I've seen a lot about the rise in private prisons and it got me thinking. Private prisons have a profit motive to actually increase recidivism (more repeat "customers",) I wonder what would happen if we instead financially punished/rewarded for-profit prisons based on their recidivism rates?

One of the Peelian principles for the police force is: "The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it." Incentives matter, and in the same way we shouldn't establish incentives for treating prisoners as resources to be exploited for profit.

I'm not sure if the police quote makes a ton of sense. While police presence and efficiency does discourage crime to some extent, many crimes are committed in the heat of the moment and/or despite the risk of being caught.

This is a fantastically interesting idea. For me, the idea itself is pleasant enough to make your comment the high point of this thread. :)

I immediately tried to think of how the incentives could be set up this way and unfortunately couldn't come up with anything that didn't seem susceptible to gaming.

Ie, offer prisons a tasty carrot -- if it's tasty enough to be attractive, you get the same link between sentencing-happy judges and prisons. Sentence people who don't deserve it for a couple of months, they get out and don't reoffend.

I haven't given it much thought, just a idle idea really.

In my ideal world the prisons would offer job training/therapy/etc.. and generally just start treating prisons like people, but it probably would be too easy to game. Prisons would probably try to game transfers to move high-risk to re-offend prisoners to other prisons. Sentencing gaming like you mentioned, probably lots of other odd and interesting unethical hacks that I can't even think of.

Just re-enforces my personal belief that for-profit persons are not a good idea at best, and immoral at worst.

This was California's prison system in the 70s, when we reached a recidivism rate of 15%. Then it was overhauled. My other comment has some more details.

>> I don't understand why we don't mandate that?

Because prisoners being rehabilitated and rejoining society is contrary to the interests of the prison industry.

Can you clarify this point? Do you mean from a monetary perspective, private interests, public prisons, etc?

It is in the prison industry's best interest to have as many people in prison as possible. The longer a prisoner stays in prison, the more money the prison makes. If they get out of prison, commit a crime and are thrown back in, that's great from the prison's perspective.

Not only is it not mandatory, it's often not even available or very hard to access, today in reality.