to.
[1] https://hbr.org/2009/03/when-economic-incentives-backfire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect [3] https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/2304-privat...
I agree that existing private prisons are wasteful and cruel, but I think that could change if they had different incentives. Right now, convicts can't choose between private or public prison. That lack of choice means that private prisons have no incentive to be better than state run prisons. Private prisons usually charge per head. If no prisoners want to stay at the prison because it's a hellhole, revenue dries up and they go out of business.
I'm familiar with the cobra effect and ways in which adding financial incentives can cause counterproductive outcomes. I'm not particularly worried about that happening with private prisons. Financial incentives backfire in two cases:
1. When they fail to account for higher-order effects. (As happened with the cobra bounty in India.)
2. When they replace social incentives. For example: If a friend asks me to help them move, I'll probably oblige. But if I show up on moving day and I see some paid movers helping, I'll resent that. That's basically what happened with the day care that charged for being late. Previously, parents would show up on time because they felt a social obligation (guilt). When the day care added a late fee, that guilt disappeared because the transaction moved from the social realm to the financial realm.
I think the motivations of wardens and guards in both private and state runs prisons are pretty similar, and I don't think they're motivated by social incentives. For them, it's a job. They want to minimize the amount of stress at work, and that usually means minimizing the amount of violence prisoners do towards one another. Adding some financial incentives isn't going to solve all the problems with prisons, but considering our existing recidivism rates, I seriously doubt it will hurt.
I assume you didn't intend this in a sinister way, but exercise caution when speaking of experimenting with prisoners. Even with good intentions, remember that these people have limited choices, and will probably lack the ability to withdraw consent (assuming it was given in the first place).
Also, I think the point about lobbying proves too much. If lobbying is so much cheaper and more reliable than innovation, why don't all companies lobby instead of innovating? Apple has billions of dollars sitting around. Why don't they lobby to make the iPhone the sole phone used by federal employees? Heck, why don't they lobby to get rid of the new import tariffs affecting their products? I don't think companies leave $20 bills on the sidewalk, so lobbying must not be as effective as people like to believe.
I agree that lobbying is bad, but my objection to it is that the government is allowed to pass laws that coerce people in such ways, not that some companies take advantage of that power. Basically: hate the game, not the player.
Government procurement is a very different beast than most people would be used too. Imagine an organization tasked to deliver the world, but while spending the absolute minimum, and without showing anything that could remotely resemble favoritism in the process.
That's Government. The supplier must be reliable, yet everyone should have an equal footing from which to have a chance to grab a contract.
It has to be cheap, yet must satisfy every requirement necessary to fulfill the procurement's intended purpose.
There must an always also be at least the appearance of propriety in all transactions, or losing bidders have every incentive to challenge the integrity of the decision.
Given the significant hurdles represented by having to jump through all the hoops in winning a Government supply contract, it simply makes more sense to focus mercantile efforts elsewhere where returns can be made with far less risk.
Prisons on the other hand, run into the worst of both worlds. Private prisons don't make money without convicts. So they might lobby for increased mandatory incarceration as a punishment for violation of new laws. You also have operations where prisoners are exploited as slave labor (which is explicitly allowed by the Constitution). Which if you really sit and think about it, makes the threat of increased incarceration as a result of profit-motive for the private prison industry that much more dangerous, as by definition, you are delegating people to a more abusable status in the eyes of the law.
Hard-on-crime stances notwithstanding (I'm not taking sides, just pointing it out), one really needs to take into account on what spending on prisons really says about our society.
Begone yee incarceree! Ye has't offended in the eyes of Man and God, and to the Pit do we consign'st thee til through suffering that debt is repaid!
Vs.
Your offense has brought you here, being due to the threat to civil society your reckless and thoughtless behavior represents. Through the insecurity you suffer through here, it is our hope that you will come to understand the fragility of the civic construct, and come to see the error of your ways.
Vs. Yet still:
Clearly, our society has failed to incorporate/integrate you in a safe or constructive way. Here you must remain for a period until such time as it is deemed necessary to recompensense for the crime you have committed, or until it can be observed beyond a reasonable doubt that you no longer represent a threat to the civil life outside these walls.
A prison by it's nature does not function as anything else than a container or isolator of men and their proclivities. To create a profit making enterprise around that under the guise of "innovation shall make this system better" is foolhardy, seeing as the law, and punishments for breaking it often preclude any way to operate a prison or treat the offender in a "innovative" way.
The price of a man's years is set by the people already, that is. No private prison can innovate on that except by changing or altering the suffering they experience therein contained from the rest of society. Their Wardens' alone reaping the benefit of the custody of society's delinquents.
Furthermore, even the vaunted Market can be severely damaged by the "free labor" potential generated by prison inmates.
I just see far too much potential for negatives and far too few possibilities through which one could wave a magic wand and both dispel the wickedness of the alleged offenders heart (if it actually exists), and also extracting something resembling justice for the victims should it be appropriate.
That said, I think this is still pretty fraught.
Incentives are just rules enforced with a carrot instead of a stick; we're just as likely to come up with bad incentives as we are to develop ineffective regulations and write loophole-ridden or misapplied laws. At sufficient scale, money tends to inspire a troublesome kind of creativity.
If the private prisons have sufficient profit motive and the problems they face prove tractable for data and bespoke or ML solutions, they'll analyze likely convicts as thoroughly as possible and do what they can to skim the most-profitable convicts off the top of the pool and leave public prisons with whatever is left. Maybe they'll just directly pay the prisoner or their family. Maybe they'll have a miserable as-bad-as-regulations-allow experience for uninvited plebians and a special experience to offer prisoners they want.
Will a certain incentive lead them to bribe judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, or witnesses to get (or avoid) prisoners? Would they do the same to keep a former inmate from being convicted again within 3 years of release?
