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California bans private prisons

theguardian.com

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Re: California bans private prisons

#241

Post by rienbdj »

arcticbull wrote: post #223
ekianjo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Erm, no. Because if people can't pay for it, then your drug get no sales, and you lose your investment. The problem right now is that there are several payers involved and nobody sees the real cost of things. Were you to pay directly for drugs from your own pocket without intermediaries…

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…

this is not how prices work. consumers only pay the maximum they would be willing to pay for a good when there is only one provider. when there are multiple providers prices are pushed down to the cost of production. or so the theory goes.

Re: California bans private prisons

#242

Post by celticmusic »

jamiequint wrote: post #174
calcifer wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus. Ah, so the people who profit off of others' misery would be able to profit even further if they treat prisoners like human beings? Great incentive indeed. > If someone ever proposes such a system, they'll be branded a supporter of "private prisons". You propose such a system and I don't see how…

Why should we care if someone makes a profit if we get the outcomes that we want? The profit is not what is evil, the poor conditions and poor outcomes are. If incentives are effective at producing good outcomes it would be stupid to not use them. p.s. It is possible to disagree with someone without being a moralizing asshole, you should try it sometime.

because the incentives are bass ackwards. These companies lobby for laws, and there's no way they're lobbying for less prisoners.

Re: California bans private prisons

#243

Post by dredmorbius »

ekianjo wrote: post #219
arcticbull wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Erm, no. Because if people can't pay for it, then your drug get no sales, and you lose your investment. The problem right now is that there are several payers involved and nobody sees the real cost of things. Were you to pay directly for drugs from your own pocket without intermediaries…

Healthcare plans routinely charge far more than patients can reasonably pay, then unload the full force of the law at them.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/uva-has-ruined-us-heal... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20921887)

Re: California bans private prisons

#244

Post by aqme28 »

coryrc wrote: post #239
aqme28 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I understand that the prison guard lobby is terrible, but that's not the point. The question isn't "private prisons vs prison lobbying," it's "private prisons vs public prisons."

Prison lobbying comes from both.

Re: California bans private prisons

#245

Post by ako »

imsofuture wrote: post #187

[flagged]

Dogmas are a disease.

We have different economic & market tools. We should use the right tool for the problem.

Some markets are best served with a free market system, others with a single payer system, others with a monopoly.

There are studies (no reference) which indicate that every euro spent by government on education has a 10 times return on investment: better educated people, have better jobs, pay more taxes, create more companies, create more jobs, attract more companies, have less health issues, etc.

Making people pay for their own education, and thereby limiting the education level of the population of a country, a country is doing itself a disservice.

Re: California bans private prisons

#247

Post by dlphn___xyz »

arcticbull wrote: post #223
ekianjo wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Erm, no. Because if people can't pay for it, then your drug get no sales, and you lose your investment. The problem right now is that there are several payers involved and nobody sees the real cost of things. Were you to pay directly for drugs from your own pocket without intermediaries…

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…

why does the healthcare discussion always regress to capitalism vs socialism? everyone cites canada as the ideal model of social healthcare but forget to mention the long wait times and the fact that their population is only a fraction of the US. i think our system could use some tweaks but throwing it out altogether for a socialist program is not it.

Re: California bans private prisons

#248

Post by Octoth0rpe »

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.

Denmark comes very close per capita, while still having shockingly lower prices.

Edit: found a good source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866602/

Note, per capita it looks like most of the countries studied are discovering new drugs (in the study's terminology "new molecular entity") at much faster rate than the United States when adjusted for population.

The money quote: " Our data suggest that the United States is important but not disproportionate in its contribution to pharmaceutical innovation. Interestingly, some countries with direct price control, profit control, or reference drug pricing appeared to innovate proportionally more than their contribution to the global GDP or prescription drug spending"

Re: California bans private prisons

#249

Post by chroma »

gnarmis wrote: post #214
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…

On the second point, I think folks are rightly dubious about the effectiveness of incentives broadly[1]. There's also some hilarious historical examples of incentives backfiring or having unwanted side-effects (like the Cobra Effect [2].) More broadly, I don't think it's that easy to think that private prisons can even work well as a solution, regardless of whether they should be allowed to exist as a matter of publi…

I'm not sure why but your comment was hidden as dead. I vouched for it because… WTF? It's a totally fine comment. Anyway…

I agree that existing private prisons are wasteful and cruel, but I think that could change if they had different incentives. Right now, convicts can't choose between private or public prison. That lack of choice means that private prisons have no incentive to be better than state run prisons. Private prisons usually charge per head. If no prisoners want to stay at the prison because it's a hellhole, revenue dries up and they go out of business.

I'm familiar with the cobra effect and ways in which adding financial incentives can cause counterproductive outcomes. I'm not particularly worried about that happening with private prisons. Financial incentives backfire in two cases:

1. When they fail to account for higher-order effects. (As happened with the cobra bounty in India.)

2. When they replace social incentives. For example: If a friend asks me to help them move, I'll probably oblige. But if I show up on moving day and I see some paid movers helping, I'll resent that. That's basically what happened with the day care that charged for being late. Previously, parents would show up on time because they felt a social obligation (guilt). When the day care added a late fee, that guilt disappeared because the transaction moved from the social realm to the financial realm.

I think the motivations of wardens and guards in both private and state runs prisons are pretty similar, and I don't think they're motivated by social incentives. For them, it's a job. They want to minimize the amount of stress at work, and that usually means minimizing the amount of violence prisoners do towards one another. Adding some financial incentives isn't going to solve all the problems with prisons, but considering our existing recidivism rates, I seriously doubt it will hurt.

Re: California bans private prisons

#250

Post by jacobush »

chroma wrote: post #192
criddell wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How about a structure where they don't make any profit whatsoever (state only covers costs) unless, say, 50 year recidivism rate is below 2%? You're creating incentives for the prison operator to make sure prisoners are never released.

It's private prisons, not private judges. The prisoner would be released when they'd served their sentence.

If someone was up for parole, you could very easily discover bad behaviour on their part, so they would have serve the full sentence.

How's that? Waddayknow, they committed a new crime while in prison. Guess they have to stay a bit longer now. Sad.

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