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Comment by serf | Hacker News Reader

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...

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...

>> 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.

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