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Comment by stronglikedan | Hacker News Reader

> This guy apparently got 10 years for hacking; in much of Europe, you'd get less than that for murder.

Both of those things are problematic, IMHO.

As for US sentences being absurdly long, I attribute that to the privatized (profit-incentivized) prison system here. Abolishing that concept would be a good starting point, I think, because it would eliminate a very large chunk of the humanitarian problems in one fell swoop. Then we can work on the rest, starting with the perverse incentives of the legal system itself.

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Only like 10% of the prisons in America are private, no?

Yes, but even state and federally owned prisons use an army of specialized contractors for much of their staffing and supplies. Since many of those companies were established specifically to service prisons it creates the same incentives to spend large amount of money lobbying for harsher sentences and other policies that grow the prison industry in general. It's not much of a concern for, say, Tyson, which is so big that prisons are a tiny part of their revenue but it's a bigger issue with other services.

The fully privatized prisons are on a whole other level of messed up.

Sentencing is decided by a judge not by a prison warden. Beyond vague conspiracy theories I don’t see the connection.

Conspiracy, yes. Theory, no:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

I don't generally consider myself a conspiracy theorist, but I agree with the previous comment. For-profit prisons not only make money by having more prisoners staying for longer, but in many cases have actually been required to maintain a minimum number of prisoners. That creates a huge incentive to the operators of private prisons to make sure that people are sentenced to terms that are as long as possible, and to make sure that as many people as possible are given sentences that get them into those prisons vs. alternatives like house arrest, community service, court-ordered rehabilitation meeting attendance, etc.

I think it would be pretty naive to assume that private actors can have no influence over an unelected/appointed judiciary anyway, but don't forget that many places in the United States have an elected judiciary that needs to campaign every few years to maintain their status, which clearly opens them up to influence by those prisons.

> have actually been required to maintain a minimum number of prisoners.

All prisons are required to maintain a certain minimum population to justify their operating budget.

At any rate the entire debate of public versus private prisons is laughably flawed because even public prisons are reliant upon commercial service vendors that cater specifically to the prison industry at ludicrously inflated rates to both inmates and tax payers. And both prison types are known to make use of inmates as cheap commercial labor which undervalues the inmates and robs the local economy of manual labor jobs.

>Beyond vague conspiracy theories I don’t see the connection.

It's not vague at all. Private prisons lobby for mandatory minimums. Mandatory minimums remove sentencing power from the judge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandatory_sentencing

The older system you describe is called discretionary sentencing, it is a dissipating vestige of the era before private prisons.

Important correction - the significant political power in the US comes from the prison guards union, not a "private prisons lobby".

The prison guards union is an incredibly powerful lobbying force, which has successfully increased prison sentences for many crimes, blocked efforts to decriminalize marijuana, made more mandatory sentences, etc. Whether those guards work in the 92% of prisons which are government run or the 8% which are privately run makes no difference.

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