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by Nextgrid
853 days ago
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The same factor that makes private prisons problematic also makes taxation problematic - in both cases you've got a captive market that can't opt out thus no pressure to provide a good, efficient service. In a hypothetical world where inmates could choose whether to remain in prison and which one to be in, private prisons would be competing for service quality. Actually we've got that, they're just called "hotels". I wonder if the solution there would be to force politicians and everyone involved to exclusively use government-provided services - so as a condition of going into politics, you can't use private healthcare, your kids can't go to private schools, and you need to spend a day every year in a random prison and so on. Then it would mean the decision-makers got at least some incentive to make sure these services are functional and fit for purpose. |
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What you should have are companies that offer their best prices/services to the government out of fear that they'll be passed over and those highly valuable contracts will be awarded to their competitors who do better. Governments are incentivized to select the best companies to award those contracts to because they risk being voted out if people are unhappy with the level of service they're getting for their tax dollars.
Prisoners can't kick politicians out of office when they're unhappy about the state of the prisons so that's a huge issue with prisons in general, but private prisons have another issue which is profit. Whatever it costs to keep dangerous people locked up, private prisons need all of that money plus they must extract a bunch of extra money from the public just to stuff their pockets with. If private prisons want to keep prices low to the public but also want to keep filling their pockets with money they need to provide substandard care to the people they are responsible for. A non-private prison needs only what it costs to do the job and nothing more.