Tons of conflict of interest in private prisons which are in addition to the potential abuses associated with public prisons.
Do the statistics for average time to return to prison, and pay them a bonus every year a prisoner is over that average date for 10 years type thing.
So jails make little money for the incarceration but earn profits from the rehabilitation.
Therefore, the prison would be incentivized to work with the prisoners to encourage good behavior and to show the parole board that a prisoner is worth paroling.
So long as private prisons have a say in when a prisoner is released there is conflict of interest. If a private prison gets paid $100k for a prisoner, they are going to ensure they are released at the very soonest opportunity instead of detaining them as long as possible. If they get paid per diem, they will keep them as long as possible.
I agree. This would work best if the prison had no influence on the parole board's decision. That way, the only way to get people out of prison faster is to actually rehabilitate them and encourage good behavior.
> They're just incentivized to release them ASAP
And the only way to do that is to show the parole board that a person is worth paroling, e.g. by rehabilitating them.
Why do you want incentivise a private company to release someone who is so dangerous they have to be removed from society as fast as possible?
>... US District Court Judge Thelton Henderson said he was “driven in large measure by the stunning testimony that was uncontroverted that a prisoner in one of California's 32 prisons dies on average every 6 or 7 days as a result of malpractice, negligence, or some other deficiency in the State's medical care delivery system.”
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS014067...
As fennecfoxen pointed out they also did things like forced sterilizations.
The real problem is that we spend many billions on a prison industrial complex and there are many public sector unions, contractors, builders, etc who profit from it. The political contributions of the CA prison guard union are obviously not being done to lower the number of prison guard positions. As wikipedia says "...The CCPOA is widely considered one of the most powerful political forces in California politics. ... Lobbying efforts and campaign contributions by the CCPOA have helped secure passage of numerous legislative bills favorable to union members, including bills that increase prison terms, member pay, and enforce current drug laws."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_...
This isn't to say that CA prisons are the worst in the country - likely other state's prisons are just as bad as CA. When you have the people regulating a system be the same people who are running the system, you really can't expect things to be that good.
Abolishing private prisons is a good start, but we need much more drastic reform to the prison-industrial complex and failed "tough on crime" policies, particular in the realms of drug policy, community investment, and mental health.
That is simply not correct.
>...In the 2016 election cycle, private prisons gave a record $1.6 million to candidates, parties and outside spending groups.
90% of that came from one company (GEO Group).
https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=G7000
Now compare the private prison industry to the prison guard union in CA CCPOA(California Correctional Peace Officers Association).
>...These dues raise approximately $23 million each year, of which the CCPOA allocates approximately $8 million to lobbying.
This is just the CA prison guard union and it is $8 million a year.
From the same article:
>...many of [CCPOA’s] contributions are directly pro-incarceration. It gave over $100,000 to California’s Three Strikes initiative, Proposition 184 in 1994, making it the second-largest contributor. It gave at least $75,000 to the opponents of Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that replaced incarceration with substance abuse treatment for certain nonviolent offenders. From 1998 to 2000 it gave over $120,000 to crime victims’ groups, who present a more sympathetic face to the public in their pro-incarceration advocacy. It spent over $1 million to help defeat Proposition 66, the 2004 initiative that would have limited the crimes that triggered a life sentence under the Three Strikes law. And in 2005, it killed Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan to “reduce the prison population by as much as 20,000, mainly through a program that diverted parole violators into rehabilitation efforts: drug programs, halfway houses and home detention.”
https://californiapolicycenter.org/the-role-of-the-prison-gu...
Besides lobbying for more incarceration, they also lobby to prevent accountability:
>...Between 1989 and 1999, 39 inmates were shot to death, and 200 more were wounded. Not one district attorney in the state prosecuted a correctional officer for any of these assaults. ... Local district attorneys have good reason to hesitate before taking a position against the CCPOA’s interests. Greg Strickland, former district attorney in Kings County, home to Corcoran state correctional facilitity, attempted to take a brutality case to the grand jury. The CCPOA fueled his opponent with $30,000 in the next election, leading to Strickland’s defeat. A similar scenario happened in Del Norte County and in Susanville.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061006074501/http://www.cjcj.o...
You further misunderstood the first link the bar chart below lists 4.3 million in 2019 and 2.8 million in 2016. But, that’s a subset of total spending which very focused on their bottom line.
PS: California is both very large and unusual in it’s use of propositions for major policies which confuses the issue. Nationwide union spending has a vastly lower average.
I never implied this was a total breakdown of their lobbying money. They spend an estimated 8 million a year on lobbying. As the wikipedia article says:
>...Although its membership is relatively small, representing only about one tenth the membership of the California Teachers Association, CCPOA political activity routinely exceeds that of all other labor unions in California.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Correctional_Peace_...
