In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On July 22 2014 08:40 Nyxisto wrote: Public prisons don't charge anybody for their services. If you do not charge someone for a service you can not make profit. How can you not understand this
^ It's called a taxpayer.
So the government just charges the taxpayer more if they like? Oh wait it doesn't work that way because they only have a limited amount of money to work with, and the money they would theoretically make out of their prisons wouldn't go into private pockets. That doesn't make any sense, sorry.
lol, what? Private prisons get their money from the government which gets its money from the taxpayers. Same exact flow as public prisons. They only difference is that you break off the private prison into its own economic unit (which public prisons do too).
Yes, and then private shareholders grab money from the taxpayer. The government can't put money from the taxpayer into someone's private pocket. They could pay the staff absurd amounts of money, but that wouldn't make any sense because then you'd just be transferring money from taxpayer to taxpayer. The government simply has no incentive to make profit out of prisons.
On July 22 2014 08:31 Nyxisto wrote: Public prisons don't have income.That doesn't make any sense. Prisons don't produce anything(besides some stuff the inmates build). Private prisons make money through contracts with the government, and if they keep the costs for the prisoners low enough, they make profit.
Yes they do. You can use different terminology to 'prove' me wrong, but the economic reality is the same. Money goes in, money buys labor, goods and outside services and the lower the costs relative to outcomes the better.
The only difference is in the labels used and the structures surrounding them. There is no inherent difference though. Again, look at the California PUBLIC prison example. There are money incentives to lock a lot of people up (more prison guards earning income, more police, police look good, etc.) and money incentives to spend little on caring for the prisoners. It's the same damned thing.
I won't claim to know the particulars of the american prision system, but the difference is that public prisions don't have stockholders and don't pay dividends. If you're gonna argue that there are bureaucrats in the public prision system that are capable of drawing enough private benefit (through corruption and whatnot) to create the same perverse incentives as the private prisions, that's not something obvious and you'll probably have to expand on that.
Private prisons? how is that even legal? This is fucking sad an inhuman. "It's a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism" That is just insane.
What's wrong with private prisons? They don't get to send people to jail, they just collect fees for running the prison.
Have you seen the video? The owners literally claim that their prison is a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism rates. The population wants less prisoners and less crime and low recidivism rates. A for profit prison wants the opposite.
I don't even know why we would need to discuss this. If it wasn't so sad and real it could be straight out of an American Caricature.
From a strictly financial perspective, yes, the for profit prison wants to stay full of prisoners. And guess what? The numbers work exactly the same for a public run prison.
No, because public prisons are not run for profit, they're run to keep the bad guys locked up. If there's no difference between business and government in the US anyway then that's a general problem and has nothing to do with the concept of the public branch. I find it ridiculous that we're seriously having that discussion. It's the 21st century, you don't have people locked up in private, for profit institutions. It's wrong to give anyone who is not the government that authority.
Both public and private prisons keep bad guys locked up in exchange for money. If you think that profit makes a difference, please establish why it makes a difference.
Private prisons make money from having prisoners.
Therefor they have incentive to work against rehabilitating the prisoners they have, since if they go out, commit another crime and go to jail again the prison makes more money.
Thus, private prisons have a vested interest in people committing more crimes, which kinda goes against the entire purpose of the prison system.
Making profit out of people that have committed crimes is just wrong.
The same financial incentive exists for public prisons, police forces and prosecutors.
I can't believe I'm giving into responding to this ridiculousness but here goes.
Ok the whole private vs public argument is usually coated in the 'incentive' argument. Let's look at how that might matter in prisons.
A private prison is incentive to get as many people in prison as possible, then once they are there make sure they stay there. If by some chance they escape repay their debt, it is in their interest to make sure they come back soon. This is accomplished by what I presume are obvious (and some not so obvious) means?
Private prisons have a very weak incentive to get people into prison, because they have no mechanism for getting people into prison. They can't arrest people!
A public prison isn't trying to generate profit from incarcerating people. That should be enough, but it seems you need more explanation. Prisons cost money, it's in public prisons (and societies[I know private industry doesn't care about that unless it impacts their bottom line{by law}]) interest to keep prison populations as low as possible, rehabilitate the people who come, and do anything within reason to enable them to become more than criminals.
First, private businesses are not required by law to care about the bottom line exclusively. This is a common misconception.
Second, lots of people profit from public prisons - everyone who works there and is involved in constructing the prisons, arresting and prosecuting prisoners.
