U.S. reverses Obama-era move to phase out private prisons
reuters.com
reuters.com
Just like Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex, we should do the same for the prison industrial complex.
1980 to 2000 - which spans over 3/4 of the boom in incarceration - private prisons were a single digit percentage share of the market. US incarceration from 1980 went from about 550,000 to 2.1 million by the end of Clinton's second term. Almost all of that went to government prisons and jails.
Turns out there is vast profit in government prisons. It goes into the pockets of millions of government employees and private contractors that benefit from the huge government prison complex. Those employees and their reps then spend millions of dollars lobbying to build more government prisons for their own benefit, along with lobbying against laws that would reduce incarceration.
Politicians love to build government prisons to employ people in their districts, to lure tax dollars, it has been an easy vote generator for decades for them.
Further, the extreme expansion of the government prison complex the last three decades, has increased the total power and size of government, another thing politicians go wild for.
But now that the demand has created the supply the supply becomes self-protecting and self-perpetrating.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/23/priva...
[1]: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/23/516945294/...
> The Obama administration said in August 2016 it planned a gradual phase-out of private prisons by letting contracts expire or by scaling them back to a level consistent with recent declines in the U.S. prison population.
Yeah, dictators need places to lock up dissidents. Trump's foreseeing incarceration growth.
You mean Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush were foreseeing incarceration growth when their policies helped to put millions into government prisons over decades?
Was Bill Clinton plotting dictatorship when the active US incarceration number went from 1.3 million to 2+ million in just his eight years?
Do me a favor and post the total number of people that have gone into government prisons vs private prisons, since the incarceration boom began 36 years ago.
Here's a hint: nearly the entire incarceration boom was centered around government prisons until the last ten years, a time in which both the US prison and US jail population has declined.
Are you suggesting that if there were less Government run prisons and more private prisons, there'd be less people in Government run prisons? Cause, ah... yeah.
Just look at how my facts based challenge to the private prison hysteria is being downvoted, because nobody wants to discuss this: the government prison complex was and is drastically worse than anything the private prison industry has done, yet where's the protest? Where's the anger and fear about the government prison complex? (which is still radically larger than the private prison industry)
Know who benefited the most from the war on drugs incarceration boom? Millions of government employees, who derived hundreds of billions of dollars in total pay over decades, from the vast expansion of arrests and government incarceration, from 1980 to ~2000.
You're making a huge assumption that people's dislike (or "fear" as you've called it) of private prisons is somehow related to the distribution of prisoners between Government and private prisons. What gives you that impression?
I'm not making any assumptions, I've read dozens of threads on HN about this for example, spanning years. The fear is almost universally directed at private prisons, while the posters strictly ignore that almost all of the people went into government prisons during the incarceration boom.
Where's the fear and hysteria for the government prison complex that has always dwarfed the private prison industry? And prior to the last ten years, dwarfed was extremely understating the situation.
I'm all for cutting the needless cruft off of government and keeping the kernel from getting bloated, so to speak, but prisons and other major roles of society where accountability and direct communication with the people is of utmost importance, this is something that should reside within government. Like the Linux kernel, I think all important functions should stay within direct reach and have direct interoperability.
At the cost of resorting to slippery slope and being light-hearted here, what's next, a McDonald's-sponsored drive-thru DMV? On second thought, DMV could learn a few things from McDonald's there but I'd be very leery of McDonald's handling my important tasks and the direct power of the people would get watered down with every government function relegated to corporations.
I can totally see private prisons doing a better job of identifying normal people incarcerated incorrectly and offer them a better life than getting raped in a gruesome prison.
And in all of the prisons I was in during my length time of incarceration, no one ever was raped. No one wants to become a sex offender while in prison nowadays. DNA evidence... The feds collect _everyone's_ DNA when they go to prison.