California bans private prisons • Hacker News Board

Re: California bans private prisons

#231

Post by lanevorockz » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:38 PM UTC

cwkoss wrote: post #163

danaliv wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison? 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 t…

Prison profits are spent lobbying for tougher crime laws. Thus, unnecessarily harsh criminalization of behavior has a strong economic incentive. Having an incentive to turn citizens into criminals is bad for society.

I wonder if you can raise evidence of unreasonable imprisonment. I completely agree that this can create a feedback loop that would be bad, ideally we should have a much more sophisticated system of rehabilitation. Maybe the problem lies on the state being too incompetent to even set metrics for third parties.

Re: California bans private prisons

#232

Post by abathur » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:39 PM UTC

chroma wrote: post #109

I think private prisons could work if: - Convicts could choose whether to be sent to a public or private prison. - Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus. Those changes would create enough competition and align incentives such that we could see some real innov…

A caveat, first: I think two of our larger-scale social issues are that incentives are often misaligned with the outcomes we actually want, and that we don't create structural room for innovation.

That said, I think this is still pretty fraught.

Incentives are just rules enforced with a carrot instead of a stick; we're just as likely to come up with bad incentives as we are to develop ineffective regulations and write loophole-ridden or misapplied laws. At sufficient scale, money tends to inspire a troublesome kind of creativity.

If the private prisons have sufficient profit motive and the problems they face prove tractable for data and bespoke or ML solutions, they'll analyze likely convicts as thoroughly as possible and do what they can to skim the most-profitable convicts off the top of the pool and leave public prisons with whatever is left. Maybe they'll just directly pay the prisoner or their family. Maybe they'll have a miserable as-bad-as-regulations-allow experience for uninvited plebians and a special experience to offer prisoners they want.

Will a certain incentive lead them to bribe judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, or witnesses to get (or avoid) prisoners? Would they do the same to keep a former inmate from being convicted again within 3 years of release?

And then some donation-funded corner of the think-tank ecosystem will endlessly torture the data to "prove" private prisons get better outcomes than public ones and shop boilerplate legislation to restrict public and promote private prisons.

And once the prisoners are within their walls, they'll be sucking up all of the data they can to hone their prediction of whether they'll reoffend when they get out. Will they use it nobly to target support, or to ensure the whoever the algorithms pick as bad apples end up in constant manufactured trouble?

Re: California bans private prisons

#233

Post by asdfgasd » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #209

anarchodev wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw their comment and frankly I think it's a perfectly reasonable sentiment. That objecting to incarceration practices in America is viewed as contributing to a "political flamewar" by the mods here is surprising to me.

"[F]acists" and "concentration camps" are intentionally incendiary and do not promote a constructive discussion. There is nothing reasonable about that wording at all.

It's not intentionally incendiary when it's largely true.

Re: California bans private prisons

#234

Post by tejtm » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

arcticbull wrote: post #215

imsofuture wrote: post #187

[flagged]

Capitalism is great for some things, and awful for others. Capitalism works best when there's no power differential between customers and service providers because the goal is to maximize profit. If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system. If I get no choice in which prison I go to, well, I get bilked. Basically anywhere you have n…

Not even sure how to categorize this but if you get cancer and can't pay you can have yourself put in prison for the treatment...

Re: California bans private prisons

#235

Post by JesseAldridge » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:40 PM UTC

tyrust wrote: post #211

jvm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Classic to see the correct take get downvoted. If anyone's interested in actually learning about the causes of mass incarceration, I'd strongly recommend John Pfaff's _Locked In_: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L6SLKK8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... In short: a) It's not the war on drugs. b) It's not private prisons. c) It's not sentencing laws. You could get rid of all of those and America would still lead the "free" worl…

Then what is it?

According to the Amazon summary from the linked book:

"a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before"

Re: California bans private prisons

#236

Post by _qzu7 » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:42 PM UTC

afapx wrote: post #213

imsofuture wrote: post #187

[flagged]

It makes sense in business, but not for institutions like healthcare or prisons

The problem is that those who get unfathomably rich off of "business" will employ this tremendous power to erode the barriers between what's an acceptable business venture and what is not.

Capitalism is not a "disease" really, it's a legacy system whose fundamental mechanisms are becoming an increasingly large source of dysfunction.

Re: California bans private prisons

#237

Post by celticmusic » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:45 PM UTC

jvm wrote: post #200

coryrc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public sector isn't any better. The Price of Prison Guard Unions https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-price-of-prison-guar... PORAC's contribution to California's prison crisis http://www.cjcj.org/news/5423

Classic to see the correct take get downvoted. If anyone's interested in actually learning about the causes of mass incarceration, I'd strongly recommend John Pfaff's _Locked In_: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01L6SLKK8/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?... In short: a) It's not the war on drugs. b) It's not private prisons. c) It's not sentencing laws. You could get rid of all of those and America would still lead the "free" worl…

The government isn't going to be lobbying itself to pass minimum occupancy laws.

The motivations are better. No one is saying it's going to solve world hunger, but it's a good first step.

Re: California bans private prisons

#238

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:46 PM UTC

danaliv wrote: post #28

creaghpatr wrote: post #4

>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…

> Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison? 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 t…

[deleted]

Re: California bans private prisons

#239

Post by coryrc » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

aqme28 wrote: post #212

coryrc wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The public sector isn't any better. The Price of Prison Guard Unions https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-price-of-prison-guar... PORAC's contribution to California's prison crisis http://www.cjcj.org/news/5423

How is the prison guard union and a lobby group specifically a problem of the public sector? For all of its faults, I can't agree with you that the public sector is just as bad as the private sector.

They're a major constituant of the Democratic Party and you don't get through the primaries without their endorsements, so their positions have much higher weight than your ballot.

Private prisons aren't always worse: Florida study showing lower recividism in private prisons https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249718665_A_Compara...

When you see "Private Prisons Are The Worst!!!" check the studies to see if the groups are comparable; I know someone in the industry years ago and when they opened the first private prison in the state they were sent the worst offenders in order to try and break them, yet they ended up performing better than average for the state.

Re: California bans private prisons

#240

Post by tapland » Thu, Sep 12, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

ekianjo wrote: post #230

arcticbull wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell that to your $600 epipen. Seriously. Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38. Drugs would be, in a perfect system with no socialist intervention, priced at whatever value they provide you. If that's your life, it's very expensive. There's no room for mercy in capitalism. There's a reason Sovaldi is $84,000 and it's not because it costs a lot to mak…

> Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38 It's kind of easy for a country to dictate drug prices when they had no hand in developing them. Now show me a country like the US that develops just as many drugs. Ah, you can't, there is none.

Drug prices have absolutely nothing to do with where the drug is developed. AstraZeneca being Swedish never prevented Swedes from having a yearly out of pocket maximum at $120.