Prison isn't/shouldn't be an industry. It should be a social cost of the human condition paid for by all lucky enough not to end up there (supplemented by the repaying of the inmates debts to society). Perhaps if more of the people in prison belonged there, we wouldn't have to block out the shame of ignoring the atrocities that happen to innocent and low level offenders in prison. As Jon put it 'we would be irate if 1 out of every 2 dozen donuts was getting raped and those are pastries not people.'Or the fact that was pointed out about privatization leading to medical saving coinciding with a huge spike in deaths in prison.
Considering we have more people in prison than any other country period, we should probably look at why people are ending up there more than how to save/make more money off of them once they get there.
If every prosecutor, police officer, and prison suddenly found themselves without any money to make, that would be a problem we would all celebrate. Criminal justice isn't/shouldn't be incentivized by profit, it's supposed to be incentivized by 'justice' (we generally interpret that to be retribution, but whatever).
However, with a privatized prison system the idea of reducing crime rates, recidivism rates, and duration of incarceration are all to be fought against by law to preserve profits for shareholders/owners.
I feel like that's about as simple and obvious as it gets for why privatized prisons are an incredibly bad idea.
You think the mainstream media is too harsh on the Kochs while ignoring similar stories about liberal billionaires. That's a fair piece of media criticism. There is some truth to the media treating the Kochs unfairly, but it's also true that this is seen as a conservative issue because Citizen's United was a conservative group and conservative justices took their side . All Democrats do is call for campaign finance reform. It scores them easy points with the base and independents. The Koch story is always really just a story about Citizen's United. It sort of makes sense that the Media doesn't associate this type of stuff with Liberal Billionaires(Although that doesn't really excuse them from just kind of ignoring them)
As to the rest, I'll concede that political polarization is more responsible for safer districts than gerrymandering, but I still contend that this specific obstructionist congress wouldn't have happened if not for gerrymandering. What we really have is a disagreement of degrees. Your theory, as I understand it, is that Obama's specific policies, by being so radically to the left, has accelerated political polarization more than gerrymandering has swung districts. Adding just one heavily republican county to a district can turn it from competitive to safe in an instant. That's a pretty visible effect.
And I really don't think Obama is more polarizing than say, Bush was. Obamacare(or any number of things) is not more enraging on the right than the War in Iraq(or any nubmer of things) was enraging on the left. The point is he's about as polarizing as any president would be. That's the reality of the US political climate. Do you think Hillary Clinton, even if she was governing with more moderate policies, wouldn't have enraged the Tea Party crowd? Honestly, I would speculate people getting their news from heavily slanted sources is the biggest driver of polarization. (I would also contend that Fox News counts as heavily slanted while the NY Times doesn't, but you'd probably disagree and we don't need to have that fight)
Glad to make that clear. I won't go over the minutia.
On July 21 2014 14:13 YoureFired wrote: Does it truly matter if its gerrymandering or district polarization causing the change in who gets voted in, from a functionalist perspective? I am of the opinion that both go hand-in-hand (that the reason that Democrat districts vote majority Democrat is because they've been gerrymandered that way) but let's just throw that out for now.
Is it really a good political system that does not give parity to each individual voice, in as proportional a fashion, as possible?
Introvert, I find it ridiculous that you on one hand blast the Left for using its political power to enact certain reforms (saying that it does not represent popular opinion) while tacitly endorsing a system that does not adequately represent the political opinion of the country as a whole.
We're set up as a Republic, not a Democracy- and I prefer it that way. They represent smaller majorities. Besides, as I've pointed out 3 times now, the occurrence of a discrepancy between House control and the national tally is a rare occurrence. There is nothing tacit in my support for the current system, even with its flaws.
Where have I done that? Can you not distinguish a policy criticism from a procedural criticism? I value a stable system, with rules that should be adhered to.
I don't advocate ignoring the rules when politically convenient.
Moreover, where have I done that which you criticize? I haven't said anything about politically unpopular opinions in this discussion. My focus has been to address this claim of gerrymandering and its effects.
That much is abundantly clear. As Madison said:
In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.
The Kochs are just the latest in a long line of the opulent trying to protect themselves from the majority.
Yeah, and as undemocratic as it sounds, Madison had it basically right. And if you think about it, he and Jefferson agreed upon the basic premise that it is a bad idea to let people vote who are not vested in the state. They just had different ideas regarding what to do about it.
I think what you meant was, "it's bad to vest people in the state who are not already so vested."
Giving people voting rights sure as shit doesn't vest them in the state.
That's the point I was making Dauntless. Just giving them voting rights doesn't vest them in the state.
