The entire concept of "for-profit incarceration/detention" should not exist. Such a system only incentivizes cruelty.
> 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.
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.
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?