Private prisons announce $1.4B in revenue as immigration detentions climb
npr.org
npr.org
> Propensity score matching and regression analyses of the National Inmate Survey are used to examine individuals’ experiences and perceptions of environmental quality in public versus private prisons across key domains of prison life, with an emphasis on needs, behaviors, victimization, and attitudes. No differences are identified for women. Males in private prisons are more likely than men in public prisons to perceive there to be inadequate staffing and are less likely to report maintaining ties with people outside of prison. Men in private prisons are also less likely to report crowding to be an issue.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/361439680_Private_V....
It is “for-profit prisons create a system with a financial incentive to increase the number of incarcerated people”.
Either way - publicly-run or private contractor, if the government is a good steward of public funds, they'll monitor well to avoid waste and remove people who are trying to unjustly enrich themselves. And if the officials are incompetent or corrupt themselves, they'll fail to recognize when those things are happen, or participate themselves. I don't see a big difference in public vs. private unless I imagine a fantasy government run only by officials who are smart and highly ethical.
Should private prisons be FOIA'able just like public prisons?
What do I mean by a counterweight? For example, the MLB owners hold a monopsony over hiring pro baseball athletes, but the athletes have their own monopoly via the MLBPA. The result of this bilateral monopoly is that MLB players get better compensated than most other pro athletes. Of course the MLB is private, but I’m illustrating one type of counterweight.
You can have a similar system for public prisons requiring public unions, and Norway found a creative counterweight. Norway unionizes the prison correctional officers, but they also allow incarcerated people the right to organize; this allows them to negotiate wages, safety, and education programs. This provides a nice counterweight as prisoners have an incentive to advocate against correctional officer bloat/waste so those resources go to inmates, while correctional officers have a symmetric interest to keep prisoner bloat at bay. This is because they are ultimately competing for the same (finite) state budget.
Accordingly, giving prisoners more rights to advocate for themselves solves many problems of having a public union, while ensuring that budgets stay capped and tight. Conversely, the private sector tends to lobby aggressively to suppress prisoners' rights to maximize shareholder value, which permanently destroys this counterweight mechanism.
Premised on this counterweight system working, public prisons may not be sufficient to keep prisons humane, but they are likely necessary part of the solution.
The whole thing is rotten. Changing the ownership of the mess doesn't make it not rotten.
How do you figure? Is the "I'll save you money by being soft on crime" election platform popular in your country?
With the added benefit of not costing the taxpayer as much.
You might argue that it drives efficiency but what does efficiency mean in the context of a prison? Cheaper food for the inmates? Less pay for the guards?
The nice thing about outsourcing to for profit entities is that you don't have to come up with the ideas, you can just pay for the end result.
Unfortunately, they're just being paid to babysit so that's all they do.
Those had a different name in WW2, in another part of the world. It seems US took the concept, like many other from there, and inovated it.
Your comment is a non sequitur. What false positive rate for the justice system are you willing to accept?
I'll make it a yes or no answer to help you, and we'll narrow it down from there. For example, are you willing to accept a 50% false positive rate? Yes or no? Ex: For every two people deported, one of them would be deported erroneously.
How do you re-enter the country?
People will read that headline and come away with the impression that private prisons are making billions. They're expenses are most likely scaling with their revenue.
If your concern is that private prisons exist or that detention is climbing, the dollar figure is secondary to other, better measures. Instead, revenue is (mis)used to give yhe impression that people are getting rich off of this and, while that may be true, the relevant number is the increase in income, not revenue.
In short, NPR isn't above clickbait that's biased towards their audiences.
"Swindle said that CoreCivic's total revenue went up by just over 27% this spring compared to the same quarter last year, for a total of $684.9 million."
> give yhe impression that people are getting rich off of this
CoreCivic is a public company, so we can see that the C-suite each earns over $1m annually in cash compensation. the Chief Development officer earns more cash compensation than the person holding the same title at Hilton, a company worth over 20x more.
Then, we can look at the insider roster to see that the CEO currently holds over $10 million in stock, the heads of HR and corrections each hold over $5 million, etc.
People should get the impression that people are getting rich off this because people are getting rich off this.
It's not quite as impressive to say they've increased their profits 60m which gives a much different impression.
A unique phenomenon that only exists in this industry and is clearly the reason you feel opposed to people performing the same sort of analysis they would on other businesses...
Also, nobody would assume a company with 1.4B in rev is "making billions" as that would be impossible based on their revenue being less than 2 billion.
I'm generally opposed to this metric as used in this headline.
I'm not sure what positions you're assuming I hold but there is some misunderstanding because I don't really understand your comment.
> Also, nobody would assume a company with 1.4B in rev is "making billions" as that would be impossible based on their revenue being less than 2 billion.
Unless they assume they operate for more than 1 year.