And then some donation-funded corner of the think-tank ecosystem will endlessly torture the data to "prove" private prisons get better outcomes than public ones and shop boilerplate legislation to restrict public and promote private prisons.
And once the prisoners are within their walls, they'll be sucking up all of the data they can to hone their prediction of whether they'll reoffend when they get out. Will they use it nobly to target support, or to ensure the whoever the algorithms pick as bad apples end up in constant manufactured trouble?
If you applied this same level of scrutiny to the existing prison system, I'm sure you could come up with far worse outcomes using far less speculation. For example: What's to stop state prison guards from torturing inmates? Answer: Nothing, because they have qualified immunity.[1]
1. https://www.newsweek.com/prison-inmate-qualified-immunity-pr...
If you read more into the cash for kids scandal, you'll see it was the tip of the iceberg. The level of nepotism in Luzerne county was absurd and the state did nothing to fix it. There were judges abusing their positions, using staff for personal errands, showing blatant bias against certain attorneys, fixing cases, etc. By the time the FBI was done, around a half dozen judges in the county were convicted of various offenses.
My takeaway from the whole thing was that judges have too much power and too little oversight. They're the one relic of the royalty/nobility system that we kept after the American revolution.
Some of that will be corrupt.
It's not that I don't think incentives can play a role; I just wanted to emphasize how incentives, profit, and creativity can go awry.
Then the best strategy would be to make sure that the prisoners die as soon as possible.
But let's assume that the private prisons could somehow keep getting away with murder. If anyone ever looked at the stats and saw that people released from private prisons had much shorter life expectancy, then convicts would choose state prisons. Then the private prison's revenue dries up and they go out of business.
No, they would not, because there is huge information asmyettry here and, and generally convicts have lost access to the sorts of publications with this info.
By and large, I would expect inmates to choose the closest prison to their family, regardless of quality metrics. What good does it do to know that some prison 2000 miles away has a really good meal program?
Considering most inmates do not have access to the internet, do you expect the state to publish these stats in good faith? Inmates to trust them? Or do they just subscribe to print editions of The New York Times?
I guess I'm not sure if you're speaking in hypothetical or talking about inmates today. As the article is on California I'm assuming we're both discussing USA.
Eventually. In the meantime ..say.. for about 10 years they make great money.
The recidivism metric would probably cause private prisons to try to avoid or eject worst prisoners, so you'd end up with a 2-tier system, where private prisons are hotels for "nice" people, and public prisons are a hell-hole for the rest.
Or maybe some prisons would run training on how not to get caught.
You could let the prisoners freely switch to public while they're locked up.
The main issue I have with this system is that the "consumers" making the choices (the prisoners) of product aren't paying for the cost. So incentives aren't really aligned.
Yes, so you'd have to run the metric based on who was initially assigned to the prison. "Oh, John was assigned to your prison, but one look at his record and you decided to expel him? Well, you're still responsible for his recidivism, because you chose to not serve him. Oh, Jack was assigned to state prison, and you tried to encourage him? Well, you're not responsible for his recidivism, because you selected him."
But yeah, I agree in general that the thing about metrics is that they can be gamed.
EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM GETS GAMED. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MEASURE.
Every metric you could possible think of can be manipulated in ways you can't imagine. But give private companies the incentive and someone in them will figure it out.
IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.
In contrast, you are putting forth a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure. But clearly financial incentives work in many cases. It's what sports teams use for their athletes and coaches. It's what businesses use for their leadership teams. When we need the best people possible to perform at their best, we tend to pay them money and pay them more money if they meet certain goals.
> IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.
Yes, ideally we'd have every job staffed people who are wise, kind, competent, and hard working. But we don't have nearly enough of such people and we judge traits inaccurately. So instead we have to make do with less effective but more practical methods. Financial incentives are one of those options.
A general counterargument is worth considering. Any incentive sufficiently powerful to draw forth extra resourcefulness in its legitimate pursuit is quite likely to also draw forth extra resourcefulness in its illegitimate pursuit.
> It's what businesses use for their leadership teams.
This is may help your case considerably less than you think if you look closely. Various forms of the principal-agent problem pop up all the time. Pink and Kohn have also forwarded some research suggesting that extrinsic incentives have diminishing returns or run counterproductive in some cases. And Goodhart's law is a proverb in the business world for a reason.
Aligning incentives is still important, but getting optimal performance is rarely as simple as tying rewards to a goal. Hell, half the time defining optimal performance is a project.
And when the underlying issues involve social safety and significantly curtailing someone's liberties via imprisonment (and the already fine tension between them), it's an especially tricky topic.
Simply handwaving it away with incentives being gamed seems to complete ignore that you are suggesting that there will be widespread systemic corruption of the entire nation's judicial system. Perhaps the general counterargument could really take a moment to focus on the details.
Prisoners not being convicted of more crimes down the line seems to be a no-brainer in societal benefit, or does the line of generalised argument presented here think that's not the case with some more handwaving about optimal outcomes?
EDIT: what does it mean that I love thinking about ways of gaming systems like this?
That you might be a good security researcher? From https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/03/the_security_...:
> Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.
> I replied: "What's really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to."
Picking prisoners would be one obvious way.
Now, you can say "well, we'll just make sure they can't do that." That's fine; the overarching point here is that you can't simply set up an incentive system without thinking about the ways it can be gamed, among other unintended consequences.
Though: do you know that you can make sure prisons can't do that? Is it legal to forbid them a choice? Can you set up a system for distributing prisoners that's resistant to capture or influence? It's a little bit like saying "we'll just make sure our software is secure."
> you are suggesting that there will be widespread systemic corruption of the entire nation's judicial system.
I'm far from the only person suggesting that private prisons corrupt the criminal justice system, but yes, that's part of the argument.
