Private prisons. Profit from misery.
Just shows that some very big crooks are within the law
Just shows that some very big crooks are within the law
If we realigned incentives I think private prisons would make much more sense. For example, what if private prisons were paid a portion of the tax revenue their released prisoners produced? e.g. Inmate X is released, stays out of prison, gets a good job and the private prison he graduated from gets an annual payment of, say, half X's tax revenue so long as he stays out of trouble.
In this model private prisons would be places that focused on getting prisoners to rehabilitate, learn in demand skills, get good jobs, and stay out of prisons in the future. Investors stack the prisons with the staff and resources to produce big profits in the future. Provided recidivism does decrease governments will likely make a profit on it. Prisoners will get better lives out of the deal. Seems like there is potential for wins all around.
That is a wonderful idea! However... what is the typical tax amount a, say, mc donald's cachier is expected to pay? The number might be just to low...
https://bizfluent.com/info-7890463-tax-rates-minimum-wage.ht...
(apparently, around 2000 US per year...)
also, an inmate seems to cost around 33k a year to keep imprisoned
Of course the system would require calibration. We can't have the private prisons killing off inmates they expect would be problematic or low earners. This is just a basic concept not a detailed plan.
My point is that I don't think there's anything wrong with private prisons. We just need to make sure we have the right incentives and regulations.
Do you see how this might not be received well? You admit to not being an expert and not basing your opinion on evidence, and then jump in with supporting something anyway. A quick google search picks up a bunch of results suggesting that private prisons are in fact meaningfully worse.
Speaking of quick Google searches though, lets do one. My top three results are:
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/how-...
>But private prisons have turned out to be neither better nor cheaper. They have about the same recidivism rates as their government-run counterparts — nearly 40 percent. And the Government Accountability Office has concluded time and again that there is simply no evidence that private prisons are more cost-effective than public prisons.
Which I sum up as: recidivism is similar between public and private prisons.
https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/recidivi...
>Results of multivariate statistical analyses indicated no significant differences in recidivism rates were discovered for adult males and youthful male offenders released from private versus public prisons, which is consistent with previous research on Florida offenders
I take that as meaning recidivism is similar.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2017/may/5/report-says-...
>Several studies have found that incarceration in private prisons increases the risk of recidivism by almost 20 percent. [See: PLN, Feb. 2014, p.14; Dec. 2009, p.11]. Other research has determined that violence in private prisons is significantly higher than in government-run facilities, often due to understaffing. Lower numbers of staff in private facilities, of course, increases the profit margin for private prison operators.
I take that as comparisons are complicated by confounding factors (e.g. private prisons more likely to be in areas where visitation is difficult and visitation is a predictor of violence in prison which is a predictor of recidivism). In part because of the confounding factors it is hard to exactly say and studies show different things as regards recidivism.
I hope you can see why your comment might not be received well. You make it seem like there is some consensus on a matter that is actually debated. Further, you conflate the current reality, where private prisons have misaligned incentives, with what I'm proposing, which is aligning their incentives with society. If private prisons now were substantially worse than public prisons, and I haven't seen any evidence to that point, then that would be an argument in favor of aligning their incentives, not against it.
The pattern of our conversation is: I have an idea which I share as a casual comment on a forum. You have a vague reference to "experts" who resoundingly disagree with my idea. Only, you can't cite those experts and when I follow your recommended google search I discover that the experts do no such thing.
Here is the ACLU saying to get rid of them [1]. Plenty of other groups agree [2][3][4]. They clearly wouldn't want that unless they felt private prisons were worse than publicly run ones, a direct contradiction of your original claim.
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration... [2]: https://www.justiceeducationproject.org/post/opinion-why-pri... [3]: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso... [4]: http://wesleyanargus.com/2018/02/02/the-problem-with-private...
When I use sources I excerpt the source and explain what I think it means. You do not do this but instead drop a few related opinion pieces and leave figuring out how they are supposed to relate to the topic at hand to me. Problem is, I don't think these are especially relevant to what we are discussing.
