I find it fascinating that private prisons draw such ire while the prison guard union draws so little, when the prison guard union has all the exact same incentives and is drastically more powerful.
California would have had legal marijuana a decade sooner except for lobbing by the union, they're a major force for mandatory minimum sentences and tougher sentencing in general.
This seems like a trivial easy-PR win for some legislators that does very little to meaningfully address the problems with criminal justice in the US. Private prisons are a tiny little piece of a much bigger problem and there's still a lot of real work to be done.
Going after public sector unions at all is extremely difficult. The most successful attempt to do so that I'm aware of was Gov. Scott Walker's in Wisconsin. And even he didn't go after the law enforcement unions. (It might be possible to split off the police unions from the prison guard unions, but it's not clear to me that it is.)
Law enforcement unions are one of the few American institutions with completely bipartisan protection. Democrats don't go after them because Democrats are pro-union. Republicans don't go after them because Republicans are pro-police. Furthermore, you really don't want to pick a fight with police unions. What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike? It's against the law in many places, but if the police are on strike, who's going to enforce that? There is a very significant risk that you'd have to call up the National Guard just to maintain public order. And even then, how many National Guardsmen does California have? How many LEOs? And most of those National Guardsmen are not actually trained in law enforcement. In effect you would be declaring martial law. It's not worth it.
"Law enforcement unions are one of the few American institutions with completely bipartisan protection. Democrats don't go after them because Democrats are pro-union. Republicans don't go after them because Republicans are pro-police."
Perhaps your "democracy" needs more than 2 parties.
"What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike?"
The American culture is very antagonistic. In democratic societies, which are less antagonistic, this would become a matter of new public consensus much sooner before they would go on actual strike (there are many forms of strike and some of them do not involve stopping all work, for example, work-to-rule).
"The American culture is very antagonistic. In democratic societies, which are less antagonistic, this would become a matter of new public consensus much sooner before they would go on actual strike"
I think France is kind of odd because yes, they do strike a lot, but usually the public approval of the striking is quite high. So it is less antagonistic in this sense.
I live in Europan country with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartism, and that's one option how to make things less antagonistic. There is lot of negotiations going on before the strike happens, and it mostly gets averted.
In France most of the strikes come from the public sector. And I'm pretty sure the public approval for the strikes depends if it affects them: if you'd poll people living in Paris about the current public transportation strike, I don't think you'd see a lot of support.
You are correct that the US needs a multi-party system. The lack of recognition/appreciation of the extent that the two-party system shapes and constrains every single public discourse such as this one is frankly amazing.
The current dynamic is akin to children playing one feuding parent against the other in a broken overly-adversarial marriage. You need a minimum of about 4-5 independent voices in order to facilitate civil public discourse.
This is a really big problem in America and it needs to be addressed head on, regardless of how uncomfortable the consequences may be.
LEOs hold a sacred role of trust in our society - they maintain the potential application of the use of lethal force. With that power must come the most severe of guardrails, to which unionization is completely antithetical. Our civilian control of the military is internationally lauded, but we lack full civil control of our own law enforcement.
I think the way to go about this is to break up the law enforcement departments into smaller scoped independent roles with enough potential redundancy to be able to institute reforms via divide and conquer. Remake law enforcement from the ground up in this way, and deny the new institutions public unionization by law.
If the existing police unions strike, they must be dealt with as severely as mutinous armed forces would be; they should be subject to a court marshal form of adjudication with the same penalties that a military officer would face for desertion and endangering public safety.
Start building new parallel law enforcement institutions now, prepare for how to maintain civil order in the face of a strike, then start dissolving the old institutions. It’d also probably be wise for the FBI to maintain a comprehensive database of federal, state and local LEOs in case some go underground and attempt to undermine these efforts through domestic terrorism.
It’s more a question of curbing their corrupting influence on politics. You might notice that the US has policies that result in mass incarceration, and that US police are far more likely than police in other countries to use lethal force. Part of this is because American law and policy is heavily influenced by police unions and prison guard unions, who favor their own interests over the public interest.
It’s also not purely a matter of private association. Often there are laws encouraging or mandating collective bargaining for certain public sector jobs. These laws are often what keeps unions in business, since those laws protect them and allow them to eg sign collective bargaining agreements that effectively require public employees to join the union (or at least pay dues to it) as a condition of keeping their jobs. It was the repeal of these laws that Gov. Walker faced political pushback for in 2011.
You are aware that public unions demand things from the government, making things difficult for said government. They consume a great deal of public moneys and demand special working conditions, usually above those received by employees in private companies doing similar work. And they give out money to politicians to make their concerns a priority. So if you care about other things than the pay of policemen, you'll have to fight the unions.
Isn't a private prison a private organisation formed by citizens by their own free will? :)
The unions and their membership have a financial conflict of interest when it comes to public public that impacts incarceration rate. Prison unions have, for example, lobbied extensively to keep various drugs criminalized in states where the public was going in another direction.
It's obviously a difficult subject with a lot of concerns to balance, but the posters here are just arguing that the problems of private prisons are not all unique to private prisons-- the employees of public prisons (and their orgs) have some of the same kinds of conflicts of interest.
The difference is that every prisoner in a private prison is an income source, so every law that creates fewer prisoners (such as drug legalization) is a loss of income. Are all public prisons run the same way? That is, are the prisons funded on a per-prisoner-per-day basis? Or do they get an overall annual budget, and then have to spend it as best they can to house the prisoners they're sent?
In the former case, harsh laws are good for them, same as the private scenario. But in the latter case -- fewer prisoners on the same budget -- more permissive laws would be an unconditional win. I don't know which way it actually works, just spelling out an unstated assumption that's being made upthread.
More prisoners means more jobs for prison guards which means negotiating leverage for higher pay, better working conditions, and better job security. If there were significantly fewer prisoners, there would be layoffs of prison guards, which would very much be against the interests of the union.
It might be true that, for some legislators, the fear of speaking truth to this particular power is one of public disorder. I don't think there's evidence to support that fear, but that doesn't mean it's not a motivating factor.
A larger motivating factor - and this is pure speculation - might be more closely related to angering an institution with such a capacity for unchecked initiation of violence (ie, that ones person, home, or family may be in danger of direct violence).
> What happens if police officers and prison guards go on strike?
> When New York police officers temporarily reduced their “proactive policing” efforts on low-level offenses, major-crime reports in the city actually fell, according to a study based on New York Police Department crime statistics.
> The scientists found that civilian complaints of major crimes dropped by about 3% to 6% during the slowdown.
I find it very malicious to just drop numbers like this. It gives the impression that you state a simple fact, while the reality is much more complicated than that.
The studies on the subject require much more subtlety and statistical understanding when interpreting the results that a 2 line quotation to make a point.
There are a number of factors to take into account when giving credit to such studies:
- Is there enough observations to have statistically significant results? (i.e. do we have enough occurences of police strikes to really have meaningful results? can we have overwelmingly influencing factors not present in the studied samples: I guess it would likely highly depend on the city where the strike happens also)
- Did the sample properly allowed the isolation of the variable being studied against other influencing factors?
