[Prophasi]

By definition? That requires some justification.

The justice system still sets the parameters and manages the procedures by which sentences are handed down. If a court determines you're going to prison for 10 years, you're going -- the private company manages your environment for that time.

And given that private parties also manage your medical care, hospital stays, air travel, car manufacture, work environments, home building, and thousands of other mechanisms and environments that determine your safety and quality of living, I struggle with finding a moral difference when it comes to prisons.

You could argue that these other things are voluntary and prison isn't, but it's involuntary even if run by government; most inmates would opt out either way.

And I think it's highly naive, this distinction between private companies as greedy, interested parties and government agencies and functionaries as objective arbiters of truth and goodwill. Either way you have ridiculous salaries, internal power struggles, marketing/perception, budget committees, and cynical people inured to the hard realities of the lives they affect.

[zeidrich]

A prison is a place where people are deprived of liberties. A society can justify depriving people of liberties. A private interest should not have the right to do so.

Yes, it's not the private interest who condemns the prisoner, but they run these facilities at a profit, turning what should be a rehabilitating environment into an environment that is designed to promote full prisons to enrich an individual.

A good prison should work at a financial loss because there should be a societal benefit to rehabilitating inmates. If a higher prison population turns into a financial incentive, there is no incentive to help inmates or even reduce recidivism.

This is especially true when you consider how many minor offenses can send people to jail in the US. It is also interesting to consider that when slavery was abolished, many plantations turned into for-profit prisons; or that the incarceration rate of the US is the highest in the world.

[Prophasi]

The government delivers citizens into the hands of private management all the time: required insurance policies, training programs, licensure, etc. Mandating that every obligatory service be not only funded, but implemented, by government would extend its rolls of employees, budgets, laws and legal complexity, competencies, and requisite voter knowledge beyond any reasonable possibility.

You seem to be ascribing a negative to the mere profit focus of a private company, rather than the outcome. We could do the same for insurance, medical practice, automobiles, plane travel, lodging, and everything else important; but we don't, because private companies in the open market perform better.

Would you then deliver everything important into the hands of government monopoly, despite everything we know about the benefits of competition, for the moral premise rather than results? And if you think the results weigh against private prison companies, might we restructure the government/private arrangement before nuking wholesale the notion of the market?

WRT the incarceration rate, I'd have to see something linking that to private companies running prisons, rather than problems with the justice system itself.

Consider the abysmal performance of government-run schools, among others, as a counterpoint.

[anonymousab]

Well, the basic idea is that a government prison would have the goals of society in mind (both security and rehabilitation) whereas a private prison's profit motive benefits most from having as many prisoners as they can get for as long as possible.

Actual rehab runs contrary to that; facilitating a state of affairs that results in more prisoners (repeat and new) for longer periods is going to be a primary goal.

What solutions are there that aren't simply large carrots (bonus' for prisons when repeat offense rates fall?) or large sticks (penalties/fines for the opposite)?

[Prophasi]

Agreed that that's the basic idea behind government-run anything -- its ostensible adherence to the benefit of society. But that's the naivete I was referring to: in the end there is no "government" per se, just a bunch of self-interested individuals. They all stand to benefit from overemphasizing a need for their department, bigger budgets, better benefits, tenure, and the political clout to influence those things.

There will always be undesirable incentives. Say we reverse things and pay the company more for reformed prisoners who make parole earlier. Now the incentive is to err on the side of leniency and potentially release more dangerous criminals earlier. You might then counteract it by penalizing the company even more if one of their parolees ends up back in the tank within X period of time; that might help, but depending on the parameters it could make them so gun-shy that we're back where we started -- holding people for longer -- but with a more complex system with more opportunity for schemes and loopholes.

It's not an easy problem by any means. As I said, I want to find some studies; I'm open to what the results show, but I'm very wary of trusting government simply because their purported goal is social benefit.

[pilif]

It starts to become a problem when judges and district attorneys own shares of the companies that run the prisons. This creates a clear conflict of interest (the more people they can convict, the more money they will make) which so far doesn't seem to be noticed as you read about such circumstances at times.

[Prophasi]

That's fair, and unquestionably a conflict of interest. However, it's not an irrevocable quality of a prison run by a private company (and therefore evil "by definition").

OTOH, purchase of shares is at least an above-board, traceable interaction. Government officials have always gotten perks and kickbacks from private companies, rich individuals, NGOs, and their own budgets that are either off the books or disguised as something else, and therefore less transparent.

I haven't seen (or yet hunted for) a study of publicly run vs. privately run prisons, in terms of treatment, costs, etc.; but I'd be curious, to say the least.

[coldtea]

>And I think it's highly naive, this distinction between private companies as greedy, interested parties and government agencies and functionaries as objective arbiters of truth and goodwill.

Higly naive?

A government agency can be greedy or good.

A private company is by definition greedy. It exists to make money.

Unlike the second, which does what the owner/director likes, a government can be controlled by a vigilant voting population, that eagerly participates in political debates and raises issues.

[nrb]

The issue isn't that the company is private, the issue is with the fact it's a for-profit entity. This leads to a host of perverse incentives such as providing the lowest possible level of care for the most money possible and a lack of effort put into curbing recidivism (repeat business!!).

There are juvenile facilities that are run by non-profits and they exhibit lower rates of recidivism with a cost far lower than public prisons still.

[Prophasi]

Those incentives are often there when a private company and the government make a deal.

It's certainly not a problem with for-profit entities in general, though: Apple and Ford and IKEA and every other private manufacturer has those same incentives -- decrease cost and quality and increase price, with a corresponding interest in recidivism.

Obviously in government scenarios -- defense contracting, roads, schools, prisons, utilities -- local or regional (or temporal) monopolies suppress the competition that keeps other companies' base desires in check on the open market.

There are a lot of pressures to the contrary and obvious reasons it's the initial path of least resistance to grant such monopolies, but I wonder if there's a better way to structure deals like these to encourage competition at the same time.