Suddenly prisons are trying to incarcerate the factually innocent, since they're the least likely to "re-offend."
This is why we have stalled in general ; everyone has some "slippery slope" boogeyman as an excuse why we can't solve problems society faces.
/s
Is judges colluding with prison operators a frequent and normal occurrence? The US prison system is bad, but to my knowledge these things are the exception.
Outlawing such arrangements only pushes the blackmarket economy of kids for cash underground. Instead, of course, it should be regulated.
Besides, if there isn't a market for child-imprisonment, then we won't be able to accurately price it as a commodity. Not being able to price commodified child-imprisonment means the market for it will be much more inefficient than it needs to be. Efficient markets imply positive public good. It's really that simple.
Ideas like this show a moral bankruptcy that has become so ingrained in our Technocratic elites and we wonder why there is such a disconnection between different groups in our society.
So, eliminating markets for people was a bad thing?
Why, for example, would a market for health care be good, but a market for child-imprisonment be bad? If a market for child-imprisonment were susceptible to bad actors, perverse incentives, and bad outcomes, then it stands to reason the same could be said of all markets. That's a rather large implication, I'm sure we agree on.
If humane child imprisonment is valued by the market participants, then that's what the market will provide. If a market doesn't signal that it's important, then it's definitionally not important. That's what price signalling is all about.
It seems like what people are trying to say is that market outcomes dictate market success. Eg: bad market outcomes = bad place to hold a market, but no one is flat out saying it. At the same time, we have the idea that markets are "the best thing we have and any limits on markets produce negative outcomes." This is a contradiction and at this point at this place, I don't think debating that topic directly is going to teach me anything. Debating the fringes, however is.
It's the same thing as saying "X doesn't work" on StackOverflow and getting people to prove that it does. It's that we're doing it with something non-tech this time.
https://harpers.org/archive/2023/02/is-liberalism-worth-savi...
The conversation flits around a bit too quickly for my taste, but some interesting points are made.
It will be most efficient. I promise!
That's pretty much what happened to the judge in the article linked by GP (you should read it, it's horrifying). Mostly because it's hard to work as a judge when you're serving a 17.5 year prison sentence.
Last big scandal about large scale wrongful imprisonment - of children, no less - the people profiting from this were:
1) Directly profiting
* the District Attorney
* 2 judges
* the director of ... of the Juvenile Probation Office
* the brother of the District Attorney, who ran the prison
2) Involved, capable of stopping the abuse, not proven to have personally profited, yet they cooperated:
* the district attorney
* a supreme court lawyer
* a supreme court justice personally
* the whole Pennsylvania supreme court
* the governor of Pennsylvania
* Pennsylvania's Judicial Conduct Board
* the FBI
3) the only parties the justice system considered guilty
* the brother of the District Attorney, who ran the prison. Note: he's still in business. The SAME business. He was convicted for a small amount, because he lied about paying off judges. He, and his brother the district attorney, are of course completely innocent of plotting for a decade to wrongfully imprison children, for profit.
The scheme continued for 7 YEARS after complaints about corruption were filed.
The profit has not been paid back.
* the lowest level judges
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
As always, we come to the same point as always: people claiming the government can be trusted, because of $reason. Separation of powers, because of the law, because ... You forget the government is a system made up of people. Guarantees, laws, contracts, achieve nothing the quality of people in government doesn't achieve. And we all know that quality is lacking somewhat. Also, this cannot be fixed by better laws, better such guarantees, any of that ...
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
This gets brought up all the time as evidence of something systemic, but the linked article only mentions two judges convicted. Is there any evidence this is widespread?
But yeah, this sort of thing is widespread.
https://apnews.com/article/prisons-us-department-of-justice-...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/final-defendants-includin...
https://scheerpost.com/2022/01/23/the-scandal-of-u-s-prisons...
https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/prison-ame...
But all of the above is employees violating the law. Worse is the justice system itself abusing the law:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalief_Browder (the state has a duty to prosecute. This is NOT what lawmakers mean by that, yet nobody ever sees any consequences). More general this is an example of: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/pie2022_jail_churn.html
>https://apnews.com/article/prisons-us-department-of-justice-...
>https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/final-defendants-includin...
>https://scheerpost.com/2022/01/23/the-scandal-of-u-s-prisons...
>https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/prison-ame...
I agree that these are all examples of justice system employees abusing their positions, but the examples given are slightly short of the original claim of "delivering inmates and redirecting profits", which implies some sort of concerted effort to send more people to jail for the purpose of enriching oneself. That's present in the cash 4 kids scandal, but really present when a corrections employee is mistreating prisoners. I certainly don't think the people
That problem is endemic, and occurs everywhere, and is also individuals enriching themselves, just a bit more indirect.
But these individuals that DO abuse the system for personal enrichment, they are the worst of all.