Some people concerned about the issue believe that industry lobbyists work to back criminal code changes requiring more prison sentencing. Others believe in milder phenomena like judges internalizing lower costs of imprisonment and therefore using more of it in sentencing. The former could be described as corruption without being even slightly illegal. The latter might not even be recognized as a form of corruption, but it'd be a systemic issue unless you think imprisonment is underused in the US.
Yeah but I think the big question here is - in what cases?
There's a lot of evidence to suggest financial incentives are in some cases, bad.
Take for example, the financial incentives given to people for running a private prison. Bam.
It’s a fantasy to think you can simple “hire people that care about the public good”. If that were the case the government wouldn’t be filled with incompetent red tape slingers vying for nothing more than a good retirement.
Prison ships to Australia were originally paid per passenger that boarded in Britain. The death rates were horrible, in the double-digit percentages. When the transport ships were instead paid per passenger that _arrived_ the death rates went down phenomenally.
And someone like you might say: "omg these prison ships gamed the system by saving lives!!!" Yes, that's what we want to happen.
(edit: not sure what the downvote is for, but I want to be clear that I'm not for gaming the rates in this way. I'm merely saying we don't want to incentivize lowering recividism rates at the expense of everything else)
Yep. Thinking that you can just design a good incentive structure and be done with is hopelessly naive.
> IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.
Thinking that you can just hire people that care about the public good is just as naive as thinking that you can just devise the right incentive structure.
I bet if you just paid the felons the same amount they cost to incarcerate, relocated them away from their peer group, and forbid contact, a lot of them wouldn't re-offend, like, ever. It's down to basically a combination of poverty and peer pressure (as in "just when I thought I got out, they pull me back in") most of the time.
This is sort of how exile worked in Russia before the revolution: nonviolent offenders were sent to Siberia and simply lived there. No hard labor or anything, no incarceration per se, but you couldn't leave, and all your correspondence was subject to review and censorship.
What I mean is nobody really cares if prisons buy commercial toilet paper, for example. (As opposed to a hypothetical government toilet paper.) Nobody cares if the military uses the private industry for procurement of computers or whatever. We don't feel the government should be creating its own version of all private industry products.
But when the prison itself is private - and likewise when defense contractors themselves are developing, shopping around, and selling new weapons only to the military, that the military didn't ask for - then suddenly there is a new player in the budgeting process.
Ideally few or no people are committing crimes. If the prisons have excess capacity, free beds - good! But if it's a private prison, how can they fill those beds? Well, by working to imprison more people.
This is the incentive structure that people don't like about private prison.
In the United States it's de facto "illegal" to walk around while being black: there is a high chance you will eventually be jailed on non-existent charges. (And accept a plea bargain, for example, rather than risk a really long term.) I'm a white guy. If I had lived the exact, exact same life, done every single action exactly the same (and this is true of other people reading Hacker News) I likely could have been jailed for no reason at all, just for walking around while being black. That's a fact. I probably would accept the plea bargain I'm offered, too, and resolve to work for change later. What am I going to do? Tell the judge and prosecutor (who often is scored based on how often he gets a conviction/plea) that he and the system are racist? How well will that go over? Will it get me my freedom? Or will it get a vindictive term from the judge. I'd rather just sit in prison for a few months and then avoid the cops better next time, I think I would decide. (Rather than risk a 20 year prison sentence, again, totally innocent of anything. A few months' plea - which my counsel would probably advise I take - is nothing compared to that.)
So why are innocent black people jailed? Well, to fill prison beds, apparently. That is one of the reasons that people don't like private prisons.
We don't want anybody to be "selling" prison, so we don't want prison to be a private enterprise. It's quite straightforward and is something most people understand very easily.
Utter nonsense. Black people are jailed for being black in America because American police are racist and American legislators are racist and American media are racist and American prosecutors are racist and American judges are racist. And then, because of this, black people in America have learnt that police, legislators, media, prosecutors and judges are best avoided.
If private prison operators have an incentive to get more people to serve more time, then they're not going to pick black people because they're just smart business people and black people represent an untapped growth market. If they've actually done anything to encourage oversentencing, they only reason they picked black people is because them and everyone around them are racists.
You we trying to optimise out the 'inefficient' government, by saddling it with much effort designing incentives and making sure they are not abused. You might as well run prisons yourself - publically.
You could get a bonus for not getting "return" prisoners - but it'd have to be better than gaining life sentences (though in general, harder to compete in three strike legislations where you'd be incentivesed to allow prisoners to commit crimes in order to trigger three strikes).
Perhaps there's a way to pay for recovery - but if your business depends on there being prisoners, it's hard to see how you could motivate anything but an increase in prisoner population.
Certainly an end to prisoners would mean bankruptcy?
[ed: you might have a goal of lowering crime, and by extention prisoner population. A private prison, paid to house prisoners, would be commercially committed to the opposite; increasing the prison population.]
Further, this hypothetical system is ripe for exploitation. Aside from the potential exploits others have raised, have you considered the parallels to other industries such as defense contractors? Your idea creates an incentive and profit motive for crime. It’s the type of thinking that could literally result in corporations creating artificial mass shooters in pursuit of all the easy money that could be made. Sorry, but I think this is an extremely bad take and I actually worry about a dystopian future where this takes place. Pull on this thread at your own peril.
More info: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/visitation/
Another example: getting rid of donated books and libraries in favor of paid tablets that also restrict the books you can buy, both for political and monetary reasons.
I just didn't think I needed to provide an exacting list of thing that will probably always involve a vendor. For example though unless the state gets into growing and preparing all the food from scratch there'll always be a food vendor in place, maybe just a normal food services company but it'll always be bought from someone, similarly for clothes and furniture.
I do think you're minimizing the issue in the way you talk about it, but the line about you not being aware of problems wasn't justified in the slightest and was just rude.
Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?
So, yes, some people believe private-prisons are a useful tool to deal with over-crowding in state facilities and that the likely alternative is further reduced-sentence releases.
There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better.
