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California bans private prisons

theguardian.com

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Re: California bans private prisons

#451

Post by ClumsyPilot »

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…

There is an assumption that private prisons will perform better than public ones, and so far data does not support it. What great innovation came out of private prison system?

You we trying to optimise out the 'inefficient' government, by saddling it with much effort designing incentives and making sure they are not abused. You might as well run prisons yourself - publically.

Re: California bans private prisons

#452

Post by PorterDuff »

I was busy doing God's Work (upvoting any downvoted posts) and was considering the article.

So far as I can tell, the point of the article is that this is another salvo in the war between California and the federal government in terms of who gets to run immigration law, not some sort of newfound distaste for private prisons.

Curious that all the posts are about private vs. public prisons. I did poke around a bit and the private prisons don't appear to be cheaper, and it's rather surprising that they even exist given the amount of power public unions have.

Perhaps someone in the biz could pipe up, just what is the point of a private prison? All that occurs to me is the opportunity to ramp up a facility quickly or perhaps just the need for a law enforcement organization to park people when they don't want to be in that business. Dunno.

Re: California bans private prisons

#453

Post by e12e »

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…

There's a tention between "paid per prisoner day" and "fewer prisoners come back to stay".

You could get a bonus for not getting "return" prisoners - but it'd have to be better than gaining life sentences (though in general, harder to compete in three strike legislations where you'd be incentivesed to allow prisoners to commit crimes in order to trigger three strikes).

Perhaps there's a way to pay for recovery - but if your business depends on there being prisoners, it's hard to see how you could motivate anything but an increase in prisoner population.

Certainly an end to prisoners would mean bankruptcy?

[ed: you might have a goal of lowering crime, and by extention prisoner population. A private prison, paid to house prisoners, would be commercially committed to the opposite; increasing the prison population.]

Re: California bans private prisons

#454

Post by dragonwriter »

tathougies wrote: post #425
cwkoss wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Violence related to drugs is mostly caused by prohibition. If we decriminalized these drugs, we'd eliminate the price premium that can be commanded from secrecy and use of force. I watched a really great lecture online that was about how everything that rich countries criminalize (primarily prostitution and drugs) ends up becoming powerful industries in poorer countries because the demand from rich countries persists…

> Violence related to drugs is mostly caused by prohibition The rising violence rate due to the marijuana trade in California (and other states) does not agree with your made up reasoning. Although, in principle, I agree that your reasoning ought to make sense. Unfortunately, my principles and empiricism are often at odds, so it's best to side with the latter.

> The rising violence rate due to the marijuana trade in California (and other states) does not agree with your made up reasoning.

It actually does, because federal prohibition has not been lifted (even though there is non-assured enforcement forebearance).

The fact that anyone in a significant ownership, leadership, or management position in any business in the industry is technically guilty of a federal felony with a 20-year minimum sentence (and, just by being sufficiently successful, that can bumped up to a life-without-parole minimum) [0] has a fairly substantial impact on the willingness of otherwise legitimate businesses and businesspeople to participate in the industry and thus on what kind of business people do participate, even when the feds aren't actually prosecuting at the moment.

[0] the “drug kingpin” (formally, Continuing Criminal Enterprise) statute and it's later-added “super kingpin” provision.

Re: California bans private prisons

#455

Post by dang »

asdfgasd wrote: post #262
dang wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. We've had to ask you this before. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If I'm allowed to ask "What should we do about the Jewish Question" in a manner that appears civil, it's still not a civil discussion, regardless of the tone. If someone responds "don't you dare ask the Jewish Question," they aren't at fault for the lack of civility; the premise of the question was deeply uncivil. Contextually, if someone on HN is asking "what should we do about the prisoners?" about people detained…

Denunciatory rhetoric breaks the site guidelines regardless of what you're denouncing. If you hurl the buzzword weapons of the moment, it will take the thread further into political flamewar regardless of whether your position is right or wrong. Yelling a right position doesn't help; it will only trigger others into yelling their position back. We know what sort of comments take internet forums further into flamewar. What good does it do if this place burns down?

We took the word "civil" out of the HN guidelines because people kept lecturing us about it, as if we were ignorant of the objections against that word or somehow on the wrong side of them, when the truth is we know as much about it as the people doing the lecturing, couldn't care less about that word, and aren't motivated by the concept.

If you're bringing up "the Jewish Question" as a way of insinuating something about HN moderation, that's pretty offensive.

Re: California bans private prisons

#457

Post by verall »

kortilla wrote: post #416
verall wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anyone ever looked at the stats and saw that people released from private prisons had much shorter life expectancy, then convicts would choose state prisons. No, they would not, because there is huge information asmyettry here and, and generally convicts have lost access to the sorts of publications with this info.

Of course they would. Prisons inmates are not isolated from information.

Yes, they are?

Considering most inmates do not have access to the internet, do you expect the state to publish these stats in good faith? Inmates to trust them? Or do they just subscribe to print editions of The New York Times?

I guess I'm not sure if you're speaking in hypothetical or talking about inmates today. As the article is on California I'm assuming we're both discussing USA.

Re: California bans private prisons

#458

Post by voxl »

55orolder wrote: post #185

I find it fascinating that private prisons draw such ire while the prison guard union draws so little, when the prison guard union has all the exact same incentives and is drastically more powerful. California would have had legal marijuana a decade sooner except for lobbing by the union, they're a major force for mandatory minimum sentences and tougher sentencing in general. This seems like a trivial easy-PR win for…

Your claims require evidence.

Re: California bans private prisons

#459

Post by arcticbull »

rienbdj wrote: post #241
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…

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.

* caveat: Assuming no power disparty between buyers and sellers.

If you need something more than the seller needs your money they're free to adjust the price up no matter how many of them there are. For instance, a hurricane comes in to town. All of a sudden, every gas station is charging $50/bottle for water and $10/gal for gas, even though the market is no more or less competitive than the day before when they charged $2.50. Externalities matter. Gouging like this is illegal in the event of bad weather but it's the status quo in the event of bad health, and much of the time, you exert equal control over both. The only real difference is one tends to skew acute and the other tends to skew chronic, I guess.

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