>I also understand that the prison system was privatised in the US.

The prison system was not privatized in the US. Some places do have private prison but it is by no means the norm. As of 2012 less than 8% of the 2.2 million incarcerated persons in the US are in private prisons [1]. This is less than 1% of the population. Although 20% of federal prisoners are in private prisons as of last year [2].

The recidivism rate is even worse. In 2005 almost a half a million inmates were tracked after their release, more than 75% were rearrested within 5 years.[3]

>financial incentives to incarcerate...

Do you have any sources for this?

[1]http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-g...

[2]http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2015/06/private-prisons-prof...

[3]http://www.nij.gov/topics/corrections/recidivism/pages/welco...

> The recidivism rate is even worse. In 2005 almost a half a million inmates were tracked after their release, more than 75% were rearrested within 5 years.

We have an electorate and politicians who want to put a lot of people in prison but a) don't want to "waste" money on prisoners and b) want prison to be as punitive as possible. We do very little education, counseling, vocational training, etc. Someone who goes to a US prison comes out less able to function in society than they were when they went in. They have no new job skills and any they had haven't been exercised and are out of date, they have the black mark of a conviction, they've been ground down by the experience. Honestly 75% sounds about right.

We have to accept that the people we put in prison will come out one day, and it's better for everyone if they rejoin society with the skills they need to succeed. It's in nobody's interest for them to re-offend, but we do so little to prevent it.

There was at least one notable incident of a for-profit detention center outright bribing judges to impose harsher sentences: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

> Do you have any sources for this?

Actually the second link you provided mentions how private prisons take steps to keep inmates 'in' longer. So that's on incentive.

I haven't taken the time to look into it in detail (so shouldn't make sweeping statement of course), but I do remember hearing in other submissions on this site that prisons lobby and fund elected representatives who are 'tough on crime' and who might send convictions their way, so a truer 'incentive' to incarcerate initially not just keep them there.

I'll see if I can dig those up.

Thank you. I was wonder if it was actual kickbacks or something indirect like campaign funding.

I can't find the specific submissions I saw previously but did find a plethora of articles like those below with example of lobbying:

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/15/america_on_lockdown_why_the_...

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/issues/prisons/

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/08/03/627471/private-p...

There are a lot more out there across the years. The general impression is one of an 'industry' seeking to expand its operations and that just doesn't sit right to me as an outsider.

Thanks, very interesting stats!

>> financial incentives to incarcerate...

> Do you have any sources for this?

For private prisons, the Corrections Corporation of America reportedly spends over $1 million each year on lobbying. [1][2]

Beyond private prisons, there's lobbying from prison guards' unions. For example, the California union appears to have substantial political influence, and in 2008 successfully spent $1.8 million to defeat a ballot initiative that would have reduced the prison population.[3]

Further, in some municipalities, cities use fines as revenue-raising tools, and arrest and jail people who fail to pay. See e.g. the Ferguson DOJ report.[4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_Ame...

[2] http://www.diversityinc.com/diversity-management/who-profits...

[3] http://criminology.fsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/volume-10-issu... p. 750 (PDF page 274)

[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/0...

None of what you cited is actual evidence that private prisons have had an impact on incarceration rates.

I will also point out that lobbying is something every industry and interest group does in the United States, including many groups who support drug and sentencing reform. $1 million isn't even really that much.

What measure of proof do you require?

$1 million isn't even really that much.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tullock_paradox

Any measure would be a good start.

>For private prisons, the Corrections Corporation of America reportedly spends over $1 million each year on lobbying. [1][2]

Why lobbying -- buying influence with money -- is legal in the US, I will never understand...

It's because the money isn't given to the politicians or their campaigns. The money is spent hiring the lobbyists, and their teams to dedicate manpower to finding convincing arguments which can then be presented to the politicians.

Yes lobbying is usually associated with evil corporations, but the fact of the matter is that in order to fix it you would need to remove the power for citizens to speak to their representatives.

Lobbying is, as far as I know, legal in every functional democracy.

I think you are confusing this with campaign contributions, which is a different but related activity.

I'm not aware of lobbies, established for a specific purpose, with offices and personel, and getting donations, in any functional democracy I know of.

Lobbying in the UK sure sounds like lobbying in the US to me.[1] So does Volkswagen's lobbying of the EU parliament.[2] Do you have an example of a functional democracy that doesn't have lobbying like this?

[1] http://www.lobbyingtransparency.org/

[2] https://uk.news.yahoo.com/volkswagen-scandal-puts-eu-lobbyin...

> Do you have any sources for this?

"A new report by In the Public Interest finds that private prison contracts that include “occupancy requirements” — effectively inmate quotas — are alarmingly common. Among the 62 contracts that they were able to obtain, 65 percent contained occupancy provisions that required prisons to remain between 80 and 100 percent full, and can last for as long as 20 years. If beds sit empty, states still have to pay, which the report dubbed a “no-crime tax.” And even when the abuses and violations for which these private firms are notorious cause the state to remove prisoners, contractual deals compel the state to keep paying."