So while there are definitely people who want these prisoners freed immediately, and even people who want prisons abolished altogether, getting the profit motive out of prisons would be a significant win regardless.
The same criticism can be applied towards forced prison labour, and yet, it is explicitly permitted by the thirteenth amendment. (And is commonly used in state prisons.)
Just because a profit incentive falls in the hands of the state's coffers, as opposed to some corporation, does not mean the incentive is not perverse.
If you ask me, we need substantially more drug enforcement. There are severe inequalities in how we police for drugs that often result in only the poor and marginalized locked up. We need to refocus our drug war on the rich and powerful and put them in jail to, to make things more equal.
Drug dealer Y kills someone to protect territory - This is violent.
If X was willing to buy drugs from anyone, and/or if X would prefer to buy from a legal seller but none is available, Y is not the cause of the violence.
Also, you can get locked up for smoking weed that you grew yourself and had no intention of selling. What of that?
> if X would prefer to buy from a legal seller but none is available
If I want to buy a nuke, but one is not available from a legal seller, does that mean I am not responsible for paying an unscrupulous seller to furnish that for me?
> Also, you can get locked up for smoking weed that you grew yourself and had no intention of selling. What of that?
Where did you get the weed plant? Last time I checked, weed doesn't magically sprout in your hydroponic set up (and I'd know).
Oops, was that not the answer you were trying to bait?
An excellent argument for decriminalizing them.
> All drug offenses are violent. Illegal...
First you say "all", then "illegal". Which is it?
> An excellent argument for decriminalizing them.
Indeed, but that doesn't automatically exculpate those who have -- during prohibition -- directly caused violence by their money. In my opinion, they should all be in jail for murder. For life.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_Massacre
They certainly caused violence with their money much more directly than modern drug users.
I watched a really great lecture online that was about how everything that rich countries criminalize (primarily prostitution and drugs) ends up becoming powerful industries in poorer countries because the demand from rich countries persists and creates a price floor higher than normal economically productive work in those poor countries. If rich people want something and it's banned in their country, it becomes an extremely profitable endeavor in poorer nations to meet this demand. Because profit margins are greater than normal economic activity, this enables criminal to gain political power within those countries. The speaker had a name for this idea which I can't remember, something like "hedonic exportation" - if anyone knows what I'm talking about I've been looking for this lecture for a few years.
The rising violence rate due to the marijuana trade in California (and other states) does not agree with your made up reasoning. Although, in principle, I agree that your reasoning ought to make sense. Unfortunately, my principles and empiricism are often at odds, so it's best to side with the latter.
It actually does, because federal prohibition has not been lifted (even though there is non-assured enforcement forebearance).
The fact that anyone in a significant ownership, leadership, or management position in any business in the industry is technically guilty of a federal felony with a 20-year minimum sentence (and, just by being sufficiently successful, that can bumped up to a life-without-parole minimum) [0] has a fairly substantial impact on the willingness of otherwise legitimate businesses and businesspeople to participate in the industry and thus on what kind of business people do participate, even when the feds aren't actually prosecuting at the moment.
[0] the “drug kingpin” (formally, Continuing Criminal Enterprise) statute and it's later-added “super kingpin” provision.
Right, except for the critical fact that there are no legal marijuana businesses, that is certainly an important effect of the continued federal prohibition.
Not only would you want more prisoners, but you will also be interested in keeping them as long as possible (i.e. no parole) and pushing recidivism incidents to its maximum.
> instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii
Of course, no one could have rationally believed that these people -- considered to be lawbreakers -- would just get FREED automatically. That would be an idiotic assumption. And yet, the article is worded as if there actually were people who believed it.
But we also have other side of the equation - politicians willing to expand definition of "crime" to placate people's fears and emotions combined with prosecutors willing to throw the book to make and example and build a career on it, all while not appropriately funding the prisons.
California's real problem is MASSIVE prison population, where you have to BECOME a RACIST to survive the prison gangs. Prison overcrowd is a feature of CA prison system.
I wish they ordered their priorities right and built enough prisons to house the population safely.
This is one single step in a series of steps to get anywhere positive. Knowing their Governor and his political expedient past, I am skeptical.
One alternative would be to reduce sentences for those crimes, but good luck getting the public to vote for any politician who would propose such a thing.
See https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html for some interesting stats on US prisons.
There's no reason to have over half a percentage of point of the entire population in prison. Almost no other country in the world does this.
Capping incarceration rates not only prevents prison overcrowding, but is a forcing function for policy changes that actually lower crime, as well as alternative sentencing options for non-violent crime (which almost always have better outcomes.)
And well established as a thing that happens at all times in California, but the real major culprit of that type is the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, not the private prison industry.
> California's real problem is MASSIVE prison population
It's been declining for nearly a decade, and despite California being the largest-population state, it's got a smaller prison population than Texas. But, yes, the prison population is too high.
> Prison overcrowd is a feature of CA prison system.
This is true, though that has also been reduced as prison population has.
> I wish they ordered their priorities right and built enough prisons to house the population safely.
Better would be to reduce the prison population to the level that can be safely housed in the existing facilities. California's problem is too many prisoners, not too few prisons.
No. The goal of wiping out the private prisons is simply that profit motive in the justice system is always an inherent conflict of interest.
The fact that ICE is getting smashed is just a side benefit.
Adelanto is almost 2,000 people and is the second biggest detention center for ICE. Who knows, ICE may indeed free these prisoners rather than spend the money to transport them to facilities that can't house them anyway. Wouldn't that be a nice benefit?
It seems to me that whether public or private, prisons should have good, independent oversight. Pretending that the "profit motive" is the biggest issue overlooks the horrific abuses committed by guards in California's public prisons.
http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/the_undue_influen...
And IMHO is bizarrely inconsistent outrage.
Want to make a profit from supplying prisons? Activists see no problem with that!
Want to make a profit from hiring felons, who are cheaper due to having limited options? Activists give you the thumbs up!