- What is the collinearity between the variables used for the regression? (i.e. if violence complaints are made on the spot, then less police means harder to fill complaints, it doesn't necessarily mean less violence)
"Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything" has a good introduction to the challenges of such studies, and discusses a bit the particular case of police.
Please don't introduce personal swipes like "malicious" into what's otherwise a fine HN comment. It usually provokes the person you're talking to into replying with worse; or if that doesn't happen, it causes other people to take your comment the wrong way (see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20960084). It also breaks the site guideline against calling names in arguments:
But it can be equally malicious to just drop generic potential shortcomings of scientific studies, without any attempt to figure out whether they apply to the specific study under discussion.
I don't agree with this comment at all. Skepticism isn't denying the claim or advocating an alternative one, it is promoting thoroughness and responsibility. The uninspected claim is quite a bit more dangerous.
This particular flavor of skepticism does not promote thoroughness and responsibility, in fact it promotes laziness: "Why read (or even skim) through the article when I can just state these five ways in which the article might be bad and therefore its argument void?"
If you think broad skepticism or criticism of a scientific study based on class characteristics is admissible (some statistical investigations are poorly conducted, so this one might be poor too), why not trust based on class characteristics (scientific articles in Nature tend to be really good, so this one might be good too)?
You're right, I don't think either of these options is better than the other.
>I find it very malicious to just drop numbers like this. It gives the impression that you state a simple fact, while the reality is much more complicated than that. The studies on the subject require much more subtlety and statistical understanding when interpreting the results that a 2 line quotation to make a point.
And yet such numbers are dropped all the time. I also do not see callouts for number drops being consistently applied. For example in political subreddits sees number drops without callouts when it supports the lean of the subreddit and number drops with callouts when it does not.
Criticism of science seems to be unequally applied, and given how important equal application of criticism is to science being reliable, it creates a reliability problem.
As an outsider reading this thread I couldn't help but laugh at this.
Galanwe said phry was "very malicious", which is actually and not just tenuously a personal attack. Do you plan to delete their comment as well? Interesting standards on HN.
Please don't interpret as "standards" what is typically a simple case of us seeing one comment and not the other. We don't come close to seeing everything that gets posted here. If you run across something that didn't get moderated when it should have, the likeliest explanation is that we just didn't see it.
Edit: I've tracked down the comment you're referring to and indeed, no moderator saw it. I've replied to it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20964408. In the future, if there's a comment you're concerned about, you should either flag it or email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
If you haven't checked specifically with us about a post, please don't draw conclusions about HN moderation—those are almost always non sequiturs. People usually jump to the idea that we secretly support the one side (where they didn't see us moderate) over the other side (where they did). That is reading patterns into randomness.
Edit: Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. HN is a community. Users needn't use their real name, but do need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
"It lets everyone know it's safe to ignore you" is a personal attack. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd really appreciate it.
Ok, I believe you that that was your intent. But "you" is a personal pronoun. If you use that pronoun and sling pejoratives, people are naturally going to interpret it as a personal attack, as I did. If you don't want to be read that way, the burden is on you to disambiguate that.
> Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"),[1] short for argumentum ad hominem, typically refers to a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.
You failed at the "genuine discussion" part by citing pop econ horseshit.
It occurred to me that the result is not necessarily unexpected if it were due to under reporting (i.e. during the slowdown there was less opportunity to report major crime and therefore reports fell). The researchers discuss that in the paper. I don't have time to read the paper in detail and come to a conclusion one way or another, but I thought it might be of interest to people who might not otherwise click on an La Times link.
> In our analyses, we examine how crime under-reporting may bias the results. We employ precinct fixed-effects to address time-invariant sources of under-reporting, such as communities’ varying histories of police distrust. We then model time-variant sources of under-reporting biases, such as those caused by the killing of Eric Garner and/or the heightened conflict between protesters and police. Model (5) in Fig. 3 controls for the number of community complaints reported in each precinct-week for misdemeanours
and criminal violations. Assuming that time-variant sources of under-reporting are correlated across crime types, this model is robust to slowdown-induced under-reporting bias. While we cannot entirely rule out the effects of under-reporting, our results show that crime complaints decreased, rather than increased, during
a slowdown in proactive policing, contrary to deterrence theory. Additional tests show the results are robust to specifications including controls for long-term trends in crime (Fig. 3 model (6)), lagged
‘Major crime arrests’ (Fig. 3 model (7)) and lagged ‘Major crime complaints’ (Fig. 3 model (8)).
That’s not the same as going completely on strike. It’s possible that police wouldn’t go completely on strike, but it’s also possible that the work stoppages or disruptions would affect something more essential than the “broken windows” policy. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see what might go wrong even inside prisons.
There is a non-trivial risk of violent, even armed conflict if there really was a police strike and the National Guard was called in to restore order. That’s not something a state governor wants on their record.
> California would have had legal marijuana a decade sooner except for lobbing by the union, they're a major force for mandatory minimum sentences and tougher sentencing in general.
edit: Do you have any articles to recommend that would shed some lights on this matter ?
Do you have some sources ? (I don't live in the US, but I find the idea that guards somehow lobby fascinating)
>...The CCPOA is deeply involved in a variety of political activities. Most spending is done through political action committees.[citation needed] 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. The union spends heavily on influencing political campaigns, and on lobbying legislators and other government officials. CCPOA also hires public relations firms and political polling firms.
...
>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.
>...ROUGHLY HALF OF the money raised to oppose a ballot measure to legalize recreational marijuana in California is coming from police and prison guard groups, ...
So this isn’t directed at you in particular but I don’t understand this “do you have any sources?” for stuff that’s one search away. If it was some obscure hard to find information published in some journal I would understand it, but this in this case
I totally see your point. That's why I added "I am not from the US" to signal "I don't live there, I don't know the in and out of this and I need the help of someone closer to the subject to help me grok it faster".
True, I could google for it but then I am on an hunt to discern the truths and the lies and to understand why someone lies or tells the truth to whom and how it is pertinent to the original request (and there's the bubble search, of course).
The thing is, I don't know - in that case - if it's obscure or not.
Plus, our comments aren't born in a vacuum. Parent likely has additional information or an outlook on the subject that I wouldn't find (or more likely find but likely dismiss because of a lack of context) in a 15 minutes google search.
Then, on the other hand, you actually have snipers around here who are quick to derail conversations by not participating, not giving information or sharing outlook and just shooting "Sources ?" and then never coming back to the thread.
You have to trust me on that one but I assure you I don't do that.
Now, asking for sources is most of time a given when someone makes extraordinary claims meant to shut an argument (eg: "X is bad 98% of time don't talk about X" when everyone was considering X safe from the get-go).
edit: I should have asked something like "Do you have an article to recommend that would shed some lights on this matter ?". The "Do you have sources ?" is a bit harsh and inquisitive, my bad.
edit (2): On the other hand, I clicked your link, without looking at the URL, thinking "ah cool, this person is telling me that in this case a simple google search will yield pertinent results. But all I got was a "fuck you, use google".
