Re:America's Addiction to Mercenaries
by adventured on Sunday August 14, 2016 @12:01PM
(#12286080)
> for profit prisons strongly encourages incarcerating more people
Apparently government profit prisons do an even better job. Now that private prisons are increasing, the prison population level is beginning to decline after 40 years. Look out for the narrative violation.
And yes I'm aware that the rise of private prisons isn't actually the reason prison populations are finally no longer increasing. However, I find it hilarious to poke a hole in the false narrative of government prisons somehow being better, when at least 95% of all the prison population of the last 40 years went into government prisons.
Nearly the entire prison population boom - mostly 1980 to 2010 - occurred at a time when private prisons represented a tiny fraction of the prison base. If you go back to Clinton's Presidency - a time in which we saw the prison population continue to explode upwards rapidly - private prisons represented a meaningless single digit portion of the system.
The radical majority of the profit earned from the prison boom went into government specified pockets, not to the shareholders of private prisons. Handed out as special favors to create jobs in a political district, benefit construction companies, benefit police unions, and so on. Most of the employees that have benefited from those jobs have been government employees, millions of them over the years, which have derived hundreds of billions of dollars in pay from the government prison complex.
So the theory is that private prisons have a greater vested interest in boosting the prison populations than the government does? Then explain the massive boom in government prisons (and the government prison population) from 1980 to 2010. Explain how the government doesn't have in its own interest, growing its own size by putting more people in prison to be managed via ever greater tax sums / demands; passing more laws to hire more police to put more people in prison; hiring more government workers to manage more government prisons, to benefit voting districts, to ensure re-election; and on and on it goes.
Apparently government profit prisons do an even better job. Now that private prisons are increasing, the prison population level is beginning to decline after 40 years. Look out for the narrative violation.
And yes I'm aware that the rise of private prisons isn't actually the reason prison populations are finally no longer increasing. However, I find it hilarious to poke a hole in the false narrative of government prisons somehow being better, when at least 95% of all the prison population of the last 40 years went into government prisons.
Nearly the entire prison population boom - mostly 1980 to 2010 - occurred at a time when private prisons represented a tiny fraction of the prison base. If you go back to Clinton's Presidency - a time in which we saw the prison population continue to explode upwards rapidly - private prisons represented a meaningless single digit portion of the system.
The radical majority of the profit earned from the prison boom went into government specified pockets, not to the shareholders of private prisons. Handed out as special favors to create jobs in a political district, benefit construction companies, benefit police unions, and so on. Most of the employees that have benefited from those jobs have been government employees, millions of them over the years, which have derived hundreds of billions of dollars in pay from the government prison complex.
So the theory is that private prisons have a greater vested interest in boosting the prison populations than the government does? Then explain the massive boom in government prisons (and the government prison population) from 1980 to 2010. Explain how the government doesn't have in its own interest, growing its own size by putting more people in prison to be managed via ever greater tax sums / demands; passing more laws to hire more police to put more people in prison; hiring more government workers to manage more government prisons, to benefit voting districts, to ensure re-election; and on and on it goes.