Want to make a profit for your private corporation from building a public prison? AOK!
But run it for profit? No matter how much oversight or regulation is applied, it's somehow inherently evil.
It feels like a distraction.
* as in that's the political position I hold, I wasn't involved in any way with this initiative or attempting to take credit or provide insider perspective on it.
Reform is a step by step process, getting people used to the idea of thinking of rehabilitation and reintegration instead of the gut instinct to punish takes a lot of time and in the mean time address the worst abuses of the system. In the mean time make sure you're not setting up systems that will fight for their own survival and demand (in some cases by contractual obligations for the state to fill X number of best!) to be fed.
Hiring a felon should not be regarded as evil, either; just the opposite.
I don't see how it's bad faith to assume activists don't advocate full abolition of markets. If you want to take the position that all profit is evil (or at least is evil if it ever touches any part of the prison system), that just makes your position harder to defend.
Edit: Also, can I introduce you to this poster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20955714
The contracts for these four prisons expire in 2023 and cannot be renewed under AB32, except to comply with a federal court order to reduce crowding in state-run facilities.
That court order is still in effect and doesn't seem likely to go away any time soon. So... the contracts can be renewed? It's not clear to me if this law is going to make a difference.
Hmm, something tells me these will end up being renewed considering getting budget approval and completing construction in 3 years is basically impossible so unless Californa has some prisons with spare space or in-progress new construction. OR, even better, reduces it's prison population... we may still have some private prisons for a while.
Still fantastic news.
spoiler: no private prisons in Germany
Part of the problem is the division into trade unions, in which different economic sectors have their own unions and can then be rolled over or pandered to as is convenient for business or state interests. Syndicalism is an idea of people in different businesses and employment sectors to combine their labor power more efficiently by avoiding the fragmentation problem.
There is no “and”, just “California Correctional Peace Officers Association” (and, as the absence of the “and” suggests, it is just prison guards, and not other law enforcement.)
So far as I can tell, the point of the article is that this is another salvo in the war between California and the federal government in terms of who gets to run immigration law, not some sort of newfound distaste for private prisons.
Curious that all the posts are about private vs. public prisons. I did poke around a bit and the private prisons don't appear to be cheaper, and it's rather surprising that they even exist given the amount of power public unions have.
Perhaps someone in the biz could pipe up, just what is the point of a private prison? All that occurs to me is the opportunity to ramp up a facility quickly or perhaps just the need for a law enforcement organization to park people when they don't want to be in that business. Dunno.
The problem is pro-punishment politicians. Singling out any particular office/position misses the point.
Even when judges practice discretion, pro-punishment legislators step in and introduce mandatory minimums.
And even when prosecutors practice discretion, pro-punishment judges will step in and force them to prosecute cases that the prosecutors don't want to prosecute [1].
[1] See Suffolk County for a recent example
And in many places prosecutors are politicians in a sense, because they are elected. One recommendation is to go back to appointing prosecutors rather than electing them.
So no, singling out prosecutors doesn't miss the point. It is an important point.
The problem with focusing on any particular role is that the other parts of the system will step in to force punishment.
While I agree that the vast majority (if not all) of private prisons, and those who participated in profiting from them, are ugly spots on the progress of modern humanity, I'm weary about an overall ban on the concept altogether.
Rather than creating rules against an evil business model or incentives to promote a beneficial one, this "unabashedly California" move cuts off any hope of someone with an ounce of morality to disrupt and ideally create a prison system that truly aims to reform inmates.
None are invulnerable to legislative reform. However, _private_ ones are closer to it, since they're, well, private.
> No worse
If you mean they're both terrible, exploitative, have guard violence, don't provide reasonable facilities, don't provide opportunities for personal development and education, and underfunded - maybe you're right. (although frankly I doubt it.)
Mass incarceration in general is a perverse US government sport / poor people population management/behavior shaping mechanism, anyway.
Along those lines, what's the plan for dealing with the inmates from other prisons that this legislation will make ineligible?
For example, there's a private correctional center in California City:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_City_Correctional_C...
I've reached out to Austen..
Really good move. Bravo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjqaNQ018zU&t=2s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gJtYRxH5G2k
Public prisons though are not necessarily good.
I remember when a good friend was forcibly sterilized without consent by California state official directed medical staff. Eugenics and genocide has been a fundamental part of the Golden State's agenda for over a century.
I've also understood why police hiding behind bridges was considered acceptable.
Or how the hell a debate about waterboarding could ever happen when it's clearly immoral.
At some point in my life I just decided we suck shit as a society and move on.
Instead of sporadically throughout the year
California being the 5th largest world economy and relevance to the silicon valley population simply becomes of interest on this site
Other states arent just twiddling their thumbs but it is interesting what California legislature is passing
This is the key. With Gov Brown, he still had a modicum of temperance that they couldn't override. Now the legislature has carte blanche to do whatever they want, because regardless of the governor, they can override his veto.
No, it's not.
> With Gov Brown, he still had a modicum of temperance
That's a difference between Brown and Newsome, yes.
> that they couldn't override.
There was a Democratic supermajority for a session under Brown, too, but (both now and then) the Democrats in the legislature aren't marching in lockstep on the rare issues where there is a majority in conflict with the Democratic governor, so while the supermajority is significant, it's more because (1) it means swinging a few votes isn't enough to deny a majority, and (2) some legislation requires a supermajority even without a veto, not because of he possibility for veto overrides of a same-party governor.
> I'm so happy about this. Private health care insure are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum health care coverage in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as clients). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent on research and education. Next up should be criminalizing charging huge quantities for basic health care by private hospitals and the usurious fees on drugs.
I'd wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.
I grew up in socialized medicine, and you get sick, you go to the hospital, they treat you and you leave. There's no step 4. Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems is beyond me. It's all in y'alls control.
