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California is on a roll this week, it seems. Can someone local explain what’s going on?
Can somebody explain to a legal immigrant why The Guardian keeps omitting the illegal part over twelve times throughout the article?
The whole premise of private, for-profit, prisons has always seemed deeply troubling to me. The focus of a healthy prison system should be to rehabilitate people and help them turn their lives around so that they contribute positively to society. That can take years of hard work by the individual, and require assistance from professionals (therapists, teachers, ...).
A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits. Expensive rehabilitation is therefore immediately off the table, or given at the minimum allowable level. That is just not in the best interest of neither the individuals in the prison system, nor the rest of society.
The cynic and me sees this as a win... for the prison guards union. It seems to me that whether public or private, prisons should have good, independent oversight. Pretending that the "profit motive" is the biggest issue overlooks the horrific abuses committed by guards in California's public prisons.
http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/the_undue_influen...
And IMHO is bizarrely inconsistent outrage.
Want to make a profit from supplying prisons? Activists see no problem with that!
Want to make a profit from hiring felons, who are cheaper due to having limited options? Activists give you the thumbs up!
Want to make a profit for your private corporation from building a public prison? AOK!
But run it for profit? No matter how much oversight or regulation is applied, it's somehow inherently evil.
It feels like a distraction.
>Servin said that while the new law was a significant victory, there was one other thing immigrants rights groups were concerned about. When several sheriffs’ departments canceled their contracts to house Ice detainees last year, instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii. Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the pri…
So, yes, some people believe private-prisons are a useful tool to deal with over-crowding in state facilities and that the likely alternative is further reduced-sentence releases.
I'd wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.
[EDIT] Surprise surprise, when Canada experimented with private prisons, they found measurably better outcomes in public prisons [1] and took the private prisons back over.
>Servin said that while the new law was a significant victory, there was one other thing immigrants rights groups were concerned about. When several sheriffs’ departments canceled their contracts to house Ice detainees last year, instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii. Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the pri…
There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better.
So while there are definitely people who want these prisoners freed immediately, and even people who want prisons abolished altogether, getting the profit motive out of prisons would be a significant win regardless.
>Servin said that while the new law was a significant victory, there was one other thing immigrants rights groups were concerned about. When several sheriffs’ departments canceled their contracts to house Ice detainees last year, instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii. Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the pri…