Ideally, citing your sources should be done without being asked.
And, when asked, people want to know which sources you have used, not the ones they can find for themselves. So even if you think it's common knowledge, we want to see the base of your thinking.
Strongly disagree. One of the great and unusual things about the HN community is that opinions are usually based on evidence. Asking someone to provide the evidence they are basing their opinion on is a great way to cut through all the noise on a subject you don't know well.
I have also noticed this trend, not just online, but also offline with friends.
While it seemed annoying at first, I quickly came to love the fact that this happens. I feel like this might be a natural tendency starting to be developed in the wake of fake news, and opinion-generating bot armies on the rise.
Better to ask for a source one time too many, than one time too little.
> when the prison guard union has all the exact same incentives and is drastically more powerful.
Could you please provide me some examples? I figure if California's prisons were 200% of capacity, there's no shortage of work for the prison guards anyway.
> I figure if California's prisons were 200% of capacity,
Much of the concept is that the prison's are at 200% capacity because of the perverse incentives for the state (prosecutors, police, judges) to fulfill the private contract minimums.
Mandatory minimums and the 3 strike rule are suspected to be related to private prisons contracts.
I figure more people coming in also means more overtime benefits, eventually translates to better pension benefits too. Given most pensions are based on the compensations and benefits of the last years of service rendered.
Then of course there could be plenty of hidden stuff like more prison crowds means some one selling food(I hear animals eat better food than inmates) to the prison likely makes more money, and hence better bribes/commissions in the chain of people involved.
Eventually it comes down to profit per person. And they'd like to make it up on scale.
> I figure if California's prisons were 200% of capacity, there's no shortage of work for the prison guards anyway.
I'm not sure how/why you figure that, or how it's at all relevant.
I'm not sure how/why you figure that because "over capacity" != "will build new prisons / hire new guards". I.e., it's not at all impossible for there to be prisons that are over-capacity and also a decline in the number of prison guard jobs.
It's not relevant because the entire point of unions is to counter-act the effect of supply/demand dynamics on labor (see: "there's always another scab"). Just because there's "no shortage of work for the prison guards" doesn't mean they will lobby against changes to laws that might one day create such a shortage.
Or they could just work towards better working conditions? Unions dont really have the growth incentive private entities do. Prison guards are extremely far from running out of work, quite the opposite is true and their members also suffer under the poor working conditions of an chronically understaffed and underpaid sector. They are risking their life because politicians think overcrowding prisons isnt a problem.
I mean I get the initial point, some police unions are an especially vile proponents of an expansion into a police state, its just not really about working conditions. Its political lobbying. In Germany you can see it every time more competences for the police are discussed in parliament. You have some police unions giving legit feedback if someone bothers to ask them, how those competences are a bad idea and are not needed. And then you have speakers for other police union (with a catchy union name to seem more important) where you can see they have the right party membership and are looking for a career in politics. As a result you can see them in every news report that wants to bring across a certain message.
With private prisons, you can grift of off anti-private sentiment. But with prison guard unions, you just run into people's authoritarian streaks. There is a reason why Law Enforcement Officer's Bill Of Rights are sometimes expanded to include corrections officers.
Why would a union want more prisons? Surely the whole point of a union is to lobby for better pay and conditions for its individual members, I don't see what the incentive is for the union to create more prisons, to get more union members? Why?
Actually, in democratic capitalism, unions in private companies are always less powerful than private companies themselves.
The power of unions (for a certain sector) in a given society scales proportionally to number of people involved in them.
However, the power of private companies (certain sector) in a given society is proportional to revenue of that sector.
Since the power of unions in monetary terms can be bounded from above by total wages in the sector, we can see that this is always less than the revenue of the sector.
In other words, in capital intensive industries, unions have less relative power.
The point is, the "willingness of some industry to live" is the interest of more people than just employees of that industry. It's also all the people taking a cut one way or another, that is owners, rentiers and potentially all the people involved in providing assets for the industry.
I think for public sector, we have to look at it on the state level. Using the same analysis, in a democratic society, one vote has in theory more power than membership in a public sector unions, because with that vote you can decide more things than just wages of public employees.
I suspect the American culture of "being tough on crime" isn't really about prison-employee unions, but has historical roots in the colonization of the American frontier.
I think the American culture of "being tough on crime" was a reaction to the insanity of the 70s counter-revolutionary movements. In 1972 there were over 1900 domestic bombings in the US alone (https://status451.com/2017/01/20/days-of-rage/).
> Using the same analysis, in a democratic society, one vote has in theory more power than membership in a public sector unions, because with that vote you can decide more things than just wages of public employees.
...except when you can both be a member of a union and also exercise your vote.
I wasn't aware that in the USA joining a public sector union meant giving up your right to vote ;-)
No, the inequality always holds, your vote has always larger weight in society than your union membership.
I think it seems counter-intuitive to you but you cannot articulate why. I was also surprised when I realized it.
Or think about it this way: All citizens in democratic society are free to enter any number of associations that advocate for their interests. For example, unions. But membership in these associations doesn't "add up" to more power, in particular, it doesn't affect the "one person, one vote" principle of democratic elections.
I honestly have no idea what point you're trying to make here :(
> your vote has always larger weight in society than your union membership.
Yes, but the next step in your logical deduction is flawed because union membership does not necessarily dilute the power of your vote to signal other preferences (at least in countries with secret ballots and no proxy voting).
You're comparing these two things as if there's some sort of trade-off or mutual exclusivity. There isn't, especially in countries where politics is dominated by two parties such as the USA.
Here's how those mechanics tend to play out in the USA. A union voter leverages their union membership to make kings in the primaries. Then, after winnowing the field to a list of candidates who exclusively support their union's major priorities, union members are free to use their vote to exercise preference on other issues. That's not hypothetical -- it's exactly what happens in most US states with strong public sector LEO unions.
> But membership in these associations doesn't "add up" to more power
But this is obviously false when broadened to include all associations.
Politics in literally every modern democracy is dominated by associations called political parties. That's not an accident, and it's not like that status quo happened without opposition. A lot of politicians in the history of democracy have attempted to limit the role of associations in democratic processes, and they mostly failed.
I don't really understand the argument you're making. Maybe your logical deductions are bulletproof, but in that case, there must be something wrong with your premises. Because hundreds of years of extraordinarily compelling empirical evidence contradict your final conclusion.
Large associations of voters really do have more power than the sum of their votes. Maybe not "theoretically", but certainly "actually" and "empirically".
I interpret the effect you mention differently, that there is simply not enough democracy.
If the government takes more input from associations than from voting, I think it's a reasonable conclusion. (See also my comment about tripartism above.)
But what seems to me closer to the truth is that people simply heavily underestimate the power of their vote.
