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Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

If that's true why do private prisons have such higher recidivism rates? This is simply false.

> Mamun et al. (2020) report on studies that demonstrate that recidivism rates in private prisons are between 16.7% (Spivak & Sharp, 2008) and 22% (Duwe & Clark, 2013) higher when compared to public prisons. [1]

When providing services, private companies do worse because their charter is not to provide services per se, it's to make money. These are antithetical in the world of social services.

Private enterprise isn't a solution to every problem. It's a solution to a lot problems. However police, fire, healthcare, education, regulation and so on are services in the public interest and should be provided therefore be provided by the public.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2021.6721...

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The incentives are misaligned. Private prisons make more money if people go back to prison…!

This is true with all social services. The goal of a school is to educate. The incentive of a private school is to make money.

Private schools (assuming consolidation, which is common) make more money if students need continuing adult education.

I am not sure how you can generalize from prisons to schools. Because private prisons are bad, so private schools are bad?

All sorts of past failed experiments:

- Private fire departments that used to show up at your house and demand payment in order to put the fire out, otherwise they'd just let your house burn to the ground. In Rome, they'd literally show up at your house, and buy it from you for pennies on the dollar before putting it out.

- Private prisons fail the people in the way I've described.

- Private healthcare fails Americans each and every day. 45,000 Americans die each year due to lack of access to care. One person dies every 12 minutes. Their goal is to deny you cover because each treatment they avoid paying for pads their bottom line and benefits their shareholders. It costs twice as much per capita as Canada, 60% as much as Norway - and yet fails to cover everyone and yields worse outcomes.

The generalization is simple: when your task is to provide services to the public, then profit must be secondary. In private enterprise, profit is primary. You fail the people when you provide core social services via private enterprise because you have fundamentally failed to align incentives.

Private social services are designed to fail the people.

> Private fire departments

These are still definitely a thing. Though I expect they must be regulated so we don't end up in a Rome-style situation.

Edit: Found it. If you're in an area with something like Rural Metro, they put out the fire either way. If you don't have an annual membership with them, then they will invoice you. Nobody offering to buy your home for pennies on the dollar or standing around waiting for your credit card to clear before hosing down the flames.

My understanding is there are very few, and each dollar profiteered off this basic service is not spent improving the fire department. Do you have statistics on this?

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