Taken to its logical conclusion, private companies are making money hand over fist with private prisons, from the amount taxpayers pay to house inmates, and from modern day slave labor of prison “jobs” making products. Why not ensure you’ve got a recidivist population of that labor by taking away any avenue for someone to escape the cycle.
Truly evil.
It's not just private industry. The .gov is very much in on the racket.
Given that private prisons cost less than state run ones, do you think taxpayers would prefer to pay more for prisons just so that companies running private prison don’t make a profit? Do you apply this logic also to construction projects? I.e. would you prefer to pay, say, twice as much for a bridge to be build by government construction agency, so long as no private construction company makes a profit building it?
If we wanted to reduce costs we could finally end The War on Drugs and reduce the prison population (and the court costs, etc).
But, then again, California is not the best example here, as California cost per prisoner is way, way above national average (despite being below national average 30 years ago). California has pumped its cost per prisoner through the roof, which is then used to justify reduction of prison population, as too expensive. Either way, California is not known to care much for its fiduciary duty to its taxpayers.
In Arizona, private prisons are still cheaper, though the disparity there is only 1.25x, not 3x. Also, state prisons in Arizona are cheaper than private prisons in California. State prisons in California are 5x more expensive than private prisons in Arizona. If California contracted Arizona private prisons and shipped its prisoners there, it could save >$10B annually, more than 5% of its entire budget, which could then be used on schools, infrastructure, and public safety. Of course, this 80% reduction in prison spending will never happen, prisons being expensive is too politically convenient.
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2016/oct/3/apples-fish-...
Yet a 2010 report by Arizona’s Office of the Auditor General, based on data from the state Department of Corrections, noted that privately-operated prisons were actually more expensive than their public counterparts.
https://corrections.az.gov/sites/default/files/REPORTS/Opera...
Highest cost private prison was cheaper than cheapest state run prison.
> Police still make over 1 million drug possession arrests each year, many of which lead to prison sentences. Drug arrests continue to give residents of over-policed communities criminal records, hurting their employment prospects and increasing the likelihood of longer sentences for any future offenses.
> Nevertheless, 4 out of 5 people in prison or jail are locked up for something other than a drug offense — either a more serious offense or an even less serious one. To end mass incarceration, we will have to change how our society and our justice system responds to crimes more serious than drug possession. We must also stop incarcerating people for behaviors that are even more benign.
My interpretation is that releasing drug offenders alone will not reduce the prison population significantly. However—and this is a big however—harsh punishments for drug offenders and crimes related to drug use is a driver of mass incarceration.
It was my understanding that legalizing drugs is more about treating drug addicts humanly and offering treatments over punishments. To offer drug users safe usage sites and other benefits so that they are not forced into commit crimes for acting on their addiction. The legalization is only a part of a much broader policy change which may ultimately reduce criminal behavior in addicts, criminal behavior which includes, but is not limited to, possession.
Your source seems to agree with my understanding:
> For example, the data makes it clear that ending the war on drugs will not alone end mass incarceration, though the federal government and some states have taken an important step by reducing the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses.
> Are state officials and prosecutors willing to rethink not just long sentences for drug offenses, but the reflexive, simplistic policymaking that has served to increase incarceration for violent offenses as well?
TLDR; Your source is very much for legalizing drugs, however it acknowledges that legalization by it self is not sufficient in ending mass incarceration.
This is the point I was trying to convey when I said, “Legalizing drugs would not reduce the prison population as much as you may assume”.
But the primary complaint is actually taxpayer expense, so what you say makes sense.
> the incentives to imprison more people are so perverse that I would anticipate the price would catch up,
But it’s the state that’s imprisoning people, not private prisons. Private prisons cannot catch, prosecute, sentence and institutionalize people at tax payer dime any more than construction companies can build road and bridges on their own initiative while paid by the state. When government contracts bridge construction to a private company, are you also worried that said company will build 10 extra unnecessary bridges and charge government for them?
I do not believe this to be so and it runs counter to what I would logically expect.
At any rate, prison companies do things like write prisoner quotas into contracts, with penalties if the quota is not met, and lobby lawmakers to put more people in prison for committing petty crimes. So really it's nothing like your absurdist scenario.
