Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsinsky | Hacker News Reader

Is there any reason to believe that private prisons are significantly worse than publicly run prisons?

I agree that the U.S. is badly in need of major reforms in its criminal justice system, but is there any reason to believe that society is better off with exclusively publicly run prisons?

Private prisons may do some regrettable lobbying on behalf of longer prison sentences, but I'm pretty sure that the corrections officers unions (most of whose membership works in publicly run prisons) is a far stronger political force.

It seems as though the students' activist energy would have been better used fighting the policies of mass incarceration rather than the private companies who do the government's bidding in applying them.

View on HN

Private prisons are widely acknowledged as being utter hell holes, and spawn corruption at the highest levels.

A description of a Youth "correctional" facility in Mississippi:

"Federal Judge Carlton Reeves wrote that the youth prison "has allowed a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts and conditions to germinate, the sum of which places the offenders at substantial ongoing risk." http://www.npr.org/2012/04/24/151276620/firm-leaves-miss-aft...

Also, there are things like the "Kids for Cash" scandal: "Two judges, President Judge Mark Ciavarella and Senior Judge Michael Conahan, were accused of accepting money from Robert Mericle, builder of two private, for-profit youth centers for the detention of juveniles, in return for contracting with the facilities and imposing harsh adjudications on juveniles brought before their courts to increase the number of residents in the centers." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Not to mention the that the private prison industry lobbies for harsher sentences and basically are a bunch of soulless vampires.

Prisons are already getting paid based on their capacity and not occupancy, so sentencing would not affect their bottom line the same way public prisons would be.

Yes it would, capacity is created to match expected occupancy, increases in sentences pre-empt the contracting of greater capacity for the expected increase in occupancy. All but the smallest increases in sentencing duration equate to additional prisons, not merely the picking up of some slack in existing ones.

Was actually just reading today that several states are being "sued" by private prisons because they have guaranteed minimum occupancy clauses that the states are not "meeting"

Private companies have a greater motivation to maximize profits than public entities do. The problems stem from that.

That is more or less the ACLU's opinion, as well.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/private-prisons-are-problem-not-so...

>> Private companies have a greater motivation to maximize profits than public entities do.

Corrections officers unions have strong motivations to keep prison populations high as well and unions tend to be stronger in the public sector than the private sector so its not obvious that private prisons increase the aggregate political pressure for high prison sentences.

http://mic.com/articles/41531/union-of-the-snake-how-califor...

>> The problems stem from that.

This seems like a serious inversion of cause and effect. Our problems with prisons pre-dated the growth in private prisons and private prisons remain a small fraction of the overall prison industry so its hard to see how private prisons could be the primary source of the problem.

>Corrections officers unions have strong motivations to keep prison populations high as well and unions tend to be stronger in the public sector than the private sector so its not obvious that private prisons increase the aggregate political pressure for high prison sentences.

It's not about prison sentences. It's about the poor conditions of private prisons and the rampant abuse there.

Haven't looked at this closely, but I would think corrections officers would care about keeping their jobs and increasing their pay, and perhaps reducing their work (by lowering the prisoner/officer ratio).

Those incentives seem benign compared to a private corporation, which would be incentivized to increase the prisoner population (build more prisons, more revenue), and increase the prisoner/officer ratio (more profits). These changes would have a negative impact on prisoners, officers, and society at large.

This is true, but publicly run prisons are subject to greater transparency because of things like the Freedom of Information Act which would not apply to private firms by default, only by contract.

Do unions count as public entities or private ones? Because they have a lot of motivation, and a lot of money, and a lot of success of converting the former into political clout. But somehow I don't see their motives questioned as often as "motivation to maximize profits".

There are a lot of companies that extract profits from what can be regarded as other's misfortune - from hospitals to computer security specialists. However that does not necessarily means that hospitals promote disease and computer security professionals routinely spread malware and deliberately compromise their clients' security, to boost their business. Something better than "they have motive to do so" would be required for that claim.

The difference is that patients can choose their hospital, so the hospital has an incentive to have a reputation for the best care. In the case of prisons, the customer and the user are different people.

be interesting if we allowed prisoners the choice of prison, haha.