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/09/20/2658701/private-...

> The prison system was not privatized in the US. Some places do have private prison but it is by no means the norm.

It doesn't have to be the norm, one is too many; private prisons should not be allowed at all and the introduction of business to the prison system is privatization of the prison system.

Most prisons may not be 100% private, but how many private sector companies provide very important services that create nearly the same problems as private prisons? Does it matter if Guards-R-Us are supplying guards to Private-Prisons-R-Us or to New York's own prisons?

If you want to see just how bad private prisons can be, read about the Cash for Kids scandal. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal

Calling those prisons "private" in the sense that "private" equates to "private sector" is a huge misnomer.

There's a judge who was not neutral.

Out of these two, the plea bargaining system always seemed the most corrupt to me. It's also widespread (in some form^) and predates privatization.

I say some form, because confessions forced with threats of far worse punishment are a long unbroken tradition. It used to be more common for them to happen after sentencing, say during your punishment.

The modern form usually revolves around an enormous range of potential punishments. 6 months probation if you confess/bargain, 6 ears in jail otherwise. It's especially malicious because it's all happening between lawyers, without judicial involvement. Well paid lawyers are important in courts too, but at least there is a neutral judge in the room.

It's not unique to the US.

Judges aren't neutral. They're only supposed to be neutral.

There was a movement to get everyone to decline all plea bargains to try to swamp the system, but of course these are criminals who will likely lose their case in court and end up serving a longer sentence so it never went anywhere.

Interesting thing is that one of the largest plea bargain use-cases are DUI first offenders, a group for whom many that is there only interaction with the criminal justice system -- and there are some white middle-class suburbanites who loooooove plea bargains then.

And what? It is bad that they don't usually commit crimes? Or just because they are white? First time offender plea bargains are the best chance to reduce prison population.

It's not bad -- my point is that the class of the (admittedly stereotypical) complainer about plea-bargaining, is also one of its bigger beneficiaries. That probably wasn't clear based on the comment I replied to.

And yet he says:

>> And if we focused on cutting back sentence lengths, maybe that would weaken DAs’ bargaining power at plea bargaining, but since people aren’t serving the massively long sentences anyway, it probably won’t have that big an effect on prison population either.

They're getting lots of easy short sentences because they accept those in exchange for not going to trial against 25 years. So it sure seems like reducing the long sentences and overdone charges would reduce the likelihood of getting plea bargains. Of course that would make more work for the prosecutors. Before taking that route, one has to ask if we really should have fewer people in prison. Efficiency in dolling out appropriate punishment is not a bad thing. Efficiency with injustice is a bad thing. I have no data on that, so I'll stop now. I guess I'm asking, are the people in prison for the right reasons, and is their actual sentence appropriate for what they did? We should start there, not at the population numbers.

>Is this an accurate view? Do these plea bargain happen regularly?

Yes. Either that or people just confess to everything they can out of ignorance or because showing reticence can supposedly get you leniency from a judge.

>I also understand that the prison system was privatised in the US.

Not the whole system(s), but there are private prison operators. The majority of prisons are still state owned and run.

>perfect storm

As you predicted, this guy Mark Ciavarella is probably the most shameful example of systematic injustice in recent history; he was caught and eventually sent to prison himself (though it is rare for a judge to go to prison for something they did on the bench). There is no reason that this sort of thing couldn't be happening on a wide scale. http://boingboing.net/2013/08/06/judge-who-accepted-private-...

In my state, IIRC the private prisons have contracts with the state which stipulate that they will be paid as if they were nearly full without regard to if their population falls below some threshold. I think that's probably the reason why we don't have prison operators bribing judges. We have other problems though, mostly related to underfunding health care, food, anything else that can be underfunded. About ten years ago there was a huge sex-abuse scandal in the youth-prisons. http://www.texastribune.org/2010/01/07/15-of-tx-youth-offend...

>> The majority of prisons are still state owned and run.

Do you also have privatisation happening by the back-door?

i.e. how many private services do the public prisons use? You get some weird situations where public institutions use staff from contractors, rent buildings and buy in all their services.

In Texas, we had a prison system director named Andy Collins who involved himself and the whole prison system in a huge scandal(s) about 20 years ago, and the stink from that still hasn't gone away. It was super embarrassing. Collins signed contracts to purchase some soybean product that was supposed to resemble food from an ex-convict (from Canada, not TDCJ). He didn't use the required bid process, and was receiving kickbacks for the stuff. They bought so much of it that it sat in warehouses and rotted. The inmates just wouldn't eat it. (source: I was a TDCJ guard at the time). The current directors seem content with minor scandals, and are presently leaving the wide-scale graft to someone else. TDCJ has been pretty territorial in protecting their control over staffing, and the citizens of the state were happy to fund enough concrete and bars to prevent the state needing to use those kind of creative tricks in order to get more beds. The biggest scandal with prison privatization in Texas, as far as I am aware was the problem(s) I mentioned before with the Texas Youth Commission. That's not an argument for privatization though, our private prisons still suck; we just don't do much of it here. We're apparently very proud of having one of the largest prison systems in the world, and I think our public prison officials tend to see private prisons as a threat (at least until they retire and consult for them).