The only counterexample I can think of is elite private schools, which do cost more than public universities, but I think that it’s safe to assume that Yale provides rather different kind of service than University of Kansas. But, if you think that government-ran enterprises in US are cheaper than for-profit ones, I’m eager to hear some examples.
This pattern is also logically expected: for profit companies are incentivized to keep costs low, while government ones much less so. It’s not like citizen can easily choose to change the government they are signed up with for a cheaper, better run one.
> At any rate, prison companies do things like write prisoner quotas into contracts, with penalties if the quota is not met
Sure, because otherwise they’d never commit to run the prison in the first place. Starting and maintaining prison operation is expensive, so if government does not commit to buying some level of service, you’re risking a lot of money.
Imagine an alternative scheme, where government agrees to buy 1000 prisoner-years worth of capacity, and then is free to send as many prisoners as it wants between 0 and 1000. There is no prisoner quota, prison company is paid exactly the same amount regardless of whether it houses 100 or 1000 inmates. Would that arrangement be more acceptable to you?
Medicare is a blindingly obvious one. Trains. The postal service. Can you actually cite a real example of the private alternative saving money, especially one that didn't involve drastically cutting services?
I also don't think it's "safe to assume" that Yale does much different from the University of Kansas except let you go to school with the kind of people who attend Yale.
> This pattern is also logically expected: for profit companies are incentivized to keep costs low, while government ones much less so. It’s not like citizen can easily choose to change the government they are signed up with for a cheaper, better run one.
No, that is not logically expected, because the entire concept of "profit" is collecting extra money on top of the cost to actually render the service.
> Imagine an alternative scheme, where government agrees to buy 1000 prisoner-years worth of capacity, and then is free to send as many prisoners as it wants between 0 and 1000. There is no prisoner quota, prison company is paid exactly the same amount regardless of whether it houses 100 or 1000 inmates. Would that arrangement be more acceptable to you?
That doesn't really solve the problem; your incentive is still to get there to be so many inmates that there's no choice but to fund a new facility.
In an ideal world, you are more efficient at the service you provide than the general population, and the profit comes largely from that efficiency reducing costs.
(Of course, we don’t live in an ideal world)
I think they'd prefer to pay more for prisons that prioritize reducing recidivism over increasing profits. And that is logic that I apply to construction projects, if it was demonstrated that private construction companies were making a profit by building structures that collapsed more often and killed people, ultimately increasing the costs of infrastructure by forcing us to constantly rebuild failing bridges, then I would have a problem with that.
That being said, the debate of private/public prisons really misses a fundamental point of how prisons work in America: public prisons are also regularly exploitative, and they also funnel resources/money into private companies and personal/pet projects; resources that would be better spent reducing recidivism rates. Even when private companies are not involved, the State itself has found out that it can exploit prisoners for cheap labor, taxes/fees, federal funding, better census data, and just general political ends.
It is inaccurate to frame prison reform as a debate about public vs private prisons, when in reality prison reform is a debate about how even the State prioritizes prisoners as resources over encouraging their rehabilitation. The State often does this to the benefit of private companies and often with permission from a society with regressive and/or uninformed views about the purposes of prison and how our prison system currently functions.
In both cases, public and private, reducing costs to the taxpayer means reducing recidivism rates. It is always a costly burden on the taxpayer to imprison someone; it doesn't matter where you put them, all prisons are costly. When we look at profits (both private and State profits), we need to ask if it's good for the incentives of the taxpayer and the incentives of the State/companies to be so misaligned. It is undesirable for either a private company or the State to benefit from someone being in prison when both the taxpayer's wallet and society in general would rather benefit from keeping them out of prison.
Tho it's not just private prisons, even federal prisons and state jails have massive rat-tails of private industries servicing them [0]
Nor are private companies the only ones outsourcing labor to prisons, the US military is also doing it [1]
[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html
[1] https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/unicor_about.js...
No, it's increasing demand for the C.O.’s contraband racket. It is not trying to hold back the flood at all.
(Yeah, it also narrows competition for the approved sellers, too.)