Johnny, all those people exist in the private prison system as well. Why make the problem worse by adding additional profit incentives on top of the existing ones?
You've also misunderstood the "by law" statement. There are only two reasons for a company to do something socially beneficial. 1) They are required to by law (such as being forced to clean effluent before dumping it into a river) or 2) They think it will result in higher profits (making pro-environmental statements to attract customers who care about the environment)
On July 22 2014 08:56 SnipedSoul wrote: Johnny, all those people exist in the private prison system as well. Why make the problem worse by adding additional profit incentives on top of the existing ones?
Profit incentive isn't inherently bad. It depends on how the incentives are structured.
Edit:
You've also misunderstood the "by law" statement. There are only two reasons for a company to do something socially beneficial. 1) They are required to by law (such as being forced to clean effluent before dumping it into a river) or 2) They think it will result in higher profits (making pro-environmental statements to attract customers who care about the environment)
Or people working there decide to do something socially beneficial at the expense of profit because they want to.
Private prisons? how is that even legal? This is fucking sad an inhuman. "It's a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism" That is just insane.
What's wrong with private prisons? They don't get to send people to jail, they just collect fees for running the prison.
Have you seen the video? The owners literally claim that their prison is a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism rates. The population wants less prisoners and less crime and low recidivism rates. A for profit prison wants the opposite.
I don't even know why we would need to discuss this. If it wasn't so sad and real it could be straight out of an American Caricature.
From a strictly financial perspective, yes, the for profit prison wants to stay full of prisoners. And guess what? The numbers work exactly the same for a public run prison.
I don't necessarily doubt this but can you back this up?
Regardless even if true it merely means that US public prisons are just as awful as the private ones. Recidism rates in the US are particularly high compared to other nations. Some of this may be due to cultural differences but a lot of it is probaly not.
From a cost perspective a prison may have ~$1 million in fixed costs. If it houses 10,000 inmates that's $100 per prisoner. If you only house 5,000 you still owe the $1 million so it becomes $200 per prisoner. Recidivism in this context is beneficial because it helps keep your prison full of prisoners, which lowers the cost per prisoner.
You can see this play out in California's public prisons. It's cheaper to simply pack prisoners in like sardines than it is to build more prisons. And since prisoners are not high on the budget priority list, the state has suffered from overcrowding to the point where courts have ordered them to fix the problem.
WASHINGTON — Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. ...
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”
I don't know if private and public prisons have different recidivism rates. Public and private prisons tend to be different on a number of dimensions and so a good comparison would be difficult.
Minimizing the cost per prisoner by filling the prison up with more prisoners is idiotic. I don't really understand why you even entertain these sophistic economic arguments concerning recidivism.
On July 22 2014 08:56 SnipedSoul wrote: Johnny, all those people exist in the private prison system as well. Why make the problem worse by adding additional profit incentives on top of the existing ones?
Profit incentive isn't inherently bad. It depends on how the incentives are structured.
You've also misunderstood the "by law" statement. There are only two reasons for a company to do something socially beneficial. 1) They are required to by law (such as being forced to clean effluent before dumping it into a river) or 2) They think it will result in higher profits (making pro-environmental statements to attract customers who care about the environment)
Or people working there decide to do something socially beneficial at the expense of profit because they want to.
And then those people get fired for costing the company money.
On July 22 2014 07:55 Danglars wrote: Public prisons are better because ... they're not run for profit? Yes, yes, profits are evil. It's only if you lose money, waste money, and don't care about waste and fraud that makes something noble and untainted. I thought earlier posters were all over a natural distrust of federal bureaucratic solutions, and now there's outright animus against anything that might be done privately and for profit. Double standards abound, it would seem.
You do know that profits are extra costs on top of running a facility right? That you can run the same enterprise more cheaply without profit? It's not a double standard.
Private prisons? how is that even legal? This is fucking sad an inhuman. "It's a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism" That is just insane.
What's wrong with private prisons? They don't get to send people to jail, they just collect fees for running the prison.
Have you seen the video? The owners literally claim that their prison is a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism rates. The population wants less prisoners and less crime and low recidivism rates. A for profit prison wants the opposite.
I don't even know why we would need to discuss this. If it wasn't so sad and real it could be straight out of an American Caricature.
From a strictly financial perspective, yes, the for profit prison wants to stay full of prisoners. And guess what? The numbers work exactly the same for a public run prison.
I don't necessarily doubt this but can you back this up?