>...You further misunderstood the first link the bar chart below lists 4.3 million in 2019 and 2.8 million in 2016. But, that’s a subset of total spending which very focused on their bottom line.
Sorry, I was in a hurry and didn't notice they had a chart for Lobbying Totals, 1998-2019, that gives a better indication than just 2016. That shows a little over $4 million total political lobbying nationally by the private prison industry. That compares to $8 million alone in CA by the prison guard union. You originally said:
>...They often brought up to deflect discussion, but simply operate at a order of magnitude smaller scale.
This one union in one state spends more on lobbying than the private prison industry. And as the article says:
>...“The formula is simple: more prisoners lead to more prisons; more prisons require more guards; more guards means more dues-paying members and fund-raising capability; and fund-raising, of course, translates into political influence.”
The political contributions of the CA prison guard union are obviously not being done to lower the number of prison guard positions. It wasn't the private prison lobby that pushed through all that bad policy in CA.
In reality, private prisons are often brought up to deflect discussion. The reality is private prisons house a small percentage of prisoners and are a tiny part of the prison industrial complex.
CA getting rid of private prisons isn't going to help reform a broken prison system.
>...Nationwide union spending has a vastly lower average.
You haven't given any evidence that is true. Even if true, just because it costs less to influence policy in other states, doesn't mean they aren't trying to do it.
True, but number of guards and their salaries are surprisingly independent of the number of prisoners. https://www.scstatehouse.gov/CommitteeInfo/HouseLegislativeO... Unions can thus lobby for higher wages or more officers without lobbing for more prisoners. Private prisons on the other hand directly profit on a per inmate basis. As they need to look cost competitive with public prisons they thus need to lobby for more prisoners if they want increased profits. That’s either from more private prisons or more prisoners at existing prisons.
Again I am not saying unions don’t do a lot of lobbying they clearly do for all sorts of things, most recently to stop prisoner transfers during COVID-19 and get more PPE. https://www.thetimes-tribune.com/coronavirus/canaan-federal-... So what I am saying is their don’t focus on increasing the prison population as a primary motivation, thus you need to look at the issues their spending money on. Ex: https://www.texasobserver.org/texas-prison-guard-union-calls...
> You haven’t given any evidence that this is true
CA: As of 2017, the union had 39,750 members
Just one of many examples of a union at the other end of the spectrum: https://mnlabor.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/prison-guards-vote-...
The election makes WACLE the representative for about 5,900 state security and public safety workers, a big chunk of the 22,000 members who belonged to WSEU before Act 10 outlawed most state employee collective bargaining and made union membership voluntary.
PS: Private prisons are recent and growing thing making comparisons even a 10 years ago misses the current reality.
Rather than coming up with hypotheticals of how you think they could operate, it is more useful to look at what they did:
>...many of [CCPOA’s] contributions are directly pro-incarceration. It gave over $100,000 to California’s Three Strikes initiative, Proposition 184 in 1994, making it the second-largest contributor. It gave at least $75,000 to the opponents of Proposition 36, the 2000 initiative that replaced incarceration with substance abuse treatment for certain nonviolent offenders. From 1998 to 2000 it gave over $120,000 to crime victims’ groups, who present a more sympathetic face to the public in their pro-incarceration advocacy. It spent over $1 million to help defeat Proposition 66, the 2004 initiative that would have limited the crimes that triggered a life sentence under the Three Strikes law. And in 2005, it killed Gov. Schwarzenegger’s plan to “reduce the prison population by as much as 20,000, mainly through a program that diverted parole violators into rehabilitation efforts: drug programs, halfway houses and home detention.”
I don't know where private prisons spend their lobbying money, but in terms of a hypothetical private prison, they have such a small percentage of prisons, the best return for their money would probably be to lobby for privatization and bidding against government prisons. The only thing we really do know is that industry spends less nationally than the prison guard union in CA alone spends on lobbying. The prison problems in CA can't be blamed on private prisons and trying to do so is simple deflection.
>...Again I am not saying unions don’t do a lot of lobbying they clearly do for all sorts of things, most recently to stop prisoner transfers during COVID-19 and get more PPE.
Yes health/safety issues are the things they should lobby for, the issue that they have so much money, they also lobby for lots of things they shouldn't be involved with.
>Just one of many examples of a union at the other end of the spectrum:
Well there has been a backlash against public sector unions in Wisconsin and one group of prison guards has decided to leave AFSCME and form a new union with supposedly less interest in electoral politics. That doesn't tell us much about how much influence they had before this point.
>PS: Private prisons are recent and growing thing making comparisons even a 10 years ago misses the current reality.
Not really. Private prisons first started around 1987 and have a slow growth in the number of prisoners compared to public prisons. The last 10 years have been stagnant with little growth.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/private_prison_growth_to...
