People always like to blame private prisons for everything, despite them being a tiny fraction of prisons (8%).
It helps no one to blame the wrong thing.
It helps no one to blame the wrong thing.
You can pack quite a few people into an extremely small place when you aren’t concerned about their well-being.
Either prisoners are sent to a prison for long term prisoners, or to jail for “short term” prisoners.
But many “short term” prisoners include those serving consecutive short term sentences that add up to a lot of time.
Jails are the correctional equivalent of a bus station. Not the sort of place you want to live in.
Jails aren’t long term facilities, but some prisoners can spend over a decade in them.
Even worse than jails is being sent out of state. The state pays out of state prisons and jails to incarcerate our felons. These prisons are money making machines for the states that offer them.
The wide variety of conditions we have now prove pretty clearly things could be much better or worse.
Imagine if there were something like recidivism bonds or cooperatively owned prisons, with healthy start-up culture behind it.
Meaning that with for profit, there is at least a pathway to new ways of doing prison.
This naive view that incentives engineering could somehow fix the fact that a profit oriented creature means that any other value become subjugated to profit. Ppl are amazing at optimizing for stuff, especially stuff you can measure. If you throw away the non tangible values of decency truth fairness freedom, in favor of the very tangible value of money you'll get corporations working hard to maximize their profit in any way imaginable, including twisted lobbying to rewrite the incentives and outright kickbacks.
We see this happen again and again and again, and still the "incentive engineers" want to try one more time.
…not that it’s done properly or humanely though, or that the incentives are commensurate with those ideals. It seems we can’t agree on whether people who have ever shown an ounce of imperfection get to retain their rights. Ah, politics…
to start filling those 8% you have to over-fill the 92% of the government ones.
Giving the guaranteed minimum vacancy clauses in the private prison contracts, state officials have to send people there, and they wouldn't look good doing that while having free space in state prisons, so they need to keep the state prisons overfilled.