Sounds like an incentive for more people to commit less crime.

This is true, but I see no difference here in private or state prison - in both cases agent problem exists, and in both cases there's no choice for the "user". The only difference is that if there are two prison companies, and one of them is really bad, citizens can fire it (through pressure on their elected representatives) and hire another with relative ease. If all prisons are owned by the state, you can't fire the state and the status quo is protected by the powerful and concentrated effort of the public worker's unions, which has clout that is hard to match or overcome. So I don't see how private companies make things worse, even taking into account the agency problem. To consider if private companies are worse or not, it is not enough to find a problem in private company, it is also necessary to show that the same (or worse) problem is not present in the alternative, which I don't see happening here.

"The only difference is that if there are two prison companies, and one of them is really bad, citizens can fire it (through pressure on their elected representatives) and hire another with relative ease."

You don't honestly believe that, do you? For one, you're assuming that enough citizens will actually care enough to make this an issue. For two, you're discounting the number of people who think that anything other than a dank, dark dungeon where people are chained to the walls is "coddling" prisoners. Third, I do not buy the schlock that is the argument "private entities are always better than public ones."

Again, you are missing the important point here. Let me reiterate it. When you evaluate two alternatives, it is not enough to say "A is bad for these reasons" or "B is good for these reasons". You need to actually compare them, i.e. say "on this metric, A is better than B" or "on this metric, A is worse than B".

So if we apply this to your argument, we see that you argue that (most) citizens do not care, so it is hard to gather clout to fire bad private company. Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is true. How this makes government-run prison better than private? If citizens do not care, they also wouldn't care if prisoners were abused in government-run prison. Moreover, if some citizens care, what is easier for them to overcome - a lobby of one private company (which can be, ultimately, fired, its reputation destroyed, and in extreme cases, whole company bankrupt and dissolved) - against which other private companies and lobbies can be also used as allies, or the alliance of state bureaucracy and public employees unions, which can not be seriously hurt (most of their power is constitutionally protected or at least enshrined in the law so hard that you need truly exceptional clout to change it), which have access to vast amounts of budget money and control well-organized and battle-hardened political machine with national support? What is easier to fight - the ones that have the money or the ones that have the money, the law, the executive power, the people, the press and the human resources? I'm afraid the comparison doesn't come in the favor of your point.

>> Third, I do not buy the schlock that is the argument "private entities are always better than public ones."

You do not have to buy it. But if you intent to seriously evaluate it - as opposed to dismissing it without consideration because it does not fit your fixed ideological biases - you have to use proper tools. Such as actually comparing the benefits and disadvantages of both, instead of saying "this is crap, because it is". It is not about always, it is about really thinking about it as opposed to not even bothering.

I'm not missing anything. I'm asking you when you've ever actually seen something like that happen. The answer is you haven't. So saying that the public can "fire" a private prison is worthless as not only do the public not bother, but most of the private prisons have contracts making it difficult to fire them.

No, the answer is it happened, and it can be discovered by simple search, which for some reason completely incomprehensible to me you neglected to do. For example:

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/06/21/2193261/three-st...

http://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2007-10-26/554296/

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/race-multicultural/l...

How about it just seems morally wrong to create a business where the incentive is increasing imprisonment. This ranges from not just lobbying efforts, and in some states iirc, it's still correction officers working there. To over-reporting and escalating minor infractions so as to deter parole.

I understand that scandals happen in government managed prisons as well. However, the saying two wrongs don't make a right comes to mind. In this case the business model is morally wrong, plain and simple.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal for an example of why this is a bad idea in practice.

This doesn't really answer the question since I could point to hundreds of scandals at publicly run prisons (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/nyregion/even-as-many-eyes...)

Prisons are cesspools of abuse, that doesn't make private prisons worse than public ones.

Can I first say your question is an excellent one and I'm not sure I can answer it, however i wanted to share my thoughts.

