[protomyth]

Not going to disagree with the intent, but that would make it very worth the effort to get as many children who shouldn't be in prison incarcerated since they likely wouldn't be prone to going back. In fact, it might lead to no prison time for hard cases since that would affect he prison's profits.

[digikata]

Absolutely agree with you. It's a general problem with using any performance metric as a sole-focus driver for optimization. You'll find the optimizations may drive behavior beyond where the metric has direct value. That's a truism if you're talking about performance of prison contracts, computer systems, factory throughput, or even capitalism as a whole.

And really, that's what a well-running oversight function should be doing in the case of prison management, adjusting metrics to drive the system toward good whole-society outcomes. Public vs private prisons theoretically doesn't matter, except that introducing private prisons introduces a dynamic where corruption of the oversight function and metrics is used for optimization of profits.

[protomyth]

Agreed, incentives are fun problems everywhere.

> Public vs private prisons theoretically doesn't matter, except that introducing private prisons introduces a dynamic where corruption of the oversight function and metrics is used for optimization of profits.

Read up on some of the campaigning done by the prison worker's union in California and you will see public has its own profit motives that are just as bad.