They've been told socialized medicine is evil communist plot to steal their hard earned money. Many Americans have not been outside of the states and have no concept of what life in other countries might be like. There's a good percentage of Americans that are completely ignorant of how the rest of the world does things, and also dismiss this as inferior. They've been told their entire life that the US is the greatest country, so, why would we do it any other way?
One guy I knew went to the doctor complaining about blood in his poop. Was prescribed pepto bismal. Went back a few months later. Same thing. Went back a few months later, same thing. This pattern repeated for a little bit over a year. Eventually, he got a colonoscopy. Stage 4 colon cancer. He passed away a few months later.
A friend of mine went to the doctor with a fucked up ankle. Swollen to the size of a grapefruit. They wrapped it and gave him 800mg Motrin. Week later, same thing. Repeat x4. During the last trip, the doctor was giving him the scrip for another bottle of Motrin, when another (higher ranked) doctor recognized him and ordered the junior doctor to do an x ray. The junior doctor protested but did it anyway because it's the military. Fractured ankle. By this point it was mostly healed, so too late to put a cast on it. Fortunately it hadn't healed wrong, so it didn't need to be rebroken.
Vet communities are full of stories like this. And veterans, people who have had government healthcare for years to decades, are the population group most opposed to government run healthcare.
This doesn't necessarily mean government run healthcare is bad; the military is disfunctional in many ways. But your assertion that opposition to government run healthcare is based in ignorance is absolutely, completely false.
Socialized medicine is in no way equivalent to the VA system or the issues of the DoD and VA. So if you're using that as an example to disprove ignorance, to me that just proves how ignorant people are. Pointing to the VA as an argument against universal socialized medicine is such an absurd take that I'm not sure how to respond.
If anything, your comment proves my point. Americans are completely ignorant on the basics of the topic to the point where they compare a poorly designed military system as some kind of argument against socialized medicine. The incentives of the VA are so radically different from any national healthcare system. I appreciate the debate.
The fact that it's poorly run is actually the point. Few Americans want to replace their experience at the doctor's office with the experience from the government run Post Office or DMV. The point is that many Americans have relatively little faith in the government to design a good system, and association with government run systems correlates strongly with lack of faith in the government to operate smoothly.
Note that my position, not that it really ought to matter, is as a proponent of universal basic income. Cut everybody in the country a check for $1500 a month, keep the ACA requirements that everyone buys health insurance and that insurance companies can't reject coverage on preexisting conditions, and let the market solve the problem. The problem is that healthcare is too expensive, not that it's bad. The government, for everything it sucks at, is really good at sending a check every month.
They are in the technical sense that the US govt "runs it". They are not socialized medicine as every Western country has implemented. They hardly have the scale, participation or political pull.
> I define government run healthcare as healthcare that is run by the government.
This is a bit naive, because the VA and DoD have a strong vested interests in short term solutions to keep soldiers going and back on the field. Also, many of the VA's problems stem from the fact that only a small % of Americans actually use the VA and care about its performance. So politically, it's hardly something that anyone focuses on, despite many promises to the contrary.
> experience from the government run Post Office
The post office is actually really efficient and is an example of a very well run government service. They're on par with any private company, easily, in both price and service. If anything, cuts to the post office have hurt it more than any operational problems or mismanagement.
> The point is that many Americans have relatively little faith in the government to design a good system
This is because many Americans actively vote against their best interest and elect politicians whose sole purpose is to hamstring the government from doing anything effectively. It's the classic conservative self fulfilling prophecy: cripple the government, point to the fact that the "government doesn't work", then privatize and reap the rewards. It's just a political game to make rich voters richer.
Or you can choose to be unhealthy. Smoking, drinking, drugs, poor diet, lack of exercise. These are by far the biggest contributors to healthcare cost and they cost absolutely nothing to prevent. Many people just don't take responsibility for their health, and many others in the US don't like the idea of subsidizing other people's healthcare for preventable or self-inflicted health complications.
edit: I actually do have access to one of the best single payer systems in the world due to dual citizenship. Single-payer is far from the perfect silver bullet everyone likes to sell it as.
How is that working out? Does the average American eat healthier, do more exercise, consumer fewer drinks, or do fewer drugs?
It's also a downward spiral. The more people are responsible for their own well being, the more they're opposed to "handouts". So those who do take of themselves and do responsibly manage risks I've noticed are the ones more opposed to socialized medicine.
Who cares really?
It costs a bit more to care for people in dollars and cents, but it fosters a better society, which everyone benefits from.
Another case of people wanting to be freeriders.
Why "educated" people in this country still keep voting in the same crooks (dems & reps) is beyond me.
This election cycle is going to be the same thing - this crook or that crook. Pick one that will do less damage. There is no difference anymore. This two party system BS has to go.
This system throws caring-but-unlucky people under the bus.
And even people who really care about their health still have to endure this absolutely bizarre implementation (how can you have an efficient market where prices are secrets or fiction?)
The United States is not a free market healthcare system - it's literally the worst parts of both capitalist and socialized systems with none of the benefits of either.
Also: I am Canadian, I spent nearly 50% of my earned income last year on just taxes. I also live in the most expensive city in the country. 90% of my medical expenses I've had in the past 10 years came from private practices that I paid out of pocket with a smidgen of private insurance that cushioned the blow a bit. The Canadian system is nowhere near as great as ignorant Americans like to believe.
I appreciate the value of debate, but i ask that you please do your homework before you start citing the evidence
Can you describe some aspect of US healthcare that you think is good?
A thing that sucks in both systems can not legitimately be used to argue against only one of them.
So, how about all of the not-California parts of the US that have the same kinds of problems (which is, last I checked, more or less "all of them")?
Because, the thing is, only one of my examples was, you know, from California.
... and had no PT within the county with a <10 week wait time.
I guess we're close to Canada though, so maybe it's contagious?
https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wa...
