I thought such things only exist in movies.
California bans private prisons
171–180 of 646 posts
Re: California bans private prisons
#172Honestly, 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…
Just a reminder that approximately 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States.
10% of 2.2 million is 220,000, and that is 220,000 more people than deserve to be a human sacrifice to a corporation and its bottom line.
Re: California bans private prisons
#173I'm so happy about this. Private prisons are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum occupancy levels in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as criminals). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent rehabilitating criminals and making them functional members of society. Ne…
Interesting Wikipedia page. Seems almost 20% of Australian prisoners are in private prisons! And 15-20% in the UK. Obviously this is not a uniquely US issue another countries are expanding their use.
I'm guessing, but I suspect it's hard to convince voters of the need to build prisons over other large capital expenditures (ex. hospitals, schools etc). Therefore it's easier to convince a private company to spend the money and operate it. Unfortunate, but could be the case.
Re: California bans private prisons
#174I 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…
> 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.
Re: California bans private prisons
#175I'm so happy about this. Private prisons are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum occupancy levels in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as criminals). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent rehabilitating criminals and making them functional members of society. Ne…
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
Re: California bans private prisons
#176>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…
> ICE detainees > release all the prisoners ICE detainees aren't prisoners. ICE are facists holding people in concentrations camps. They should absolutely be released.
Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. We've had to ask you this before.
Re: California bans private prisons
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 on…
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. FWIW, one should also consider that in a Libertarian system FAR fewer people would be in jail in the first place - perhaps as few as none, since Libertarian ideology is not big on forced imprisonme…
Does Libertarian idea of a penal system not rely on the idea of discipline? I'm curious as the western world has moved on from the previous system where a crime was considered a personal offence to the sovereign. In which case, criminals were displayed in public and tortured. To a system where criminals are to be reformed and disciplined into a normalized individual. An eye for an eye seems to be a regression back to the systems before we had a state and where the penal institution was no longer a extension of politics.
Re: California bans private prisons
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 on…
I agree, I've been thinking more and more that we need to spend some serious time on defining what is and isn't best handled by markets and drawing clear bounds around those areas. I'm positive that there are enough real world examples out there to draw up the general structure of a system that would incorporate what we've learnt over the past few hundred years. I feel like most attempts to do so so far have been rat…
Creating the public/private distinction would also help solve some legitimate political issues and provide a much more consistent framework. Politics is mostly a game of compromise. You could give in on already gutted half markets, such as public health insurance, while using the leverage to push harder to keep most other industries open.
Ideology often gets in the way of providing the best solution to the greatest amount of people. I personally don't see much value in keeping a broken half-market like health insurance putting along in the name of "free markets". That just makes people blame markets for the failures of the public/private arrangements, which hurts them in other areas where it does make sense, where markets should be the default.
Others like private prisons and private military contractors makes the public lose trust in public institutions. Having a trustworthy justice and government system is critical for all markets to succeed.
Additionally a harder public/private distinction will put greater weight in these decisions and more responsibility. It's very easy for a politician to grab the half-measure public/private mix while pretending to appease both sides.
Re: California bans private prisons
#179Just for fun, same sentence on health care.
> I'm so happy about this. Private health care insure are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum health care coverage in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as clients). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent on research and education. Next up should be criminalizing charging huge quantities for basic health care by private hospitals and the usurious fees on drugs.
I'd wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.
Re: California bans private prisons
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't need phone calls in some jails that cost over $20 for 15 minutes. Please don't make excuses for a corrupt system. Yeah, this is a win, but the problem is MASSIVE and in so many different domains. Frankly, you don't seem aware of the many issues that they were hinting at.
Sorry I didn't provide an exhaustive list of all the evils in the prison vendor system I'm aware of. I know about the horrendously expensive phone calls and the move toward video conferencing in place of in person visitation and the massive over charging for commissary items and the nearly slave 'wages' prisoners are paid for jobs they have no option to reject. I just didn't think I needed to provide an exacting list…
I think I was too negative in that comment. I apologize.
I do think you're minimizing the issue in the way you talk about it, but the line about you not being aware of problems wasn't justified in the slightest and was just rude.