It is clear though that claiming that prison guard unions "simply operate at a order of magnitude smaller scale." is simply wrong.
With the way they are currently regulated, it isn't clear if private prisons are much better than state run prisons, but to focus on them and ignore law enforcement public sector unions is a deflection.
The current system is broken though. Those of us who care about prison reform, also care about the lack of accountability of prison guards and the cruelty for cruelty sake that seems to permeate the prison system. When you have the people who regulate the system are the same ones who run it, though what do you expect? Take the example of Cochran prison. This was a prison which shot and killed more prisoners than any prison in the country and the guards were setting up and then betting on gladiator battles.
>...Guards and inmates described macabre scenes in which prison officers gathered in control booths overlooking cramped exercise yards in advance of fights, which were sometimes delayed so that female guards and even prison secretaries could be present.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/staged-fights-betti...
After 60 minutes covered the story, the California Department of Corrections did an investigation and naturally found no "'widespread staff conspiracy' to abuse prisoners".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Prison,_Corco...
Anyway, I don’t want to bring up the same point, but over a 26 year period that quote covers nearly 1% of total spending which is clearly not a major focus.
> The last 10 years have been stagnant with little growth.
Yes, and like many industries that’s changed their focus. EX: https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/profiting-enforcemen...
In 2015, the private prison industry operated 62 percent of immigration detention beds and ran nine of the ten largest detention centers housing ICE detainees. Although the model of prison privatization varies, a private prison typically charges a daily rate per person incarcerated to cover investment and operating costs, and to turn a profit. In FY 2017, DHS spent approximately $126 per day for each detained noncitizen. As immigration detention costs steadily increased to around $2 billion annually, industry profits soared. Between 2007 and 2014, CoreCivic’s overall annual profits grew from about $133 million to $195 million, and GEO Group’s profits grew from about $42 million to $144 million yearly.
When your talking 62% of a specific market that’s worth lobbing for. As shown by very healthy profit growth in a ‘stagnant’ industry.
Preventing any accountability for many murders, probably goes a little beyond "arguably shouldn’t". Though in particular, the infamous gladiator spectacle at Cochran though was likely more a case of what happens when an organization regulates itself. People seem to understand that it isn't a good idea for businesses that could harm the public to regulate themselves, but forgot that idea when it is a government agency.
>...Anyway, I don’t want to bring up the same point, but over a 26 year period that quote covers nearly 1% of total spending which is clearly not a major focus.
That is more like the tip of the iceberg. LA Times reporter Dan Moraine estimates the prison guard union might have 11 PACS.
>The political budget flows out in 6 main directions.
>CCPOA pays for public relations.
>CCPOA pays for lobbying services.
>CCPOA funds affiliate groups.
>CCPOA contributes “soft money” to political parties, political events, debates.
>CCPOA gives direct contributions to candidates.
>Election winners support the CCPOA political agenda.
>Tough on crime legislation fuels expansion of the correctional system.
>Expanded correctional system adds membership to the CCPOA.
https://web.archive.org/web/20061006074501/http://www.cjcj.o...
>In 2015, the private prison industry operated 62 percent of immigration detention beds
Immigration detention is not usually what the average person thinks of when they think of private prison, so it is good to call out the differences so everyone is talking about the same things.
>...When your talking 62% of a specific market that’s worth lobbing for. As shown by very healthy profit growth in a ‘stagnant’ industry.
Their lobbying though is a tiny fraction of the lobbying of law enforcement groups.
Yes, very much so.
From the ACLU:
https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration...
Here's a classic example: "Kids for Cash", 2011 in PA:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2011/08/11/139536686...
According to him, the quality of the food, cleanliness, staff is WAY higher at a private facility than the state run one.
Current contractual incentives on both sides of the prison company / government relationship are too perverse.
I don't think they are necessarily a moral hazard by nature - like charter schools, there is the possibility of having something good come from private industry, as well as things not so good. I don't know what the systemic obstacles are that need to be overcome, however. State and federal prisons did not used to be as much the over-crowded, brutal institutions they have become in the last 50 years, perhaps the problem is not so much with private prisons per se.
You’re right it’s not private prisons per se.
It’s the private ownership model that we’ve seen abused again and again.
This is one of those situations where the warm fuzzy anecdote is overpowered by evidence that scaled the model is rife for abuse.
At scale, yeah a dozen voting fraud stories here, and there. But mathematically we can show that it’s largely been working . Whether the candidates we get are “ours”, gerrymandering, and gaming the electoral college are aside from the fact the math on Election Day has largely worked out as one would hope.
The same is not true given a macro view of private prisons. Profits are going up, so is over crowding, incarceration rates, the result is racially and financially biased, we get more uptight with offenses to fill beds (Google it, it’s not rocket science, there’s history of bias), and it feeds a cottage industry of work that’s essentially reiterating daily to workers at these places we should just treat each other like animals. Go home, have your light beer, and watch news, that’s a good boy. Come back tomorrow.