Regardless even if true it merely means that US public prisons are just as awful as the private ones. Recidism rates in the US are particularly high compared to other nations. Some of this may be due to cultural differences but a lot of it is probaly not.
From a cost perspective a prison may have ~$1 million in fixed costs. If it houses 10,000 inmates that's $100 per prisoner. If you only house 5,000 you still owe the $1 million so it becomes $200 per prisoner. Recidivism in this context is beneficial because it helps keep your prison full of prisoners, which lowers the cost per prisoner.
You can see this play out in California's public prisons. It's cheaper to simply pack prisoners in like sardines than it is to build more prisons. And since prisoners are not high on the budget priority list, the state has suffered from overcrowding to the point where courts have ordered them to fix the problem.
From a few years ago:
WASHINGTON — Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. ...
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”
I don't know if private and public prisons have different recidivism rates. Public and private prisons tend to be different on a number of dimensions and so a good comparison would be difficult.
Minimizing the cost per prisoner by filling the prison up with more prisoners is idiotic. I don't really understand why you even entertain these sophistic economic arguments concerning recidivism.
a significant mechanism of government corruption is through abuse of the nonresponsive/manipulation vulnerable government system by private contractors. to say private prisons is not immune because it is just a transparent pass through loop is silly.
Private prisons? how is that even legal? This is fucking sad an inhuman. "It's a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism" That is just insane.
What's wrong with private prisons? They don't get to send people to jail, they just collect fees for running the prison.
Have you seen the video? The owners literally claim that their prison is a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism rates. The population wants less prisoners and less crime and low recidivism rates. A for profit prison wants the opposite.
I don't even know why we would need to discuss this. If it wasn't so sad and real it could be straight out of an American Caricature.
From a strictly financial perspective, yes, the for profit prison wants to stay full of prisoners. And guess what? The numbers work exactly the same for a public run prison.
I don't necessarily doubt this but can you back this up?
Regardless even if true it merely means that US public prisons are just as awful as the private ones. Recidism rates in the US are particularly high compared to other nations. Some of this may be due to cultural differences but a lot of it is probaly not.
From a cost perspective a prison may have ~$1 million in fixed costs. If it houses 10,000 inmates that's $100 per prisoner. If you only house 5,000 you still owe the $1 million so it becomes $200 per prisoner. Recidivism in this context is beneficial because it helps keep your prison full of prisoners, which lowers the cost per prisoner.
You can see this play out in California's public prisons. It's cheaper to simply pack prisoners in like sardines than it is to build more prisons. And since prisoners are not high on the budget priority list, the state has suffered from overcrowding to the point where courts have ordered them to fix the problem.
From a few years ago:
WASHINGTON — Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. ...
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”
I don't know if private and public prisons have different recidivism rates. Public and private prisons tend to be different on a number of dimensions and so a good comparison would be difficult.
Minimizing the cost per prisoner by filling the prison up with more prisoners is idiotic. I don't really understand why you even entertain these sophistic economic arguments concerning recidivism.
Not from the perspective of an individual prison.
Which is exactly why for profit prisons are stupid. Each individual prison has their own goal of maximizing the number of prisoners, which is terrible for society as a whole when thousands of prisons are doing it.
Plus, in a public system, they don't get paid per prisoner. They get paid to do their job. In the very long term, they might have an incentive to not lose too many prisonors because that might lead to prisons being closed, but this is a very far and nebulous thing that does not directly relate to anything they do with the prisoners. Plus, in public institutions there is usually some sort of oversight that has exactly the job to make sure that prisons do what is good for society, not for the prison, and which is usually not directly related to the prison itself.
Compare this to a for-profit private prison. It has one goal. Make money for the shareholders. Thus, it will try to keep prisoners coming back, because repeat customers are good for business. It will try to reduce costs per prisoner in any way they can, without really caring about the prisoners. They will then pass on some of that reduced cost to the tax payer, so the governor can happily say that prisons are now cheaper per prisoner again. Noone in this system really cares about the prisoners rights, as long as they don't sue the prison. Food gets worse, conditions get worse, who cares about giving them education or perspective to do something productive once out of jail, that might keep them from coming back again!
How this can not be an obvious problem is exceedingly weird, and probably something that only americans can understand.
Americans have been bombarded with the message that "Government can't do anything right" and they believe it because half of their politicians are dedicated to proving that statement.
On July 22 2014 08:56 SnipedSoul wrote: Johnny, all those people exist in the private prison system as well. Why make the problem worse by adding additional profit incentives on top of the existing ones?