As I wrote before comparing recidivism, and even cost, between private and public prisons is difficult because private prisons tend to house different populations of prisoners and tend to be located in different locales. When scholars to try to control for variables they find mixed results ranging from private prisons decrease recidivism to have no effect to increase recidivism. The balance, from my short investigation, seems to suggest "No effect".
Nothing in what you've linked refutes that or gives me any reason to reconsider. Nothing in what you've linked or what you've written makes the case that private prisons are inherently bad either.
I do not understand what point you are attempting to make. I have shared my opinion on private prisons - that we need to align their incentives with society and prisoners. You have said I shouldn't share my opinion because it disagrees with experts - but you don't link to any such experts and there doesn't seem to be any expert consensus on the topic.
One more contrast between you and I in this thread - when I am offering an opinion based on my own thinking I provide an explicit caveat to that effect. You, on the other hand, misleadingly bolster your pronouncements by suggesting that they are the informed consensus of experts and "people who've thought about this for a long time."
I think this is the core of the disagreement, and why we're talking past each other...
Your argument (let me know if I'm stating it correctly): on the objective metrics of cost, recidivism, and so forth there is no compelling statistical difference between public and private prisons. Therefore there's no grounds to rule out either. Since different incentives can change behavior, better laws could result in private prisons optimizing for these metrics and we'd have better outcomes.
My argument (evidently not clear from previous posts): Prisoners shouldn't be treated cruelly regardless of whether that improves or worsens some objective metric. Example: it isn't morally OK to serve prisoners rotten food, even if that makes them less likely to come back. An academic or government agency who is disinterested in the welfare of prisoners is the least qualified to study how prisons should be run, while those with a track record of promoting human rights and humane treatment for prisoners have the most credibility on how to make things better.
Edit: I'd also add just how catastrophically bad it is that private prisons do lobbying. Their fundamental incentive is the exact opposite of the rest of society: to have the highest number of criminals possible.
My point is that the incentives of private prisons are misaligned with society. As I wrote earlier, they would view recidivism as repeat customers. I then suggested a concept to realign private prisons with society and prisoners.
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with private prisons. The problem is that they are misaligned, not that they exist - as I see it. To approach the problem a different way - public prisons don't have a good incentive structure either and they produce some pretty poor results. In fact, it is our public criminal justice system that is currently hiring misaligned private prisons in addition to running their own poorly performing prisons.
I have lived through some of these cycles, of trying to adjust incentives so markets can deliver goods/services in a sensible way when the naturally occurring incentives are skewed in all the wrong ways.
In imprisoning people the incentives are all wrong to involve the private sector. The public sector too faces bad incentives. It is a catastrophe AFAICT both in the USA, here in Aotearoa, and in our neighbouring state Australia. These are the cases I know something about.
We can only fix it one bite at a time, and keeping the private sector out of the mix - with their millions in lobbying power, is one such bite. Here we have mostly succeeded. Where the private sector has gotten in the lives of prisoners have gotten worse.
Remember: Every prisoner will be released (here - maybe not there) and they will be your neighbour. How do you want to treat them when you have them in your power? So you think cruel treatment will increase, or decrease, the chances of bad actions when they are living next to you?
Sure it does. We can only discuss solutions if we’re willing to accurately describe ALL of the causes of the problem.
The article we’re discussing is entirely about how the “contraband” claim appears to be a flimsy excuse that both doesn’t impact the primary source of contraband (the guards), and obviously has nothing whatsoever to do with issues like:
> With e-books, the situation is even worse, as companies like Global Tel Link supply supposedly “free” tablets which actually charge their users by the minute to read. Even public-domain classics, available on Project Gutenberg, are only available at a price under these systems—and prisons, in turn, receive a 5% commission on every charge.
“Books can smuggle contraband” has no explanatory power wrt marked up access to free ebooks. Profit motive does.
It’s you, rather than the person you’re responding to, who seems to be shutting down discussion of solutions by trying to rule discussion of private for-profit prisons making profit-optimal decisions that may be net-worse for society somehow out-of-bounds.
The state(s) is just as complicit in all this crap as the private prisons are.