It should be noted that the DOJ started phasing out private prisons last year, and most states don't have any significant number of people in private prisons: https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso.... Additionally, the prisons folks tend to hear about in terms of abuses, like Rikers in NY, are good old public prisons.
Rikers is a jail, not a prison. It might seem like I'm being pedantic but when you're talking about problems in the criminal justice system it's important to recognize the difference between the two and how the problems and solutions may be different.
I agree that’s true in general. But people can be in Rikers for months and sometimes years (average is over 9 months). So the capacity for the government to abuse prisoners is demonstrated: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/08/8-appalling-stories-...
I don’t think we should have private prisons, but the level of focus on them is about politics. It’s an issue that unifies the economic left, who support unions and oppose privatization but may or may not care about prisoner abuse, with the criminal justice movement.
But at the end of the day, most prisoners (over 90%) are not in private prisons, and there is little evidence that private prisons are worse than public prisons. The reality is that our government run, union-staffed prisons are really bad. But prisons are a major source of jobs, and public unions that represent prison employees are powerful—and Americans are punitive—so it’s difficult to tackle the real issues.
Prison means you’re going away for a while. Jail means you’re awaiting trial or have a minor sentence to serve for something like failing to pay a fine, vandalism, etc. Jail is also usually operated locally by a city or county while prison is state or federal.
A prison is usually run by the government. A private prison is run by a corporation hired by the government; payment is usually prisoner * time.
It's understood that the incentive for the private prison is to spend as little on the prisoners as possible, because the rest is profit; although I understand some contracts regulate this.
I meant prison vs. jail. It seems mildly blurry to me considering that in my country we do have some distinctions between different types of detainment facilities but from what I grasped, the distinctions are delineated somewhat differently in the US that they are around here.
I see that someone answered, but the cultural feel is that jail time is anything from a few hours to a few years for reasons that could include public drunkenness, assault, prostitution, or just awaiting trial, it's kind of ambiguous what it means when someone was in "jail", but it could really be no big deal. Most cities or towns would have a jail.
Prison is a bigger deal. A prisoner was convicted for something unambiguously bad, and there is this cultural expectation that they have become somewhat hardened or institutional in prison. A state or Feds would run a prison.
While I've known people to be in jail for longer sentences than prisoners, the expectation is that prison sentences are much longer.
I'm speaking only to the social meaning of the two concepts, which might help to understand the underlying understanding that Americans share about this difference, but the actual legal realities are no doubt quite different. Most of us are pretty naive about our legal system.
If you want to be specific jail can be used to describe a place for those awaiting trial or held for minor crimes, whereas prison describes a place for criminals convicted of serious crimes.
I believe the timeline is that Obama started phasing them out, Trump halted that, and then Biden started phasing them out again. Good reminder that executive action isn’t worth the paper it’s written on either way.
(Perhaps most importantly, most private prisons are not federal)
> Good reminder that executive action isn’t worth the paper it’s written on either way.
That doesn’t at all follow from your previous statement that the executive orders of the last three presidents regarding private prisons have in fact been followed
You are right, a better way to look at it would be that only the Democrat executive orders have been worthless since the federal private prison contracts that were already signed pre-Obama action (or signed during Trump admin) are not instantly dissolved by their executive action.
> Among the immigrant detention population, 40,634 people – 81% of the detained population – were confined in privately run facilities in 2019. The privately detained immigrant population grew 739% since 2002 to 2019.1) Biden’s executive order does not limit private contracts with immigrant detention facilities.
So the page you linked is from a plaintiff’s law firm, talking about the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and doesn’t say anything about private prisons. The first article linked from that page is about sexual abuse at FCI Dublin. That sounds terrible, but it’s public servants employed by the federal government running that “rape club”—members of the American Federation of Government Employees.
In Justice period. The victims often have no relation to crime or criminal prosecution.
It's not a bug, it's a feature. The system is working as intended. It is no accident that the US has #1 incarceration rate on the planet. A significant portion of the population and and even higher portion of those in government believe manipulation and control of certain groups in the population is more important than any notion of justice or law an order. Their love for their country pales in comparison to their hatred and greed.
Let's say someone smoked weed outside your house and right off your property, your house can be taken by the police even if you have no relation with the person and they did not enter your property because your lack of relationship or their history at your property is contested by the government and your house itself is the accused and the evidence therefore being an inanimate object that can't defend itself it now belongs to them. Can't make this up lol
As a current prisoner, one of the nice things about private prisons is that they are so thirsty for profit that a lot of them bypass all the asinine rules about security that government prisons have in order to sell you anything and everything, e.g. games consoles, steel-stringed guitars, etc.
So, while you are more likely to come to grief in a private prison due to them under-spending on guards, health care, physical plant, etc, you will die in luxury as long as your family have money to send you.
Please bargains themselves aren't terrible. They're only bad because the trial wait times and bail conditions are so bad that innocent people are accepting a plea bargains. If the rest of the system was fair, like with reasonable bond and not waiting years for a trial, then it could still be a valid tool. I won't hold my breath though.