Profit incentive isn't inherently bad. It depends on how the incentives are structured.
Edit:
You've also misunderstood the "by law" statement. There are only two reasons for a company to do something socially beneficial. 1) They are required to by law (such as being forced to clean effluent before dumping it into a river) or 2) They think it will result in higher profits (making pro-environmental statements to attract customers who care about the environment)
Or people working there decide to do something socially beneficial at the expense of profit because they want to.
And then those people get fired for costing the company money.
Or get promoted if the organization likes what they did.
Private prisons have a very weak incentive to get people into prison, because they have no mechanism for getting people into prison. They can't arrest people!
Are you serious with that or is that sincere? I mean it doesn't make the incentive any weaker but perhaps their ability to directly act on that incentive?
Because we all know the only way to influence who goes to prison for how long is to directly arrest people? But it won't be long before privatizing police is something conservatives want too anyway.
First, private businesses are not required by law to care about the bottom line exclusively. This is a common misconception.
Second, lots of people profit from public prisons - everyone who works there and is involved in constructing the prisons, arresting and prosecuting prisoners.
Of course it's not exclusively, it's just they use the law to hide behind whenever what they are doing has huge social costs but saves/makes more money (at least in the short term).
Second can you still not see the difference between those jobs in a public system being jobs of neccessity vs private prison jobs which are ones of opportunity? There is no benefit to the public prison system of an increase in demand (it's the opposite actually) the opposite is true for private prisons.
Private prisons? how is that even legal? This is fucking sad an inhuman. "It's a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism" That is just insane.
What's wrong with private prisons? They don't get to send people to jail, they just collect fees for running the prison.
Have you seen the video? The owners literally claim that their prison is a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism rates. The population wants less prisoners and less crime and low recidivism rates. A for profit prison wants the opposite.
I don't even know why we would need to discuss this. If it wasn't so sad and real it could be straight out of an American Caricature.
From a strictly financial perspective, yes, the for profit prison wants to stay full of prisoners. And guess what? The numbers work exactly the same for a public run prison.
I don't necessarily doubt this but can you back this up?
Regardless even if true it merely means that US public prisons are just as awful as the private ones. Recidism rates in the US are particularly high compared to other nations. Some of this may be due to cultural differences but a lot of it is probaly not.
From a cost perspective a prison may have ~$1 million in fixed costs. If it houses 10,000 inmates that's $100 per prisoner. If you only house 5,000 you still owe the $1 million so it becomes $200 per prisoner. Recidivism in this context is beneficial because it helps keep your prison full of prisoners, which lowers the cost per prisoner.
You can see this play out in California's public prisons. It's cheaper to simply pack prisoners in like sardines than it is to build more prisons. And since prisoners are not high on the budget priority list, the state has suffered from overcrowding to the point where courts have ordered them to fix the problem.
From a few years ago:
WASHINGTON — Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. ...
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”
I don't know if private and public prisons have different recidivism rates. Public and private prisons tend to be different on a number of dimensions and so a good comparison would be difficult.
Minimizing the cost per prisoner by filling the prison up with more prisoners is idiotic. I don't really understand why you even entertain these sophistic economic arguments concerning recidivism.
Not from the perspective of an individual prison.
Which is exactly why for profit prisons are stupid. Each individual prison has their own goal of maximizing the number of prisoners, which is terrible for society as a whole when thousands of prisons are doing it.
Individual prisons have little control over how many prisoners they receive. At best they can fight over the existing pool of potential inmates or advocate on a larger scale for increased sentencing or enforcement.
On July 22 2014 04:57 Nyxisto wrote: [quote] Private prisons? how is that even legal? This is fucking sad an inhuman. "It's a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism" That is just insane.
What's wrong with private prisons? They don't get to send people to jail, they just collect fees for running the prison.
Have you seen the video? The owners literally claim that their prison is a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism rates. The population wants less prisoners and less crime and low recidivism rates. A for profit prison wants the opposite.
I don't even know why we would need to discuss this. If it wasn't so sad and real it could be straight out of an American Caricature.
From a strictly financial perspective, yes, the for profit prison wants to stay full of prisoners. And guess what? The numbers work exactly the same for a public run prison.
I don't necessarily doubt this but can you back this up?
Regardless even if true it merely means that US public prisons are just as awful as the private ones. Recidism rates in the US are particularly high compared to other nations. Some of this may be due to cultural differences but a lot of it is probaly not.