Take 1000 men over 50 and give them PSA screening for prostate cancer for about 11 years.
Take 1000 different men over 50 and don't give them PSA screening for prostate cancer for about 11 years.
For the group without screening about 7 die from prostate cancer. But for the group who do have screening we see the same number of deaths. The screening hasn't prevented deaths from prostate cancer.
The group without screening didn't have any false alarms and didn't have any needless biopsies. 160 men in the group with screening had false alarms and unnecessary biopsies. 20 men in the screening group had treatment (which can include incontinence and impotence) for non-progressive prostate cancer.
https://www.harding-center.mpg.de/en/fact-boxes/early-detect...
Over-testing leads to over-diagnosis which leads to over treatment, and harm is caused at each step.
Margaret McCartney or Gerd Giggerenzer talk about this.
So sure, the amount of patients is pretty much guaranteed to be higher once they can afford the care. If you optimise only for wait times, then the obvious solution is to have no doctors and 0 wait time.
Do you think this doesn't happen in the US?
If you're about to say "but in the US we can pay for healthcare", well that's true everywhere. Anyone with enough money can pay for healthcare.
Yes, like I said, anybody who can afford it can travel to get healthcare elsewhere.
Travelling from US to UK and paying 150% of the English tariff price for health care turns out to often be cheaper than getting care in the US, even if you include the travel costs.
Whether or no wait time varies greatly, the overall quality of care can be assessed in terms of patient outcomes life expectancy which are generally very similar while spending significantly less money. In fact many countries with socialized healthcare actually surpass the US on some factors like infant mortality, in part because the US has a higher poverty rate and those in poverty have less access to healthcare.
I've had a relative with a treatable condition wait so long for a surgery that her condition worsened and it couldn't be fixed and now she is permanently physically disabled.
Private hospitals and health insurance are still allowed. Here in Canada, every public hospital still has a billing department for the uninsured & those with private insurance (foreigners, etc.) (I wonder if you can opt to pay to "skip the queue" here?)
I once worked in the US and in Canada (Connecticut) in the same year.
My tax rate was lower in Canada for the same salary.
For comparison in my income bracket:
Ontario income tax rate: 12.16% Canada federal tax rate: 26% Employment Insurance and Social Security are deducted seperately and made up the rest of my deductions.
Connecticut state income tax rate: 5.50% US federal tax: 22%
Unless social security rates are worse than Canada, I don't see how your situation is possible.
However due to a minimum below which no taxes are paid and other features, the effective rax rate for a $35k salary is ~15%. For a $90k salary it’s about 32%. A median salary is about $70k.
This is excluding pension (the employer pays that on top to a pension fund).
Public services are pretty good and not expensive for me, they are even cheaper for people in lower income levels. (Putting a kid in kindergarten is about $100-200/month for example)
If you take everything into account, I suspect it’s the US system is a much worse deal for everyone except the top 5-10%.
While the US by some measurements has a lower overall tax rate than other developed countries [1], the difference between us and, say, Canada, who enjoy high quality socialized health care, is far from "exorbitant".
There's a very reasonable argument for considering all of the consequences of our systematically broken health care system as a "tax" -- it amounts to a massive financial and quality-of-life burden for most Americans.
Health care in the United States is more expensive than in other developed countries for identical procedures [2]. Medical costs are the worst kind of lottery, where an overnight visit for tonsillitis can get you a nice little $100,000 bill [8]. Do you not consider that a tax? Why not?
Medical bills account for 60% of bankruptcies in the US [3]. High medical costs are literally causing people to commit suicide [4] or to die of entirely preventable causes [5] while others just forego care entirely [9]. For those people who do jump through the hoops to get private medical insurance, there are entire bureaucracies dedicated to denying claims [6]. There are so many perverse incentives involved that some doctors are taking it into their own hands to try to lower medication costs, and pharmaceutical companies are responding by tripling the costs of the medication [7].
Meanwhile tons and tons of Americans stay in jobs they don't like just to maintain their employer-sponsored health insurance [10], strangling their wages and preventing positions from being opened up to more enthusiastic employees.
These things are all taxes. They are taxes on American society, impacting all of us. Anybody that's opposed to socialized health care "because muh taxes" is defending this system, this embarrassing, broken, corrupt system that endangers and kills countless people every year and acts as a massive multi-faceted anchor on our economy.
[1]: https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/how-do-us-taxe...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/03/15/why-a...
[3]: http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/06/05/bankruptcy.medical.bill...
[4]: https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/co21rt/elderly_couple... -- linking to Reddit here because there are a lot of comments there worth reading.
[5]: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/shane-patrick-boyle-died-a...
[6]: https://splinternews.com/a-glimpse-into-the-bureaucratic-hel...
[7]: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/04/doctors-tried-to-low...
[8]: https://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/ngngy/merry_fucking_ch...
[9]: https://www.fool.com/investing/2017/06/09/sick-of-high-healt...
[10]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/13/fear-o...
https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2911271-america-and-am...
If you have good health insurance, the healthcare in the US is absolutely top tier.
Many people that complain are getting a plan with a huge deductible either because they are being cheap or can't afford better. But I think in a lot of cases it's the former. People just don't prioritize health care. Many would rather trade in their 2 year old car for a brand new one.
But while the exact rationale doesn't hold, there are inherent problems on competition and freedom of choice on health care that kinda break capitalism. There is also the rationale that one does want minimum health care coverage in a society, and a market is not able to provide that.
Instead I went to a Walgreens, bought a pin, a lighter, some ethanol, and a band-aid for like $5, and did it myself...
Dental isn't really indicative of "how expensive health care is" though. Lots of U.S. dental and vision "insurance" plans are really just mandatory subscription plans since their bills are pretty consistent, and anything that might cost more gets you a referral to a hospital.
It's when you visit a hospital (voluntarily or via emergency ambulance) that you'll start getting the $1,000 - $100,000 bills that'll kill ya.