Different issues. People tend to dislike the fact that we charge prisoners outrageous rates for calls, etc.
And I don’t remember prison guard unions being the ones principally pushing for 3 strike laws. Most of those went through when it was politically advantageous to be backing them, unlike now.
the side effects of going after a union purely for this reason will need to be properly quantified before you can consider going down this road.
removing private ownership of prisons is a no-brainer in comparison
Seems like the poster meant that going after private prisons was the easy PR win, and that going after the unions would be more difficult, but effective at addressing the underlying perverse incentive structure.
Well for-profit prisons have been the target of pop culture for the last couple of years (e.g. John Oliver did a segment on them, Orange is the New Black, etc). People incorrectly assumed that since they were bad that it meant the public ones were somehow better (standard good vs evil thinking that plagues political discourse in the US).
> Private prison companies used to view California as one of their fastest-growing markets.
This is such a bizarre and twisted sentence to hear without a hint of irony. It's like dream/nightmare logic except in real life. In 100 years private prisons are going to be a hideous stain on our history and this is such a huge step in the right direction that it really makes me proud to be living in California and supporting the state with my tax dollars.
Isn't it? Companies that probably lobby for stricter and longer sentences, looking at a populated state as a "market,"
with caged human beings as their product. It's the most absurd concept to me, and it's even more disgusting when it's put in such an innocent manner. "Private prison companies used to view California as one of their fastest-growing markets." It just gets more disgusting the more you look into it, and the statistics around incarceration in the US.
It is not just that the states are paying them to house convicts (or people accused of a crime), they can even use these people to do jobs for basically no wage. These companies are in the business of slave labor.
Will we still have private companies making money off of public prisons by offering different services? Will there still be individuals earning a paycheck by working at prisons? Both of these groups will have similar incentives as companies running private prisons.
I’ve heard ideas that prisons could be voluntary in a completely free society. First, a lot of people who have gone to prison for victimless crimes (using and/or selling drugs for instance) would no longer go to prison. Second, people who have committed violent crimes may choose to go to prison to “work off their debt” and show willingness to atone for their crimes. One could imagine that many employers, businesses and people generally would ostracize a person that would not be willing to go to prison, but on the other hand would be more willing to again accept that individual if he did go to prison.
If it was nonviolent crime, then island where convicted can live with shops, houses, internet, trains and parks and local elected administration and cctv, but cannot go back to the rest of the world.
But if it is a serious violent crime, it should still be prison. Comfortable like in Europe or better, but preventing convicted from doing harm to others.
It should not be a punishment. It should be just an isolation. Separation of bad people from good people.
Yet more accurate language: bad-behaving people from good-behaving people. I realize some would say it‘s the same thing, but I always like to make the distinction.
A lot of the times we would just do nothing. Marijuana possession doesn't need punishment for example.
Otherwise there are a tonne of options from before prison became the norm. Community service, restitution, fines, public shaming, exile, corporal punishment, capital punishment. Some more acceptable today than others.
We still need a viable alternative that is both a deterrent and allows for rehabilitation and reintegration. I think things like prison, corporal punishment, exile, etc., are good deterrents but they're horrible at reintegration which is why prisons have such a high recidivation rates. On the other hand, community service isn't a high enough deterrent and flat fines disproportionally affect poor people.
> I think things like prison, corporal punishment, exile, etc., are good deterrents but they're horrible at reintegration
Not sure I understand. Corporal punishment doesn't have a problem with re-integration because no one is removed from society, and the whole point of exile is you will never be re-integrated into society. Only prison has to deal with the problem of how to re-integrate people.
Honestly, it's a bit of a red herring.. nothing is going to change from a criminal justice perspective. Less than 10% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons. But even more importantly, there are still so many private contractors / unions in the (public/private) prison industry that this ban won't really affect policies or outcomes going forward.. private interests will almost always exist in it that have perverse incentives that are contrary to what's actually good for crime and recidivism rates. [0]
An example would be the prison phones / video visitation industry. It's absolutely abhorrent what's going on there (removing in-person visits, replacing them with stupidly expensive phone calls that prisoners can hardly afford).. and yet public prisons / jails are using their services just the same. [1]
Personal experience tells me that in federal prison you get 300 minutes a month. You pay 26 cents a minute for long distance. There's legit virtual phone tech businesses that service the families of those incarcerated. You get it dropped down to 6 cents a minute.........
That 15 minute maximum includes a mandatory waste of 38 seconds of a recorded message telling the receiver that the person on the other end of the line is in federal prison. Additionally you waste approximately 1 minute during the call when a woman's voice reminds you all that the call was placed from federal prison. That's just the time the voice is talking.. it doesn't account for the fact it is seemingly random and derails any train of thought. All in all you waste over 1.5 minutes of the call...
Outside of Unicor you're screwed if you expect to make more than 20 dollars a month.
Oh and the email system ha ha ha haaaa you pay by the MINUTE to email. Imagine how many people can't type well at all? I spent so much time typing up messages for people because they couldn't type well. It's just pretty sad. Huge rip off for every one in a vulnerable position.
I do agree with you. The fact that people in the feds that have been in a state prison refer to it as easy street is deflating. The local places I have been are much worse. Manhattan/Charlotte/Hampton Roads are all really, really shitty.
Truth be told, if you have some minimum level of funds available and you are within regular travel distance of visitors the federal system is not bad at a camp or a low.
The existence of a straight-to-camp prisoner is a little silly to me. Camps should really only be a stepping stone down from higher security level on your way to release. The feds could save a lot of money by sending people with 18-36 month sentences to a modified RDAP program while living at a halfway house or home confinement. I fully believe every one in the federal system should be participating in an RDAP-type program to evaluate their criminal thinking and have better availability to skills training. Prison and Oren Cass' book "The Once and Future Worker" really influenced my thinking on what should be done to help.
No. I'm writing it from my desk at my place of employment. I went to the privately owned halfway house in May of 2019. I get released to probation in October of 2019.
Internet access is non-existent without a cell phone. The higher up in security level you go the harder it is to get a cell phone. Camps at Fort Dix, Petersburg, Morgantown, etc. without a fence.. they're readily available for anywhere from 100-300 USD. A low that has an attached camp a little harder and more expensive. A low with a fence you're looking at maybe 1,000+ USD. Beyond that good luck. These are the shitty prepaid 30 dollar Android phones. Get caught with a cell phone you'll lose up to 200 days of good time and get an automatic shipment (through the horrible OKC facility...) to the next security level. Camp -> Low -> Medium -> High.
General rule at a camp is expect to pay 4x the street price for anything you want. Multiplier gets to be more like 5x-7x if it's something bulky and unusual.
I don't think that's a fair assessment. Just because it's not a huge revolutionary reform that doesn't make incremental improvements a red herring. These are just steps toward a better world.
