California bans private prisons

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.

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)

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?

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_Enforcement_Officers%27_Bi...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

https://nypost.com/2014/02/23/film-details-teens-struggles-i...

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

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...

Obviously this is not a uniquely US issue another countries are expanding their use.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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...

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?

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).

Then the best strategy would be to make sure that the prisoners die as soon as possible.

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.

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.

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.]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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...)

A more accurate label would be “arbitrary detention facilities”.

Regardless, the statement as written is accurate. How many modifiers are necessary?

> Immigrant detainees

> immigration detention facilities

> undocumented immigrants

> immigrant rights advocates

> immigration attorney

Which of those offends you and needs the illegal part?

Can you explain why it's so important that the word be included even if it's detrimental to objective truth?

Its also expressed and used quite a lot in legal documents and written law.

Neither mean to use it as a racist term.