>You get some weird situations where public institutions use staff from contractors, rent buildings and buy in all their services.

Yeah, IIRC TYC had all of that, and while it was talked about, nothing was really done until the sex-scandal broke.

http://www.texasmonthly.com/articles/the-great-texas-prison-...

Any government agency meets this description, though. Your sense of smell is accurate -- it's where fraud does occur in reality. But the more serious fraud on the public comes when prison owners are incentivized to buy less food and sell the labor of their prisoners.

Partially privatized. According to a 2012 source [1], there are 1.6 million prisoners in the US and roughly 8% of them are in privately-owned prisons. That number, however, unfortunately keeps growing.

[1] http://www.propublica.org/article/by-the-numbers-the-u.s.s-g...

Huh, I was under the impression that most prisoners in the US were in privatised prisons. If that is not the case, then this does not seem to explain either the prison boom.

Prison boom is easy to explain.

Politicians like to be seen doing something. Punishing bad people is easy. Building prisons is the cost but politicians don't pay this cost and people don't understand the financial cost of the prisons nor the cost it inflicts on those imprisoned and their families.

Politicians also like to control people. You do this through laws and regulations. Combined with punitive measures you coerce people into thinking and behaving as you need them. Those who don't or are less desirable; poor who don't fund campaigns and such; are easy targets.

Politicians also want to put groups against each other, distracting both sides from all the other activities that the politician may be engaged in.

TL;DR Politicians crave power and money, it is simple to "protect" the people by making it easier to put people in jail claiming a problem solved.

But the politicians aren't the ones doing the sentencing. They just write the laws. The Slate article suggests that it's the judges who are handing out increasingly Draconian sentencing. Why are judges doing that?

Judges and prosecutors are elected too (it varies from state to state) so technically they are politicians too.

Aren't they frequently appointed or they run unopposed?

If you're interested in this, John Oliver did a piece on elected judges: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poL7l-Uk3I8

They're "supposed to" be appointed. This is the way it used to be and the way it constitutionally has to be at the federal level. But I think more than half of states have elected judges.

True, they often run unopposed, but that doesn't free then from political pressure; if they make an unpopular decision, any lawyer could opt to run against them by simply campaigning as not the other judge. They would usually win and get a fantastic résumé boost.

> if they make an unpopular decision, any lawyer could opt to run against them by simply campaigning as not the other judge

In many localities there is no requirement that a judge have any prior legal training or experience.

So anyone, not just any lawyer.

It varies from state to state (perhaps even county to county) In some places they are appointed, in others they are elected.

When they are elected, even if they run unopposed they still tend to act tough on crime. If a judge or prosecutor started acting weak, the could very quickly find themselves opposed in the next election.

One reason for this are mandatory minimum sentences. And in that case, it is the politicians who made the sentencing, in a way.

Often times judges have their hands tied. Many minimum sentencing laws were passed in the late '80's & throughout the '90's in response to the crime waves of the era. Judges simply can't give lower sentences in many instances even if they want to. In my opinion, this is a significant contributing factor.

Make no mistake, prosecutors are politicians.

Actually a lot of judges were very opposed to mandatory sentencing because it removes a lot of their power.

All those things are true in other democratic countries as well, but most of them don't have anywhere near the incarceration of the United States.

The US is by far the most violent western nation.

Except for homicide, this is not true nowadays. See http://economicpolicy.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/67/347.a... for a recent study on the subject, which notes your opinion as a "common perception" that does not match the actual data.

Also by far the most populous.

You have to think about this in the context of history. The US has largely been diverse throughout most of its history. Most developed countries are largely dominated by one race.

i don't understand this argument, can you elaborate? it looks like you're suggesting that usa is a nexus of interracial violence and other race-motivated crimes.

Not only that, but the private prison population was very small in the 1980's and early 1990's when the vast majority of the prison boom happened. Private prisons are mostly a late-90's and 2000's reaction to the desire of states to save money housing their huge prison populations.

The private prison meme is far larger than the actual number, which is eight percent. Elsewhere in this people are asking how much of US manufacturing is from prison labor, I doubt it is large enough to accurately measure.

Just how large is the meme, in units that can be reasonably compared to the percent of prisoners in privately-owned prisons?

Don't impugn the ACLU with your lack of understanding of how percentages work.

Edit: LesZedCB just deleted his comment where he adds two different percentage groups from the ACLU site.

Someone would have to do a survey but I would guess that 90% of Europeans buy into it. Of course they also believe that they will be carjacked if they come to the US so I don't think their opinions are useful.

What percentage is publicly owned but largely privately ran?

Private prisons are very rare in the US. The majority of them are run by individual states or by the federal government.

Where I have read that private prisons are on the rise, however, is in the UK itself, and in New Zealand and (to a lesser extent) Australia, run by companies like Serco and G4S.