Is almost 10% of prisoners really only baby steps? I understand your point, they will be transferred to a new prison that will still have private interests, but to call it baby steps still seems exaggerated and defeatist
Public jails are doing the same things because companies that provide those services lobby them to do it. The FCC under Obama had capped the amount they could charge which was promptly undone with government changes.
This also ignores known stories such as an example where a judge had a stake in a private prison company (or was bribed outright?) And as a result was sentencing school kids to prison for things which probably needed detention at worst. And this went on for a decade.
The prison system in the US is not good to begin with. Largely because the citizens look at prison as retribution rather than rehabilitation. But the private nature only adds to and exacerbates issues.
Agreed, there's lots of work to do in public prison reform, too.
FWIW, the judges you mention are probably the two in the Kids for cash scandal [1]. They're currently serving sentences ranging from 17 to 28 years. Good riddance.
Yeah, the worst part is that these jerks would be out by now if they kept their mouths shut--they should rot permanently.
Thank God they opened their mouths, pissed off the judge overseeing their plea agreement who then yanked it, and got sentenced to about 3 times the jail time they would have had otherwise.
The problem here is corporate capture. These companies are raking it in with huge margins which would be super attractive to large amounts of competition... if competition could compete in a free market instead of buddying up with government officials.
> The FCC under Obama had capped the amount they could charge which was promptly undone with government changes.
We see this time and time again. There really needs to be a better protocol for this. It takes so much time and effort to make these laws, yet they can be undone in a heartbeat. It's an inherently flawed system.
> It takes so much time and effort to make these laws, yet they can be undone in a heartbeat.
The whole problem is that these were not laws. The FCC does not make laws. If it had been done through Congress, it would have been a more lasting change. But anything one president can unilaterally do, the next can unilaterally undo.
These things COULD go through a functioning legislature. Functioning being the key word. When you have one party who outright states that they will stop any and all work in the legislature just because Obama is president, and the citizenry continues to re-elect that party, what else do you do? What else SHOULD you do?
> These things COULD go through a functioning legislature
Which would just make them subject to switching when the legislative majority changed, rather than actually fundamentally changing the situation.
But I'm not sure either is really a problem: otherwise, bad laws would be impervious to change, too. If you want good laws, you have to keep electing good government.
Yeah, I've always thought the private/public prison thing is a bit of a red herring. Construction and maintenance companies get paid either way. Staff gets paid.
I think it makes more sense to focus on specific aspects of the criminal justice system rather than simply the private/public distinction. There should be standards for the pay and training of prison staff, security of inmates, quality of food and nutrition, medical care, etc.. It might be true that private prisons skimp on these things more than public prisons, but the standards are what is important.
Of course, this may very well mean that the best way to implement and enforce these standards is to have as much "public" (state) direction as possible in the development and operation of prisons, and I'm not at all against that if it is in fact the best implementation.
I partially agree. I think the ban is necessary in part because once we go down the route of private prisons we create massive economic incentives to push people into prisons and keep them there. These incentives will be on top of the incentives that already exist.
So I see this as cutting off a potential source of greater problems down the line.
But you're 100% right, there are already massive incentive systems in place that we need to overcome to achieve real change.
Frankly, I think a great first step would be eliminating prison guard unions or at least putting pressure on them (e.g. other unions refusing to recognize them).
You also need to consider that several people are processed through private facilities on their way to a public facility. CCA Youngstown and others hold prisoners before they are finally transferred to a federal facility. CCA Youngstown can melt off the face of the Earth as far as I am concerned.
yeah the govt seldom builds anything. it just contracts it out. A federal prisons may be staffed by govt. employees but otherwise privatized in every other respect such as construction, surveillance, and supplies.
I'm so happy about this. Private prisons are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum occupancy levels in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as criminals). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent rehabilitating criminals and making them functional members of society. Next up should be criminalizing charging huge quantities for prisoners to video call / phone call and the usurious fees on commissary.
I'd wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.
[EDIT] Surprise surprise, when Canada experimented with private prisons, they found measurably better outcomes in public prisons [1] and took the private prisons back over.
Pfaff is convinced that aggressive prosecution is the biggest cause of over-incarceration. His argument here is compelling. He notes that while incarceration rates began to climb in the 1980s as a response to rising crime, those trend lines continued through the Nineties, even though crime was steadily falling. Why did that happen? Examining all the relevant variables (crime reports, arrests, charges filed, and convictions), Pfaff found himself looking squarely at the prosecutor’s office. As less crime was reported, arrests dropped proportionately, and among those who were charged with a crime, conviction rates held steady. But prisons continued to fill, because prosecutors were filing felony charges against ever-growing percentages of their dwindling arrestees.
I strongly agree, the u.s. criminal justice system needs a overhaul of zealous prosecutors who want to threaten non-violent offenders with felony convictions just to make a name for themselves. Greed is still the primary motive, a young prosecutor knows they can command a 6 or 7 figure salary in the private sector if the have a substantial amount of convictions under their belt. Yes, private prisons are bad, yes prison guard unions and police unions are bad, but prosecutors are equally guilty of the same greed and profit driven motivation... when was the last time you heard a story of a former prosecutor getting unemployment insurance or food stamp assistance? I'll wait...
Something that isn't intuitive about our monetary shift is that as we debase the USD, we also debase the most desperate/marginalized of our population.
It is a feature of our system that is only accelerated by income inequality and labor price suppression.
Just being government run is just one ingredient in a successful prison system.
Next you need to find good people that strongly want to accomplish the organization's goals. And who are smart enough to actually do that.
And you need to make sure those leaders have adequate funding and time to make the necessary changes. As well as having a legal system that is at least half-way working correctly.
it's probably necessary. and i must ask, you've studied philosophy? that's the only time i see people talking about "necessary and sufficient conditions"
Thing is, private prisons are 10% of prisons. Which means public prisons are 90% of prisons, and so public-sector prison guards are at least 90% of prison guards (maybe 100% if they get the state to require collective bargaining in private prisons). That means a majority of the special interests are there either way. There is a conflict of interest with private prisons, but private prison owners are a small and not-very-powerful special interest compared to others.
Like, let’s talk marijuana legalization. I’m pretty sure fast food franchise owners are already a bigger special interest than private prison operators. They probably would be even if 100% of prisons were privatized.
On the other hand, the prison guard union has some real power. If they go on strike, you have to call up the National Guard and panic to get the prisons in working order before the prisoners start rioting and/or starving to death. If a private prison owner pulled that shit, it’s just one private prison owner, and regardless, they’re ruined for life. It only even becomes a remotely comparable risk if there was a single private prison monopoly across the whole state, whereas public prisons already have a prison guard monopoly in the form of the union.
none of that matters, there's a conflict of interest with private prisons, and they shouldn't exist.
That there are things we also need to fix with public prisons is an orthogonal issue. private prisons are clearly a problem. The idea of commercializing the locking up of human beings is horrifying from a moral perspective.
FWIW, I've never studied philosophy (unless you count formal logic, but we never talked about "necessary and sufficient conditions" in the two courses I took), and I use that terminology a fair amount. I'm not sure where I picked it up, but it certainly wasn't in philosophy classes.