From a cost perspective a prison may have ~$1 million in fixed costs. If it houses 10,000 inmates that's $100 per prisoner. If you only house 5,000 you still owe the $1 million so it becomes $200 per prisoner. Recidivism in this context is beneficial because it helps keep your prison full of prisoners, which lowers the cost per prisoner.
You can see this play out in California's public prisons. It's cheaper to simply pack prisoners in like sardines than it is to build more prisons. And since prisoners are not high on the budget priority list, the state has suffered from overcrowding to the point where courts have ordered them to fix the problem.
From a few years ago:
WASHINGTON — Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. ...
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”
I don't know if private and public prisons have different recidivism rates. Public and private prisons tend to be different on a number of dimensions and so a good comparison would be difficult.
Minimizing the cost per prisoner by filling the prison up with more prisoners is idiotic. I don't really understand why you even entertain these sophistic economic arguments concerning recidivism.
Not from the perspective of an individual prison.
Which is exactly why for profit prisons are stupid. Each individual prison has their own goal of maximizing the number of prisoners, which is terrible for society as a whole when thousands of prisons are doing it.
Individual prisons have little control over how many prisoners they receive. At best they can fight over the existing pool of potential inmates or advocate on a larger scale for increased sentencing or enforcement.
Or they can sign contracts with the government to guarantee a 90% occupancy rate in their prison.
E: They do advocate on a large scale for increasing sentences and enforcement. Think about that. Prisons lobby the government to put people in jail simply to make money. How is that a good thing in any way? They have a direct financial incentive to lobby for things such as mandatory minimum sentencing and "three strike" laws.
On July 22 2014 05:42 JonnyBNoHo wrote: [quote] What's wrong with private prisons? They don't get to send people to jail, they just collect fees for running the prison.
Have you seen the video? The owners literally claim that their prison is a great investment opportunity because of high recidivism rates. The population wants less prisoners and less crime and low recidivism rates. A for profit prison wants the opposite.
I don't even know why we would need to discuss this. If it wasn't so sad and real it could be straight out of an American Caricature.
From a strictly financial perspective, yes, the for profit prison wants to stay full of prisoners. And guess what? The numbers work exactly the same for a public run prison.
I don't necessarily doubt this but can you back this up?
Regardless even if true it merely means that US public prisons are just as awful as the private ones. Recidism rates in the US are particularly high compared to other nations. Some of this may be due to cultural differences but a lot of it is probaly not.
From a cost perspective a prison may have ~$1 million in fixed costs. If it houses 10,000 inmates that's $100 per prisoner. If you only house 5,000 you still owe the $1 million so it becomes $200 per prisoner. Recidivism in this context is beneficial because it helps keep your prison full of prisoners, which lowers the cost per prisoner.
You can see this play out in California's public prisons. It's cheaper to simply pack prisoners in like sardines than it is to build more prisons. And since prisoners are not high on the budget priority list, the state has suffered from overcrowding to the point where courts have ordered them to fix the problem.
From a few years ago:
WASHINGTON — Conditions in California’s overcrowded prisons are so bad that they violate the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment, the Supreme Court ruled on Monday, ordering the state to reduce its prison population by more than 30,000 inmates. ...
The majority opinion included photographs of inmates crowded into open gymnasium-style rooms and what Justice Kennedy described as “telephone-booth-sized cages without toilets” used to house suicidal inmates. Suicide rates in the state’s prisons, Justice Kennedy wrote, have been 80 percent higher than the average for inmates nationwide. A lower court in the case said it was “an uncontested fact” that “an inmate in one of California’s prisons needlessly dies every six or seven days due to constitutional deficiencies.”
I don't know if private and public prisons have different recidivism rates. Public and private prisons tend to be different on a number of dimensions and so a good comparison would be difficult.
Minimizing the cost per prisoner by filling the prison up with more prisoners is idiotic. I don't really understand why you even entertain these sophistic economic arguments concerning recidivism.
Not from the perspective of an individual prison.
Which is exactly why for profit prisons are stupid. Each individual prison has their own goal of maximizing the number of prisoners, which is terrible for society as a whole when thousands of prisons are doing it.
Individual prisons have little control over how many prisoners they receive. At best they can fight over the existing pool of potential inmates or advocate on a larger scale for increased sentencing or enforcement.
Or they can sign contracts with the government to guarantee a 90% occupancy rate in their prison.
E: They do advocate on a large scale for increasing sentences and enforcement. Think about that. Prisons lobby the government to put people in jail simply to make money. How is that a good thing in any way?
If they signed that contract they wouldn't have nearly as much of an incentive to have more people arrested.
EPT
