California's prison population is declining. Especially in juveniles. So there's less need for prison space.
California bans private prisons
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Re: California bans private prisons
#62Good riddance. 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…
Even in a lot of the more mainstream libertarian literature [1] most law enforcement and the justice systems are treated as exactly the type of stuff that doesn’t make sense for a market and should be handled by the government. This should apply to prisons for much of the same reasons.
Besides, most of these sorts of private/public relationships are unlike other true markets anyway with very little competition and only one customer to appease. We end up with a system with even more opaque responsibility/liability chains and encourage crony business deals.
Without any discernible benefit for the private nature and creating negative incentives that encourage more violence by correlating the success of an industry on the greater imprisonment of people, I can’t see any net-benefit for them to exist.
I tend to be a fan of markets in a practical sense but I wish we had clearer distinctions between these public/private operations that are spun as being more “efficient”. Plus a ton of people use these failures of public/private organizations to disparage markets. So it’s not doing anyone any favours to support these half baked pseudo market arrangements, even if you are pro market. In most situations we need purely public or market solutions. I’ve seen few examples of mixing the two that left us better off (the US health insurance ‘market’ is the shining example).
[1] as opposed to the more fringe absolutist anarcho-capitalist stuff ala Mises which does push for private everything
Re: California bans private prisons
#63Reforming private prisons is just a small part of criminal justice reform. This is a good step but it seems like many are unaware or are ignoring the impact that labor unions have on overcriminalization. Police and corrections unions exist all across the country and share many of the perverse incentives that private prisons do.
Very true. The California Correctional and Peace Officer's Association is one of the largest unions in the state and exercises a good deal of political power, albeit less than it used to.
Part of the problem is the division into trade unions, in which different economic sectors have their own unions and can then be rolled over or pandered to as is convenient for business or state interests. Syndicalism is an idea of people in different businesses and employment sectors to combine their labor power more efficiently by avoiding the fragmentation problem.
Re: California bans private prisons
#64Good riddance. 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…
What is even scarier is an entity NOT motivated by profits that spends endlessly into a pit sucking resources away from solving bigger issues such as Climate Change, creating a high speed rail network, or educating children. Lets not be against efficiency for the sake of political orthodoxy.
What is efficient for society is to focus on rehabilitation, which is not a "pit sucking resources".
Re: California bans private prisons
#65>Two of Ice’s largest immigrant detention centers in California Can somebody explain to a legal immigrant why The Guardian keeps omitting the illegal part over twelve times throughout the article?
> battle with Trump over treatment of immigrants > Immigrant detainees > immigration detention facilities > undocumented immigrants > immigrant rights advocates > immigration attorney Which of those offends you and needs the illegal part?
The 'undocumented immigrants' part, which is simple semantic bleaching.
Re: California bans private prisons
#66>Two of Ice’s largest immigrant detention centers in California Can somebody explain to a legal immigrant why The Guardian keeps omitting the illegal part over twelve times throughout the article?
1) Because they're not necessarily all illegal immigrants. AFAIU, ICE puts asylum seekers who are otherwise following the letter of the law into these detention centers--show up at the border, request asylum, get put into detention while awaiting disposition of your case.
2) Are you an illegal driver for driving over the speed limit? Illegal usually implies something criminal. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor--no more than 6 months in prison. That is criminal strictly speaking, but within a certain grey area where we very often refrain from branding people as criminals.
I'm not really hung up on the phrase. I understand both sides, which really come down to wanting to emphasize different aspects of the situation to highlight different political priorities.
I'm curious, though, if newspapers have style guides regarding usage of "illegal". If I Google 'site:theguardian.com "illegal immigration"' I find many hits, so perhaps at least for The Guardian it's at the discretion of the particular journalist.
Re: California bans private prisons
#67Honestly, it's a bit of a red herring.. nothing is going to change from a criminal justice perspective. Less than 10% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons. But even more importantly, there are still so many private contractors / unions in the (public/private) prison industry that this ban won't really affect policies or outcomes going forward.. private interests will almost always exist in it that have…
Yeah, I've always thought the private/public prison thing is a bit of a red herring. Construction and maintenance companies get paid either way. Staff gets paid.
I think it makes more sense to focus on specific aspects of the criminal justice system rather than simply the private/public distinction. There should be standards for the pay and training of prison staff, security of inmates, quality of food and nutrition, medical care, etc.. It might be true that private prisons skimp on these things more than public prisons, but the standards are what is important.
Of course, this may very well mean that the best way to implement and enforce these standards is to have as much "public" (state) direction as possible in the development and operation of prisons, and I'm not at all against that if it is in fact the best implementation.
Re: California bans private prisons
#68Honestly, it's a bit of a red herring.. nothing is going to change from a criminal justice perspective. Less than 10% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons. But even more importantly, there are still so many private contractors / unions in the (public/private) prison industry that this ban won't really affect policies or outcomes going forward.. private interests will almost always exist in it that have…
Personal experience tells me that in federal prison you get 300 minutes a month. You pay 26 cents a minute for long distance. There's legit virtual phone tech businesses that service the families of those incarcerated. You get it dropped down to 6 cents a minute.........
That 15 minute maximum includes a mandatory waste of 38 seconds of a recorded message telling the receiver that the person on the other end of the line is in federal prison. Additionally you waste approximately 1 minute during the call when a woman's voice reminds you all that the call was placed from federal prison. That's just the time the voice is talking.. it doesn't account for the fact it is seemingly random and derails any train of thought. All in all you waste over 1.5 minutes of the call...
Outside of Unicor you're screwed if you expect to make more than 20 dollars a month.
Oh and the email system ha ha ha haaaa you pay by the MINUTE to email. Imagine how many people can't type well at all? I spent so much time typing up messages for people because they couldn't type well. It's just pretty sad. Huge rip off for every one in a vulnerable position.
Re: California bans private prisons
#69So does this also ban private companies from operating inside prisons? Most of them don't care who holds the actual keys so long as they can take advantage of the prisoners. They may not be the warden, but they can still control the purse strings.
Re: California bans private prisons
#70>Two of Ice’s largest immigrant detention centers in California Can somebody explain to a legal immigrant why The Guardian keeps omitting the illegal part over twelve times throughout the article?
Has the legality of their immigration been determined at that point? Or is the detention center used to hold them until that has been determined? Regardless, the statement as written is accurate. How many modifiers are necessary?
>Has the legality of their immigration been determined at that point?
By that logic, how do you even know they're immigrants to begin with, then? All it takes is flashing your visa or any documentation proving your status which you are required to carry at all times, just like I am. You were not expecting bartenders to give you a free pass in your teenage because you left your ID at home, did you?
>Regardless, the statement as written is accurate
Accuracy by omission is deceit, not journalism.
>How many modifiers are necessary?
One: illegal immigrant. Now I re-iterate my question: why is it so hard for The Guardian to use the correct terminology?