The War On Drugs is a mechanism prosecutors use to get people into the system. We can't dismiss the changes in law brought about from a moral panic and how that affects who and how people are taken in.
Although the root fault is that a "guilty" plea costs the court less resources than a "not guilty" plea. If you wanted to solve this properly, you'd require that even if the defendant pleads guilty, there still has to be the full process of jury selection, presenting evidence and arguments (even if the defence's argument is "yeah, I did it") and deliberation (which, by design, gives twelve opportunities for someone to say "what the hell are we doing; this is clearly bunk" without that person being under threat of twenty-five-to-life for contempt of cop).
Edit: oh right, and you also need to make offering plea bargains (outside of state's-evidence cases) a twenty-five-to-life felony for the prosecutor.
According to the Amazon summary from the linked book:
"a major shift in prosecutor behavior that occurred in the mid-1990s, when prosecutors began bringing felony charges against arrestees about twice as often as they had before"
How does that work exactly when the crime is against a plant you use for personal medical reasons. Love it or hate it, medical weed is cheaper and easier to produce then most opioid alternatives. [i.e. morphine, codeine, oxytocin, etc.] And its safer to produce, process, and distribute to end users [consumers]. So grandma gets a felony conviction because she grew her medical weed in her backyard garden and now has 10-15yrs of her life wasted in a prison cell... How exactly does the math of justice add that up? Grandma grew 20 plants because she wanted to make her medicine and have enough left over to make some edible cookies... Grandma's of America union doesn't exist, grandma is left to the mercy of a corrupt justice systems that mandates minimum federal sentencing guidelines regardless of a defendants circumstances. The math doesn't add up, it's cruel punishment and unfair treatment of the law. I mean if grandma had a meth lab then yeah she deserves to "due the time" but for weed, no one should go to jail for weed... it's a complete waste of tax money..IMHO
They're a major constituant of the Democratic Party and you don't get through the primaries without their endorsements, so their positions have much higher weight than your ballot.
When you see "Private Prisons Are The Worst!!!" check the studies to see if the groups are comparable; I know someone in the industry years ago and when they opened the first private prison in the state they were sent the worst offenders in order to try and break them, yet they ended up performing better than average for the state.
I understand that the prison guard lobby is terrible, but that's not the point. The question isn't "private prisons vs prison lobbying," it's "private prisons vs public prisons."
It's not the buildings that are a problem, it's the people running them. That's either the owners for private prisons or the prison guard union for public prisons. If you say "private prisons are bad for <these reasons>" but there's just as many problems (and mostly the same) with public prisons, then focusing your hate on private prisons isn't working on the real problem. The legislature sets the standards for both and could actually fix the situation, they have both the responsibility and the power to do so.
I have to agree on this with you. The public sector isn't functioning as you would expect and opening this market can actually boost the state's economy and provide decent treatment to inmates.
That Canadian footnote is interesting, thanks. Apparent effectiveness of one experiment not withstanding, my intuition is privatizing prisons = bad idea.
I remember the news of Ontario shutting down their privatized project and taking it over. But I also remember the Harper conservative government later suggesting private prisons could again be in Canada's future.
I know there's lobbying going on (and probably more, now, as some of the US state gravy trains dry up) but does anyone know the state or politics of privatizing prisons in Canada?
Pretty sure private prisons were a Harper/Tory [1] project that got rolled back by the Liberals. I'd imagine that remains the same as the federal Conservatives have continued their relentless march right.
Conservatives under Harper started to align their policies more with Democrats and then with eventually Republicans. The gag orders on scientists, climate denial, private prisons, mandatory minimum sentences with a focus on drug crimes, slashing social programs, tightening up immigration and nationality rules, singling out muslims, and broad tax cuts without specific goals. This is the playbook of the US right / global far-right. The recent feud / split with the new Libertarians in Canada I think illustrates that at least a subset of the party was dragging everyone right, and eventually they had to break off. Of course trump is one step further right still so by comparison they appear downright reasonable. Then at the provincial level Ford speaks for himself haha.
I can’t imagine for instance a Joe Clark conservative jumping at these ideas but maybe it was always like that?
Fair enough, this was basically what I thought you meant; there are a lot of people in the "lol they is nazis because they is tories lol" camp and I worry sometimes that nobody is actually paying attention to the specific issues.
The one that really got to me was the F-35 purchase order, which they did not even try to explain to the public.
I hope the PPC can bring some competition and vigour back to our parliament, and get them actually talking about issues, and talking to their own constituents rather than to the fourth wall.
I don't agree with all of their framing, and the English is not native, but their platform documents actually name the laws and procedures that correspond to their legislative priorities, in plain language, and that gives me the warm fuzzies.
F-35 was such a nightmare lol. Definitely with you that competition is always good, I like that while the NDP isn’t likely to enter office any time soon there’s 3 or 4 (if you count the Greens) major parties in Canada. That gives me the warm fuzzies even if I don’t agree with all the policies of each.
I've been out of Canada for 15 years, so I missed the whole Conservatives under Harper. However, I think to be fair wrt comparing today's Conservatives to Joe Clark's Conservatives, the latter organisation doesn't really exist any more. The Conservatives were down to 2 seats when they merged with Reform Party. I think that's where to you start to see the drift to the right. They had to actively kick out the really extreme right wingers when that happened, but it's just not the same party at all IMHO. Seeing from abroad, I always got the impression that Harper's government was pretty much exactly what you might expect from a slightly toned down Reform party and it wasn't really a surprise to me.
Thanks for the perspective. I spent about half the Harper years abroad, and while I remember the Progressives Conservatives and the Reform / Canadian Alliance parties merging back in what, 2003? I wasn't really paying enough attention to politics back then to understand the implications. I think to your point the Conservatives in the merger basically marketed themselves as a more moderate Reform party.
It feels like there are just 0 incentives for a private prison to actually rehabilitate anyone. Perhaps private prisons could work if they were compensated based on recidivism rate or something
One problem you face in the United States that's not present in areas where there are focuses on rehabilitation (such as Norway) is crime culture. I grew up in a very urban poor area and gang life was something that people strove for. Getting into a gang was a goal similar to how working for a FAANG might be a goal for somebody from a different culture. And the gangs act as family replacements for kids who come from mostly dysfunctional homes.
The point of this is that by the time they hit their late teens and start entering the prison system, they don't see it as prison but simply a temporary time out from 'the life.' And when they get out, their time in lock up is something that's worn as a badge of honor showing how 'hard' they are. And of course since this culture starts to take a grip quite early, individuals that fall into this trap are generally going to be extremely uneducated. You're looking at adults with elementary or middle school level educations, and generally who have a very strong aversion to education in general.
