Even government run prisons have a pressure to keep head counts up. Like schools, they get 'paid' per head, and are always against budget pressures.

The situation is not any better with law enforcement and prosecutors. Nobody gets excited when an elected prosecutor says 'I put 2000 people into a diversionary program this year.' and his political opponents go pick out the fringe cases where 1 of those 2000 went on to rob a bank and kill someone, and use that as justification that all of them should have been in prison.

The law enforcement officer that brags about how many people he 'put away' gets kudos and accolades, while the one that let them go stays at the bottom of the ranks.

None of this will change until we as society value rehabilitation over punishment and are willing to accept the small up-front and rather short term risk of recividism in exchange for a long term benefit to society as a whole.

I'm skeptical the public sector would do better. The U.S. defense and intelligence institutions are public and (from my perspective) seem to be quite eager to engage in conflicts, same as a private institution with financial incentives to do so might.

The real culprit here is prosecutors that have very little interest in actual justice, but instead have a strong desire to win cases and secure harsh punishments. Private prisons don't need to lobby prosecutors and legislators to do these things. Prosecutors and law makers are all too eager to be "tough on crime" all by themselves.

Corecivic Inc NYSE: CXW. The market definitely anticipates more profit for the largest private jailer in the counter, post election.

I think there is a very tribal incentive with elected district attorneys who should instead by nominated by the local executive, with advise and consent by the legislative body. Making a prosecutor be a politician pretty clearly is itself a conflict of interest.

There might be some improvement, but how much can be gained by shuffling things around? The U.S. is a democracy and prosecutors are aggressive because it's what the people want. If we shift that power to a local executive, committing to nominate hardline prosecutors will become a typical campaign promise (similar to our current situation with presidents and supreme court justices).

I think the only real fix is education.

All that's true. But voters deserve a lot of the criticism. It's true that DAs run up the score to run for higher office. But voters vote for that.

DAs didn't pass Three Strikes. Voters did.

There's plenty of blame to go around...congress for taking away the power of judges to actually, you know, judge with mandatory minimums, the public , for choosing to believe anecdotal stories of boogeymen over statistics, our political system for letting voters decide judges and DA's (who run on such attributes as number of years sentenced/convicted) and culture that values punishment and retribution over rehabilitatoin

At the very least (I think? I'm Australian so not intimately familiar with US law) the public sector can't lobby/sue the government for infringing upon their business when laws are changed or relaxed.

I used to agree with this until I realized that if an organization could feasibly purchase the prisons and reform the treatments without having to wade through the bureaucratic nightmare that is public administration, the system of punitive repercussions could be made well. In other words, if one can see past the money to be 'made' via the graft, kickbacks, and underuse of resources that government grants and other capital available to privately owned prisons tends to engender, said private prisons may just hold the answer for what ails the DOC by the very nature of their privacy.

Take SpaceX for example, they have done more for space travel than NASA in recent years, not for want of intelligence in NASA scientists, but because SpaceX is streamlined bureaucratically in a way that, currently, NASA is not.

A bit sad, really, as public jobs are far more comfortable and secure, and so should be used by the administrators for greater performance output.

"Financial incentives to maintain prison head-counts is a crime against humanity."

I'm not so sure about this.

It's the police/prosecutors that put people in there, and parole hearing folks as well - neither of which are 'private entities'.

So, the connection between 'headcount' and 'ownership' is not so direct.

It's entirely plausible that a small change in law could affect how many are actually put in prison.

Obviously - lobbying is an issue, but it's indirect.

I think the problem in the US is the odd way you prosecute - you can do 'one thing' and up getting charted with '10 things' and getting 10 stacked sentences which adds up to 100 years.

Also - the punishment for small amounts of weed in most states is insane.

Likewise - the drinking age is crazy high in the US.

Some minor changes in the law could really quite radically affect how many people are in jail.

But prisons have very little control over prison numbers, whether to send someone to prison is decided solely by the courts with no influence from the prison system.

Prison guard unions lobby for what is essentially more jobs for their members.

http://reason.com/blog/2015/06/02/are-for-profit-prisons-or-...

1. They lobby the legislature right, they can't lobby judges themselves.

2. Is there is any evidence that they are lobbying for more or heavier prison sentences to make more money, because that's a pretty serious accusation. I would think that the lobbying money is actually going to get politicians to choose their prison service over public ones or their competitor's private prison. I think that allegations that they are lobbying to get more people into jail is a serious and unsubstantiated one.

Prison guard unions are public safety unions. They aren't lobbying to get politicians to choose their prison service, their company. They're unions of government workers. The competitor would be private prisons.

> Is there is any evidence that they are lobbying for more

Prison guard unions regularly lobby against marijuana legalization.

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

They lobby for prison expansion, more prisons.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/09/california-prison-g...

They lobby against parole.

http://reason.com/blog/2012/08/22/what-does-it-mean-that-pub...

Obviously most of this is at the state level. I live in CA and know more about CA. We have private prisons, just fewer.

https://www.privateprisonnews.org/state/CA/