[adventured]

That's doesn't make much sense as a premise data wise.

The prison boom around the war on drugs overwhelmingly involved the government prison complex, from 1980 to 2010.

Clinton didn't have meaningful ties to the private prison industry (which barely existed at the time), and a frightening number of people were thrown into prison for drug crimes during his eight years.

About ~95% of all people put into prison over those 30 years from 1980 to 2010, went into government prisons.

Who benefitted? We spent over a trillion dollars on the government prison complex. Millions of government employees pocketed hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars in cash from the scheme. It makes the private prison industry and its meager profits look hilariously tiny by comparison.

The US has about a million law enforcement related employees it doesn't need, used to prosecute the war on drugs in various ways. Those are government employees, they benefit from the government prison system, they were made possible by government laws that date back five decades or more. They cost $80-$100 billion per year. Now compare just that one section of the government prison complex, to the private prison complex money.

CoreCivic generates $200m in profit per year. That's equal to about the cost of just ~3,000 cops. The US has at least several hundred thousand more cops than it needs, due to the war on drugs. That's how truly massive the government side of this is by comparison.

Private prisons only began to meaningfully expand in the middle of George W Bush's Presidency. In the 1990s, when such an extraordinary number of people were put into prison, the private prison industry was miniscule.

Blaming any of this mess on the private prison complex, is pretty absurd given the facts of what happened in prisons and the war on drugs in the 30 to 40 years pre ~2005.

And this post is in no way arguing in favor of the private prison system, it shouldn't exist.

[vel0city]

You shouldn't look at profits to gauge how big a company is, you should look at revenues. Otherwise, Amazon would until recently be considered a tiny company. CoreCivic generates around $1.7B in revenues, far greater than your $200M figure. If your ratio of 200m = 3k cops, CoreCivic would be closer to ~25k cops.

[adventured]

The profit motive is a common argument about the private prison complex, which is why I used the $200m. I believe it was very justified as the reference point.

That $200m goes to the shareholders, owners, in theory. That's the profit motive sum in their business.

I don't disagree that also referencing the $1.7b in sales is relevant. It's just as tiny looking when stacked up against the monster that is a million unnecessary government employees costing $80-$100 billion each year, that exist solely due to the war on drugs.

I'd like to see someone tabulate up the total cost of all reasonably unnecessary government employees, related to prisons and law enforcement, dating from 1980 to 2010, the prime years of the prison population boom (during which the private prison complex was an averaged single digit fraction of the whole thing). What do we suppose that would come to? $2 trillion inflation adjusted?

[throwawayjava]

A few thoughts:

1. I don't think you have to disagree with vel0city to make your point. Just agree that the private prison complex is large and dangerous to society (as you apparently have) and point out that the unnecessary aspects of the public sector prison complex are also large and dangerous.

2. Any time someone can have a financial stake is something like a prison while also holding immense political power, we should all be very scared and concerned. This is why there's so much well-placed concern over the private prison industry. Of course, it's worth noting that there are also lots of ways to make lots of money off of public prisons. And those mechanisms should also be choked off.

3. Damon Hininger makes about $1M/yr in salary. Presumably if total revenue were only $200M, he'd be making a lot less in salary.

[adventured]

> Any time someone can have a financial stake is something like a prison while also holding immense political power, we should all be very scared and concerned. This is why there's so much well-placed concern over the private prison industry.

I still don't get the hysteria-like concern over private prisons, when the extreme majority of all harm and money has related to the government prison system, which almost never gets tagged eg on HN in conversations like these. I've brought it up a dozen times over the years, and I'm usually the only person in the thread bringing it up. Yet the fear about the private side of it, is dramatic. That upside-down concern doesn't make any sense to me. That isn't to play down the negatives of the private prison industry, rather, it's to highlight that the public system is radically larger and just as financially motivated. Some of the strongest and best funded advocate groups against pot legalization have been government prison & police groups / unions / lobbyists; they all have a truly vast, financial stake in the government prison system.

Those people earn relatively decent wages. There are maybe 2.5 million of them total in the system, across all government prisons and law enforcement related jobs. They vote. Their representatives lobby aggressively. They hold immense collective political influence, far beyond anything the private prison industry could muster.

Hiniger makes $1 million? The total cost of 8 or 12 government cops. We've got 300k or 500k too many. Yet, again, the private side gets a hugely lopsided amount of attention.

What's the total prison population scale difference between government & private prisons, between 1980 and 2017? 20 to 1? More than that?

If we're adding up lives destroyed, the number of people harmed by being unjustly put into government or private prison, the economic value of all those destroyed lives, how would that come out? How many millions of people were put into government prisons over 30-40 years that shouldn't have been and how does that compare to the private industry? We must surely be talking about trillions of dollars more in real cost to society from the government side vs the private side.

The real comedy of the fear? The US prison population finally began to stop rising and began to fall, as the private prison system has gotten larger. And pot is getting legalized during that time as well. Peak war on drugs existed during peak government prison complex. Nobody likes to talk about that.

[throwawayjava]

> Hiniger makes $1 million? The total cost of 8 or 12 government cops.

You claimed that profits, not revenues, constitute "the profit motive sum" for private prison operators. But if revenue is tied to executive compensation, that's clearly not true. I didn't offer the number as a comparative, but rather as a way of refuting your claim that total revenues don't contribute to profit motive.

Aside from this point, I don't really think Hiniger's salary is relevant to this conversation.

> Peak war on drugs existed during peak government prison complex. Nobody likes to talk about that.

So are you really claiming that private prisons caused prison populations to decline? If not, what point are you trying to make by mentioning this obviously-not-causative correlation?

> rather, it's to highlight that the public system is radically larger and just as financially motivated

You'll find just as much "hysteria-like concern" here on hn, and elsewhere, about profiteering in public prisons. And yes, that includes concern over lobbying by prison guard unions.

I agree with your general point that a wave of stupid in the 80s and 90s is more to blame for our current situation than profit motive. And to get back to the article, Sessions has always been in the eye of that hurricane of stupid.

But profiteering -- by unions, by private prison suppliers, by suppliers to public prisons -- certainly helps sustain the present situation. Different people choose different subsets of that Goliath. So what?

Like I said above, I really, really don't understand the battle lines you're trying to draw here. Surely, we can all agree that the solution is putting fewer people in jails, right?