And so how do you rehabilitate against this? When these guys get out of lockup their options are returning to the life where they're going to met with adulation and respect. Or they can try to go get a minimum wage job bagging groceries or asking if you'd like fries with that. Even look at things such as all the dead rappers. Many of these guys had millions of dollars and could have just retired into self indulgent hedonism on a beach somewhere if they wanted. But even those millions of dollars can't take them away from 'the life', until it eventually takes their life.
I'd predict here that we're going to be able to gradually see Sweden start to migrate towards a punitive based prison system as well. Before they had a negligible crime culture, but now they've entered an era where they're left engaging in hand grenade amenesties. [1] It's that sort of environment where rehabilitation gradually gives way to punitive responses.
I'm guessing, but I suspect it's hard to convince voters of the need to build prisons over other large capital expenditures (ex. hospitals, schools etc). Therefore it's easier to convince a private company to spend the money and operate it. Unfortunate, but could be the case.
> They often lobby for minimum occupancy levels in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as criminals)
I'm not sure that any actually do that. The ones I've seen turned out to be misunderstandings of the contract. The contracts were of the form that the private prison would be paid a base amount of $B to house up to C prisoners, plus an additional amount of $V per prisoner for each prisoner over C. C is typically something like 90 or 95% of the maximum capacity of the prison.
The contract actually makes more profit for the private prison if it has fewer prisoners, with the total profit going down for each additional prisoner up to C. Whether profit goes up or down for additional prisoners beyond that depends on whether $V is less than or greater than $B/C. If it is greater, than profit will go up as the last 5 or 10% of the capacity is used, but it will still be lower than the profit when the prison was at around 80 to 85%.
From the state's point of view the total cost is $B to house anywhere from 0 to C prisoners, and $B + (n-C) $V if the number of prisoners, n, is > C. From the state's point of view, $B is essentially a sunk cost.
This does provide some incentive to politicians to keep the private prisons occupied up to at least C prisoners, because if they have n < C prisoners, the per prisoner cost to the state is $B/n. If that is too high, the opponents are going to say the politician is spending too much on prisons. Increasing n lowers $B/n, so the politician might be tempted (and it also makes them look tough on crime). That's probably easier for the politician that trying to explain to voters that the total is $B regardless of many or few prisoners are there, and so per prisoner cost is not really what you should be looking at.
Also, note that this kind of incentive goes the same way with public prisons. A public prison also has a bunch of fixes costs, and so if you look at cost per prisoner you are going to see a lower cost per prisoner with higher occupancy because of those fixed costs.
The first public academic to my knowledge to begin crystalizing the problem of private prisons and the prison industrial complex was Angela Davis [1] -- I first remember hearing her address this in a 1998 lecture at Northwestern.
Ruth Wilson [2,3] has worked for years analyzing and working to end the expansion and privatization of California's prisons, through both academic and grass roots efforts [4]. Her "Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California" [5] book is both accessible and rigorous, I highly recommend it. I am a bit shocked that their and foundational work were not mentioned in the piece.
There's a discussion between Davis and Wilson here [6] where they surface the mass incarceration/private prison issue, and detail the pathology of California's prison system.
The whole premise of private, for-profit, prisons has always seemed deeply troubling to me. The focus of a healthy prison system should be to rehabilitate people and help them turn their lives around so that they contribute positively to society. That can take years of hard work by the individual, and require assistance from professionals (therapists, teachers, ...).
A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits. Expensive rehabilitation is therefore immediately off the table, or given at the minimum allowable level. That is just not in the best interest of neither the individuals in the prison system, nor the rest of society.
The focus of a healthy prison system should be to rehabilitate
The operative word you used is should. You hold the view that the purpose of justice is rehabilitation, which is one theory of justice. Other popular views are deterrence and retribution.
From what I've observed about the United States, preferences for these competing theories of justice tend to fall along well-trodden political lines. That's why it can be so hard to make the legislative changes that California has just made.
The only indisputable effect of imprisonment is that it prevents preying upon the general public for the duration. Since criminal behavior markedly decreases with age, there is a rational argument to be made that persons who prey on others should be removed from society until such time as they are old enough to knock it off.
Unless prison radializes them and conditions them to integrate even less with society. Then it would have the opposite effect you desire, even if statistics painted the picture you want to see.
The purpose of imprisonment is to punish criminals by depriving them of their liberty. As a side-effect, society benefits because a criminal has been forcibly removed from visiting further misery on law-abiding people.
Imprisonment is and should be a deterrent punishment - it is not a support group.
One can both be in favor of abolishing for-profit prisons and also in favor of severe deterrent sentences for law-breakers. Profiteering private corporations naturally seek to maximise the number of prisoners in their facilities, because they are paid per inmate - so they have every incentive to ensure future "custom". This motive naturally conflicts with deterrent imprisonment - the whole idea is to forcibly prevent criminals from breaking the law again.
The purpose of prison certainly depends on the socity the prison is in. In Germany for example prison is certainly seen as a institution whose top-most goal it is to reform the inmate. Just punishing them and showing them that society doesn't care about them will in many cases achieve the polar opposite: it hardens them, makes them more dangerous and is therfore a punishment for the rest of society too.
And frankly if I had to choose between a reformed inmate who won't do it again but wasn't punished with cruelty and a hardened inmate who thinks he owes nothing to society I will always go for the former out of pure egoism.
It takes a certain transactional mindset to believe that harsher punishment result in less crime or that the suffering of the criminal will make up for the crimes commited. The lack of effectiveness for punishment to prevent future crimes is a well researched topic.
Exactly. Statements like the commenter above are not universal truths. Certainly, some people believe the purpose of prison is rehabilitation. That is neither a universal belief however, nor the focus of our legal system. Many people believe the point of prison is punishment, just as the point of fines (like a speeding ticket, for example) are to make someone hurt financially, not to recoup costs (one person speeding typically costs the state nothing).
It can be both at the same time. A step of the reformation process is for the inmate to understand the need for the punishment. It doesn't mean that there is no punishment, just that blind retribution is insufficient to form a perspective for the inmate and society. Most inmates are not going to stay in prison for their whole life, so of obviously you try to maximize rehabilitation.
I do believe it to be a universal truth that a reformist approach is superior. Treating it as opposed solution is certainly short sighted.
> I do believe it to be a universal truth that a reformist approach is superior.
Exactly. This is your belief, and clearly not everyone believes it.
It sure could be both at the same time. Many people believe that too. It could also only be one or the other. Lots think those ways. There is no universally accepted truth here, and pretending like there is is not fruitful.
It's not just supposed to be a punishment and it's obviously not a deterrent. Rehabilitation and allowing for proper reintegration into society needs to happen or you end up with a former felon being stuck in a cycle of crime that they are forced into.
While I agree with your assessment of private prisons, I think we've begun to use the legal sure and imprisonment for things it wasn't intended for, such as minor vice crimes, based on flawed broken window thinking and making police terrified of the communities that they serve.
I thought the imprisonment was to make society safer? Forcefully removing criminals and using deterrent punishment is one way to try to do this, but it's not the only way.
