Design Thinking and Mass Incarceration
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Two sides of the coin: a) conspiracy theory and b) unintended consequences. You use unintended consequences when pretending your ruling class (you know, the ones who literally make the many rules we live under) is just bumbling, perhaps selfish but more or less benevolent overall.
Conspiracy theory typically has the same overall systematic benevolence, except some evil schemers perverted everything.
Imagine a politician stumbling across Wikipedia: "Hmm that's odd, we imprison ourselves way more than anyone else. And somehow, we keep funding all the infrastructure needed for that. Ehh, you learn a random weird thing everyday."
Someone with the least bit of institutional awareness can — hold on to your hats — entertain the thought that the system is running as expected and intended. Just like if any other nation had these results. Not a bug, but a feature.
> prisons have failed to deliver on the promises of rural economic development so often touted.
An illustration of how "unintended consequences" perverts our minds. What strange person writes, "Russia's prisons failed to economically develop rural areas, as so often touted" with a straight face? (Or China, or Iran?) No, some claims are such an insult to intelligence that no one would write them with a straight face. And yet, here it is.
(Such a sentence is so disturbing that I hope I just missed the part where he admitted to satire. It's just intellectual self-defense not to read this article too closely.)
Which re-enforces the "tough on crime" mechanism, the whole system is rigged towards incarcerating people.
Chicago, which features prominently in the news, has over 4x as many murders as London, despite the latter being a much larger city. You're much more likely to be murdered in Chicago than to die in a traffic accident,[1] while the opposite is true in most of the western world.
[1] Interestingly, you're also about 3x more likely to die in a traffic accident in the U.S. than in the U.K.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
So whatever the "majority of the population wants" doesn't count, period.
Second of all, if you really believe the US isn't ruled by a secret cabal, like so many US Presidents and other important US politicians have warned us about since before Andrew Jackson, I'm sorry to say but it just makes you come across as ahistorical.
I'm not located in US and I don't know what is the mood over there. I assume HN is generally a very selected minority. I also witness Trump's ascent. However I'm deeply happy that America is reflecting upon their judicial system. As many articles appear, more people become interested and think about solutions. We may be seeing the beginning of a popular trend and if you keep going, you may have a huge impact.
A private enterprise receives 100% of its income from its clients.
No prisoner is paying to be incarcerated.
What you mean to say is that the Government gives taxpayer money to some prisons, and some private persons end up pocketing this taxpayer money.
There is no private business going on in prisons.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/...
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/13/aclu-la...
If a company's sole paying client is the government (i.e. the public at large through government coercion) then that isn't a private company.
A private company is one where if all the potential voluntary clients give up on, it goes under.
Is a spy a (foreign) private company since it also sells its services to the government? Is a saboteur a private company? Is a privateer?
This service (keeping prisoners) only exists for one type of client, clients that have a monopoly on force, also known as governments. A private business may indeed sell solely to the government, but it can only be private if the service it offers exists for more than that one type of client. Failing that, such "company" is a Government Agency, whether the government admits and/or makes it official or not.
In days of yore the UK would also call privateers private. Do you see the pattern of governments trying to distance themselves from the evil they're doing by labeling unofficial government agencies "private companies"?
This is not about a person's preference for calling things a certain way. In a proper discussion we have to settle the meaning of words and phrases. And the phrase "private company" in no way encompass the work of government agencies whose product could not be sold to the general public directly.
Sorry DennisP, you're just wrong. "Call it what you want" is not an argument, much less a counter-argument to my arguments. You could have taken the normal route and just said "you're right", but instead you're choosing to keep pushing the "call it whatever" non-argument button. Be a good loser and admit you're wrong, or refute my arguments.
I can also tell you went through all my recent past comments and voted them all down, as I went from 0 to -10 immediately after our interaction. Very childish of you, but not surprising.
How do you hope to solve problems and disagreements if you're not willing to abide by the code of conduct that those who argue seeking to learn follow?
If you believe what Socialist Bernie Sanders thinks is "private" then you'll believe anything.
My point was just that there are two ways we run prisons and Sanders proposed shutting down one of them, for various good reasons mentioned in my links. Many people call that type "private," including major news organizations. I actually agree with you that it may not be the best term, but it's the only one I've seen in common use. The basic facts are the same regardless of nomenclature.
To be fair, this is just as much of a problem with government-run prisons as it is with private ones.