[rayiner]

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.

[fredophile]

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.

[rayiner]

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.

[jhgb]

For someone from Europe...what's the exact difference?

[eloisius]

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.

[rendall]

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.

[jhgb]

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.

[rendall]

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.

[jhgb]

Ah, this is interesting. I thought we had a somewhat clearer distinction in my country since we call "věznice" ("prison", presumably) the facility where you serve your sentence, and we call "vazební věznice" (literally "detention prison", I guess?) the facility where you're detained before your sentence and while your court case is pending. This would seem to indicate that these are separate facilities. But then I went to check the list of "detention prisons" (there's like nine of them or so) and it turned out that there's a wing for sentenced prisoners in pretty much all of them. So in fact our "detention prisons" would seem to be like US jails in function (with the exception that drunk people don't end up in jail -- they're taken to "záchytka" instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunk_tank#Czech_Republic).

Having said that, the operating term is still "věznice" here; there's no word with different etymology for it. Colloquially, it's called "vězení" -- we have a form of limited diglossia in my country where you commonly wouldn't use formal names of things in normal speech without sounding weird, so some phrases are somewhat different in speech than they often are in writing. And additionally, while you would say "byl jsem ve vězení" ("I was in prison") after serving a sentence, if you were detained before sentencing, you'd say "byl jsem ve vazbě" ("I was in pre-trial detention"), NOT anything like "Byl jsem ve vazebním vězení" ("I was in jail"). So we don't really have this distinction you could make between "people who did unambiguously bad things" and "people who did some light infractions". Basically you have no way to make it sound like what you did was no big deal -- everyone convicted is a prisoner and that's it (if institutionalized, that is; not after a suspended sentence, fine, or community service of course). But in American English, you apparently do. Interesting.

[riku_iki]

First link from google:

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.

[t43ytjhfajn]

You are totally right

[tehwebguy]

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)

[seoaeu]

> 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

[tehwebguy]

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.

[stormbrew]

Seems like they just pivoted:

> 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.

[tehwebguy]

Oh wow, that’s more than double the non-immigration federal private prison population

[ncmncm]

Private prisons are good at silencing prisoners.

[rayiner]

[citation needed]

[Supermancho]

https://www.fedemploymentlaw.com/blog/2022/03/a-spotlight-on...

Google is there for your further investigation beyond the first result.

[rayiner]

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.

[Supermancho]

I didnt even look at the link. You are remaining ignorant intentionally then drawing a line in the sand. GL with whatever.