Quote:
Originally Posted by zerospinboson
[Snippety SNIP SNIP]
Entirely Off-topic: Why does the USA have a privatized prison system? Isn't it sort of odd to put incarceration and (the first part of) reintegration in the hands of people who have a business interest in making sure that recidivism happens?
|
Actually, we don't have a privatized
prison system. We do have some number of privately constructed and operated prisons. Those have usually come about because some business-person finds a political unit (usually a county or state) that needs more prison capacity but cannot afford to build the prison. The business then offers to build the prison at their own expense in exchange for running the prison at a contracted cost per inmate. Of course they're doing it to make money. And their profit in the long term may mean higher costs for the political unit that places prisoners there. Or not; if they are lucky, the business might run the prison more efficiently than the gov't would have. But there probably aren't two other private prisons in the region (giving the minimum of 3 significant competitors needed to provide a competitive market) so that's not the most likely outcome!
Whether or not these privately built and operated prisons are a good thing, depends on your viewpoint. On the one hand there are some notorious cases where it has led to nearly unbelievable corruption. For example, sometime in the past year I read about two judges being indicted for corruption charges -- they'd approved the construction of a private "correctional facility" for "trouble youths" to replace the run-down public facility (which they then closed). Then, they accepted per-inmate kick-backs from the company running the new private facility. They were discovered when some academics became curious why the youth conviction rate in that area had suddenly sky-rocketed.
On the other hand, a county or state that is facing the combination of extremely poor finances (preventing them from floating a bond issue to pay for a prison) along with a court order requiring them to reduce over-crowding in their existing facility AND federal mandates that require long prison terms for certain offenses (usually drug-related), well... that county or state doesn't have a whole lot of palatable choices. Cut something else to fund a new prison (== current politicians lose votes); get sued yet again for overcrowding in the existing prison (leads to courts imposing giant fines, which leads to more budget problems and thence to previous choice); raise taxes to pay for the prison (see previous choices); or let the private sector build it for them.
My preferred solution -- although I'm certain many would disagree with me -- would be to attack the problem from the other side. If we ended the "war on drugs" and cleared all the non-violent drug offenders out of the prisons, we'd have a massive surplus of prison space. This would allow closing a bunch of prisons and saving a pile of money. And we'd have a massive decrease in law enforcement costs. And a new set of products in high demand for the government to tax. And we could treat drug issues via public health means instead of the criminal justice system -- experience elsewhere in the world suggests this is both cheaper and more effective. And finally, if all that wasn't enough, we'd be removing the primary excuse that's been used to encroach on our traditional civil liberties for the past 30 or 40 years! But I realize that I'm thoroughly out of step with most of America on this front, so it ain't gonna happen anytime soon. Sigh.
Xenophon