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Comment by oooyay | Hacker News Reader

Private prisons are problematic in their own right, but they only make up 8% of the total prison population at the state and federal level. imo, we (the citizens) are to blame for constantly championing a system of accountability that believes accountability is putting a man in a box and taking every future opportunity he doesn't know yet away from him. You can certainly blame those in power, and they share some blame, but we also elect to these sentences.

https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/private-prisons-in...

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Agreed. It's not "powers that be" that impose this system on Americans, it's we Americans ourselves. We vote for politicians who are tough on crime - meaning long prison sentences, unsafe conditions, no robust public defense.

All true, but we also don’t rehabilitate. Prisoners should come out better then they went in not worse.

My main concern exactly.

We are in agreement. I could have added "... prioritize retribution with rehabilitation at best an afterthought"

I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "prisons are privately owned". Government-owned prisons still rely on, and provide revenue to, companies specifically designed to profit from the prison population.

That’s true of everything in an economy. It’s also true that Norway’s prisons rely on, and provide revenue to, companies specifically designed to profit from the prison population. Is a prison suddenly better if a government worker builds the bars rather than a contractor?

I agree with your one example and disagree with the thousands of others designed to profit off of incarcerated individuals instead of rehabilitate them.

Ok. If there are thousands, can you give three examples of companies that are designed to profit off of incarcerated individuals rather than rehabilitate them?

I'm not defending this. It's not an argument, it's a fact. If you're not afraid of the idea, look it up. Part of the problem here is never bucking back against what we've been taught and doing our own exploration.

I'm asking for facts. Surely if there are thousands of examples, three exploitative companies shouldn’t be too difficult to find.

I think this describes the issue k1ns is referring to: https://corpaccountabilitylab.org/calblog/2020/8/5/private-c...

> The next year, 111 inmates continued to produce “decorated party balloons” for MINNCOR, according to NCIA’s database. Large contracts such as this, coupled with correctional industries wages of between $0.50 and $2.00 per hour, allowed MINNCOR to make a profit of over $13 million in 2019.

Also relevant: https://minncorprod.blob.core.windows.net/files/MINNCOR%20In...

I'm actually having trouble squaring the claim from corpaccountabilitylab.org of an average of $.50 - $2/hr and what MINNCOR claims which is an average of $14.20/hr. The leading value of MINNCOR industries is to have the industrial programs pay for the prison system, thereby not passing new taxes onto residents. The only way that I can think to measure whether that system is healthy or not is to determine if it can both scale down and scale up. If it can't scale down, then they will indeed be incentivized to incarcerate new people.

Also of note, MINNCOR continues to employ people on release. From the report: 172 released + 753 incarcerated = 925 total active participants. The low of self-reported wages is $10/hr, the high is $22.38.

> Private prisons are problematic in their own right, but they only make up 8% of the total prison population

It's not how many people they are in charge of that matters, but how much money they donate to politicians to be be "tough on crime", and how much other soft money influence they have to make citizens think that crime is a problem that politicians need to be tough on, and to demonise politicians who aren't (which right-wing media is all too happy to help with).

Even if private prisons only have a small slice of the prison pie, they still work hard to make the pie as big as possible.

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