Note too how “profit is up” “inequality is up” are more of those types of math results. They say something in numbers entirely without considering how that acts as a forcing function on the populace. We’ll just paper over it with rhetoric about protecting individuality and how yours matters most, and forget about how our culture literally is profiting from taking it away from others that need not be in that position
Some mathematicians have suggested upward of 25% of inmates may be innocent because of inequities in the justice system
Private prisons are a big bright mathy spot that shows clearly those inequities.
In the US, the government derives its authority to govern (and by extension, the justice system derives its authority to imprison and punish criminals) only by the collective consent of the people.
It's the same reason private police and private courts are a big moral problem - they are in a position of authority over people that only government to whom the people have consented should be.
Saying "we have to fix state prisons too!" is not an argument against "private prisons are a moral hazard". We should do both!
A strawman argument is when you restate someone's argument in a way that's stupid, then you refute the stupid argument. Or in the extreme case, argue against an argument that the person never made. In both cases, you're not arguing against the other person, you're arguing against a straw man that you made up. Hence the name.
It's still a logical fallacy, just a different one. Fallacy of relative privation applies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallacies#Fallacy_of_r...
https://socratic.org/questions/what-is-the-difference-betwee...
(Similarly, a weakman is when you seek out someone who genuinely holds a weak (easier to argue against) version of the position you wish to push against, argue against this weak version, and act as if you have argued against the stronger versions.
Neither of these appear to be what has been done here.
Currently, private prisons are generally paid a flat rate per prisoner. Since they make profit per prisoner, that means they want more prisoners. They are incentivized to discourage positive outcomes and fewer prisoners, because that means less profit.
If instead private prisons were paid by some sort of rehabilitation metric, things would change very quickly. For example, if you paid more per prisoner to prisons with low recidivism rates post-release.
Capitalism works great for efficiency, you just need to make sure you have the right incentive structure in place, in order to make sure the thing you are optimizing is the thing you actually want to optimize.
Assuming stuff like this isn't a good idea. They're completely different countries.
On the other hand, I have a hard time seeing someone being both that diabolical and long-term in mindset.
Also, to your point, private prisons only account for 8.41% of the prison population in the U.S. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison#United_States
It was government prisons nearly all of those people were put into during the prime years of the massive drug war, not private prisons. Commenters always and without exception intentionally ignore that fact, for obvious reasons (implodes the propaganda). I'm entirely against private prisons, however it's comical the lengths people will go to, to pretend it wasn't government prisons those millions of people were put into. The prison boom was a government prison boom. The prison industrial complex was a government effort almost exclusively. The drug war was a government effort. The cops (government) benefitted, the police unions benefitted, the government contractors benefitted, the politicians benefitted (jobs and construction in their districts, along with more tax money and government spending).
Are you making the claim that private prisons reduce total inmates? If not, this claim, truth or not, is irrelevant.
There are 2 problems with prisons in the United States: 1) There are way too many people in US prisons. We have the highest prison population in the world by percentage and total numbers of any country. That is a metric you don't want to win at.
2) The conditions are absolutely horrifying.
To solve the first problem, you need to do obvious things like eliminate mandatory minimums. But you also need to do less obvious things like reduce overall sentencing across all crimes. You also need to reduce or eliminate prison sentences for most non-violent offenders. We also need to put in place better negotiating power for accused people so that the innocent don't have to take plea bargains (basically we need more fair trials).
The second problem can be solved in a number of ways, but the big thing that is missing is oversight from groups unrelated to the prison who are responsible for metrics. Imagine you have centralized offices where people watch video in prisons remotely and bring charges against people on this inside or implement policies. Those people would have to be completely isolated from the guards/wardens etc. of those prisons. Imagine they sit in a central office in Houston or whatever and watch prisons in Montana, California etc. What prisons need is a set of eyes that can be truly impartial.
It is great that the discussion are becoming mainstream, but we have so far to go in this country. Its truly astounding.
Presumably illegal. There wasn't a state law banning it, and Buck vs. Bell technically still stands allowing state run compulsory sterilization.
Human rights have never applied universally, the lack of any Nuremberg trial against the Allies made that clear.
Sure, it's neither the main problem nor the main area of recent reform, either in corrections specifically or law enforcement more generally, in California.
I have a hard time believing there are a few "root" problems. We got where we are because the entire incentive+accountability structure was completely skewed for decades. IMHO, there are thousands of "root" issues at this point, to the point where the word "root" is moot.
Here's a great headline to consider: "California Bans Sterilization of Female Inmates Without Consent". 2013. In the United States. Two thousand and god damn thirteen. https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/california-bans...
other links. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/07/09/200444613... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/08/califo...