In an ideal world society would not want people to go to prison because of of the cost to society. There are so many cost from physical, legal, emotional/behavior, health, recurrence, future generations and etc. So as a society we would want to avoid people going back to prison and we should support initiatives that lessen our incarceration rate. Now despite what some on reddit seem to feel no matter how much money you throw at this there will always be people you can't rehabilitate. But if we could rehabilitate lets say 10-20% more of people who would be repeat offenders how much would society save. Now the question we have there is would the people who enforce the law like that? If we have less crime that means less police, judges, DAs, jail guards, etc. I'm guessing they all want to keep their jobs so there is little incentive for them to change the system and if I have learned anything incentive is everything. They do have some incentive in the fact that they do want their communities to be safe and healthy.

However when you put in for-profit prisons you can take any incentive out of the picture. They get paid per inmate and often have agreements where their prisons stay at x% of capacity. They don't want to rehabilitate but actually have the opposite incentive which is to crate repeat offenders to keep their cash flow going.

So I'll say society/public prisons have some reasons to reduce prison populations and rehabilitate; private prisons have no such incentive and would actually prefer people to stay/return to prison.

Private prisons do not get paid per inmate, they get paid based on capacity. The "Kids for Cash" scandal was not about getting more inmates, it was about filling existing capacity and triggering the need for more private prisons.

"private companies who do the government's bidding"

It's not so simple.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/04/28/h...

> Nearly two-thirds of private prison contracts mandate that state and local governments maintain a certain occupancy rate – usually 90 percent – or require taxpayers to pay for empty beds. In Arizona, three private prisons are operating with a 100 percent occupancy guarantee, according to Mother Jones. There’s even a lockup quota at the federal level: The Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention budget includes a mandate from Congress that at least 34,000 immigrants remain detained on a daily basis, a quota that has steadily grown each year, even as the undocumented immigrant population in the United States has leveled off.

Direct incentives for financial gains from higher incarceration rates, and kicking that money back to lobby for laws that put more people in prison at tax payers expense...

Baby steps.

The problem with private prisons is the conflict of interest.

As a private for-profit prison employing what is effectively cheap slave labor, you have zero incentive to actually reform or to reduce the amount of people who become imprisoned or the amount of time they are imprisoned for. You are in fact financially incentivized to do the opposite; classic perverse incentive.

As someone else in here posted, The Corrections Corporation of America noted relaxation of drug enforcement efforts as a RISK FACTOR in their 2011 10-K filing:

http://yahoo.brand.edgar-online.com/displayfilinginfo.aspx?f...

"The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by criminal laws."

Does this not scream "conflict of interest not in the interest of the greater good" to you? It does to me.

For an example of what happens when you allow this on a larger scale, see North Korea. Not a country anyone should be taking after!

For what it's worth, I just so happen to have initiated a monthly $100 donation to http://innocenceproject.org/ just this morning after reading this article:

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/23/fbi-evidence-...

> The problem with private prisons is the conflict of interest.

And ought to be outlawed for this very reason, IMO.

private prisons seem to be the perfect example of when ethics are more important than profit motive

And when all costs (even extraneous societal ones) are considered in an all encompassing cost model, outlawing them would be the optimal course of action, anyway

The price of some things just seem severely disconnected from their actual value (or lack thereof)

Why ethics is more important with prison than with other things, like finance, health, food, drink, etc.? I would assume if I let somebody cut up my body or brain while I'm unconscious and pay tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for it, I'd be a bit worried if the said person had bad ethics, wouldn't you? Still, I see not many are having problem with brain surgeons not being government employees, as far as I can see.

>> And when all costs (even extraneous societal ones) are considered in an all encompassing cost model, outlawing them would be the optimal course of action, anyway

That would sound much stronger if it were backed by an actual consideration of the cost in an actual model, rather than a blanket unsupported statement of the outcome.

>> The price of some things just seem severely disconnected from their actual value (or lack thereof)

Or maybe their price reflects the actual value instead of the value you think they should have. How do you discover the actual value (not for you personally, but for the thing that concerns the whole society) anyway? Do you hold a vote? What if vote goes in favor of privatized prisons?

"Is there any reason to believe that private prisons are significantly worse than publicly run prisons?"

They have a profit motive to lobby for harsher penalties, and to do the absolute bare minimum for prisoner housing and health.

"but is there any reason to believe that society is better off with exclusively publicly run prisons?"

Yes. I, for one, do no buy the bullshit that says that private entities are always better than public ones.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com