I live in a very expensive California city and it's about $160 for a cleaning with x-rays. And it's not a discount dental shop.
As a kid I had a 2 day hospital stay for an appendectomy that cost about $1000.
An appendectomy now runs around $100,000. An airlift to the emergency room will also cost around $75,000.
This is a common childhood ailment and is not related to living the so-called sinful lifestyle that people like to bring up as justification for high medical costs.
I'm in good health so I don't have much personal data - dentistry is about the only fully privatized healthcare I access.
My wife and I needed prophylactic rabies vaccinations after a bit of an adventure involving a bat in a guest house. Had that happened when we didn't have health insurance it would have cost $38,000 out-of-pocket. Blood-based medicines are expensive everywhere in the world, but I personally think it's completely immoral that we would even entertain a system which would completely sink someone financially over something like that.
You also pay $40 for a $100 teeth cleaning, so you're on the Bronze plan that has a 60% coverage and 40% copay. That's the most common plan.
You mention bankruptcy due to cancer. That is true. If you undergo cancer treatment the billed costs can run over $1 million. And you'll have that 40% bronze plan copay. This bankrupts everyone. Those not bankrupted had plans with 10 or 20% copays because they were of the elite class.
Some consider this affordable and reasonable. I don't, and I think you agree.
You mention your rabies vaccine costing $38,000 in the US and this is true. Did you know the rabies vaccine, without insurance, runs around $400 a dose in most of the world? With a 5 shot sequence that comes to about $2,000.
This is through insurance. Cash payment is negotiable and possibly much less, but that’s negotiated case per case.
It's far worse than treatment with leeches. Far far far worse. It's inhumane, oncologist merchants of death are aware they are causing suffering for their own financial gain, and most oncologists have committed severe crimes against humanity by simply practicing their vocation. Oncology for the most part is on par with being a Nazi SS soldier torturing and killing people, only much worse. It's a sadistic enterprise of pseudoscience which harms innocent people for profit. Those that promote it are vile evil people who should be permanently locked away from decent human beings.
It's about the same for me in the US, where we also don't have insurance for dentistry in general.
Getting a couple stitches on a Sunday on the other hand last ran me a bit over $7500.
$7500 seems well out of whack. What kind of gold were the stitches made of!? Surely it could be done for cheaper than that.
Can somebody explain to a legal immigrant why The Guardian keeps omitting the illegal part over twelve times throughout the article?
Regardless, the statement as written is accurate. How many modifiers are necessary?
By that logic, how do you even know they're immigrants to begin with, then? All it takes is flashing your visa or any documentation proving your status which you are required to carry at all times, just like I am. You were not expecting bartenders to give you a free pass in your teenage because you left your ID at home, did you?
>Regardless, the statement as written is accurate
Accuracy by omission is deceit, not journalism.
>How many modifiers are necessary?
One: illegal immigrant. Now I re-iterate my question: why is it so hard for The Guardian to use the correct terminology?
ICE actually has detained citizens in the past - https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/07/23/francisco-e...
I'm a citizen and I don't usually have my passport on me. If someone asked me to show that I was a citizen, I would have no way to prove it to them.
> Immigrant detainees
> immigration detention facilities
> undocumented immigrants
> immigrant rights advocates
> immigration attorney
Which of those offends you and needs the illegal part?
A more accurate label would be “arbitrary detention facilities”.
I'd be curious to hear more about these cases as well as their proportion relative to the illegal immigrants detained at these facilities. I'm not aware of lawful residents being detained in such proportions that this would suddenly warrant tipping the terminology on the side of indetermination.
This is an ongoing and growing challenge for our immigration system. In FY 2017, as instability in Central America’s Northern Triangle showed few signs of ending, immigration judges decided over 30,000 asylum cases, a considerable increase over the roughly 22,300 asylum cases decided in FY 2016, and the most [since] FY 2005. (source: https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-u-s-asylum-p...)
20,000 granted asylum to the US in 2016.
70,000 granted asylum to Sweden in 2016.
Can you explain why it's so important that the word be included even if it's detrimental to objective truth?
2) Are you an illegal driver for driving over the speed limit? Illegal usually implies something criminal. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor--no more than 6 months in prison. That is criminal strictly speaking, but within a certain grey area where we very often refrain from branding people as criminals.
I'm not really hung up on the phrase. I understand both sides, which really come down to wanting to emphasize different aspects of the situation to highlight different political priorities.
I'm curious, though, if newspapers have style guides regarding usage of "illegal". If I Google 'site:theguardian.com "illegal immigration"' I find many hits, so perhaps at least for The Guardian it's at the discretion of the particular journalist.
>Illegal usually implies something criminal.
No, illegality does not usually imply something criminal. These are two different concept that have precise definitions in court. Nor does your "usually" carry any weight, for else we should abide by this probabilistic distribution and call them asylum seekers.
[1]: https://www.dhs.gov/topic/immigration-and-customs-enforcemen...
If you find the language games obnoxious, so be it. I wouldn't dispute that sentiment because I can understand it, I just don't openly espouse it because I personally also find it a little obnoxious to be rancorous with people who are clearly just trying to be empathetic.
Its also expressed and used quite a lot in legal documents and written law.
Neither mean to use it as a racist term.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/magazine/prison-abolition...
https://books.google.com/books/about/Golden_Gulag.html?id=zT...
- Private prisons has no incentive of getting rid of its income source the prisoners.
- More emphasis should be put into preventive nature. Ie to stop people from becoming criminals. This most likely involves more instruction on how to raise children.
If analog was to computer program it is cheapest to do things correct at the design phase, once late in the phase the issue hits production it is very expensive to mitigate. Thus we should as society do maximum effort into supporting young children and parents. Once the person has turned into a criminal it is very expensive for society to correct the issue if at all possible.
[0] https://www.criminaljusticeprograms.com/articles/private-pri...