Crime rates in the U.S. vs other developed countries, where rehabilitation is the focus, suggests rehabilitation is a much more efficient solution. See for example the crime rates in the Nordic countries.
Even in a lot of the more mainstream libertarian literature [1] most law enforcement and the justice systems are treated as exactly the type of stuff that doesn’t make sense for a market and should be handled by the government. This should apply to prisons for much of the same reasons.
Besides, most of these sorts of private/public relationships are unlike other true markets anyway with very little competition and only one customer to appease. We end up with a system with even more opaque responsibility/liability chains and encourage crony business deals.
Without any discernible benefit for the private nature and creating negative incentives that encourage more violence by correlating the success of an industry on the greater imprisonment of people, I can’t see any net-benefit for them to exist.
I tend to be a fan of markets in a practical sense but I wish we had clearer distinctions between these public/private operations that are spun as being more “efficient”. Plus a ton of people use these failures of public/private organizations to disparage markets. So it’s not doing anyone any favours to support these half baked pseudo market arrangements, even if you are pro market. In most situations we need purely public or market solutions. I’ve seen few examples of mixing the two that left us better off (the US health insurance ‘market’ is the shining example).
[1] as opposed to the more fringe absolutist anarcho-capitalist stuff ala Mises which does push for private everything
I agree, I've been thinking more and more that we need to spend some serious time on defining what is and isn't best handled by markets and drawing clear bounds around those areas. I'm positive that there are enough real world examples out there to draw up the general structure of a system that would incorporate what we've learnt over the past few hundred years. I feel like most attempts to do so so far have been rather dishonest, naive, and/or biased in one direction or another.
Creating the public/private distinction would also help solve some legitimate political issues and provide a much more consistent framework. Politics is mostly a game of compromise. You could give in on already gutted half markets, such as public health insurance, while using the leverage to push harder to keep most other industries open.
Ideology often gets in the way of providing the best solution to the greatest amount of people. I personally don't see much value in keeping a broken half-market like health insurance putting along in the name of "free markets". That just makes people blame markets for the failures of the public/private arrangements, which hurts them in other areas where it does make sense, where markets should be the default.
Others like private prisons and private military contractors makes the public lose trust in public institutions. Having a trustworthy justice and government system is critical for all markets to succeed.
Additionally a harder public/private distinction will put greater weight in these decisions and more responsibility. It's very easy for a politician to grab the half-measure public/private mix while pretending to appease both sides.
most law enforcement and the justice systems are treated as exactly the type of stuff that doesn’t make sense for a market and should be handled by the government. This should apply to prisons for much of the same reasons.
FWIW, one should also consider that in a Libertarian system FAR fewer people would be in jail in the first place - perhaps as few as none, since Libertarian ideology is not big on forced imprisonment in the first place. The typical Libertarian view of justice is rooted more in the idea of restitution for damages caused (where applicable) than "punishment".
Does Libertarian idea of a penal system not rely on the idea of discipline? I'm curious as the western world has moved on from the previous system where a crime was considered a personal offence to the sovereign. In which case, criminals were displayed in public and tortured. To a system where criminals are to be reformed and disciplined into a normalized individual. An eye for an eye seems to be a regression back to the systems before we had a state and where the penal institution was no longer a extension of politics.
At best, describing the (common) Libertarian approach to justice as "an eye for an eye" is over simplified to the point of absurdity. For example, the vast majority of Libertarians are opposed to State sanctioned executions for crimes, even in the case of murder or a crime where financial restitution isn't obviously applicable. Of course there are debates in Libertarian circles about exactly what the nature of restitution should be in cases like that.
Are they against capital punishment? That's different from rejecting disciplinary and penal institutions as a whole. Is there a reason why restitution is considered the only mechanism for punishment? How do Libertarians disagree with the idea that a penal institution can be a source of social reform as well as political stability?
Just to note, "libertarian literature" is a very broad phrase, and there is certainly plenty of reasonably prominent literature from both the left and the right that describes itself as "libertarian" and would also oppose the idea of centralized state law enforcement and justice systems.
On the right you've got some varieties of anarcho-capitalism that support systems of polycentric law that emerge from markets for law enforcement and criminal justice. On the left you've got anarchist movements like anarcho-syndicalism which propose a decentralized or federated system of social institutions that would be determined by direct action and direct democracy.
Yep, that’s another distinction I wish would enter public perception. Much like how socialism vs communism distinction was made to try to separate some of their better ideas from a long legacy of negative baggage.
I think libertarians would benefit from creating a clearer spectrum within their own community between the more practical (and popular) small government/minarchist side and the more extreme anarcho-capitalist privatize everything group. Too often they seem to be happy having these lines blurred. Plus I don’t think there is any contradictions or significant compromises in doing so. If anything pushing for pipe dream imaginary economic systems or half solution public/private stop gaps isn’t helping anyone.
I'm not attempting to prescribe a definition or usage of any terms. I'm simply describing a very common way in this these terms are already being used, and pointing out that your usage should probably be further clarified. If you wish to use "libertarian" to refer to something very specific, like perhaps the Libertarian Party in the USA, you're free to do so. I just think you should make that clarification, because people will understandably be confused by an unqualified usage of the term "libertarian." It is a term that is used very broadly by many different groups.
I also made no claims regarding the viability or merits of any of the viewpoints I was describing. That's not a conversation I'm interested in having in this context.
> The focus of a healthy prison system should be to rehabilitate people and help them turn their lives around so that they contribute positively to society.
Compare with this statement: "A well-run private prison system would be given financial rewards based on recidivism rates and internal violence, and could do so at less cost than state-run prisons". I suspect your response will probably be along the lines of "that's nice dear, but that's not the system we actually ended up with".
The alternative to privately-run prisons that actually exists in CA is not the healthy prison system that you have described, but is the state-run prison system: a revolving door into criminal training centres, with all the abuses you could expect from a system in which certain sets of people have near-arbitrary power over other sets of people.
> A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits.
Yep, people who make money from a thing have an incentive for that thing to continue happening. Now, I challenge you to take a less narrow view of "profit", one that would include (say) a secure job that pays a good wage and comes with a cushy pension (and power over others for those that relish that sort of thing), and apply your reasoning to the state prison system.
Profit incentive is still there, but apparently it is only OK when it is California who profits. Also please do not forget who puts people in those prisons.
That's charitable. The incentive isn't just to get rid of rehabilitation, it's for the private prison to do everything in their power to ensure that their inmates are trapped in a never-ending cycle of crime and recidivism.
What is even scarier is an entity NOT motivated by profits that spends endlessly into a pit sucking resources away from solving bigger issues such as Climate Change, creating a high speed rail network, or educating children.
Lets not be against efficiency for the sake of political orthodoxy.
>A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits. Expensive rehabilitation is therefore immediately off the table, or given at the minimum allowable level.
There's no reason a for-profit company wouldn't be able to provide a high quality service here if the customer actually insisted on (and paid for) such.
...and had some means to determine that it was happening.
I don't see a way where the incentives to cut corners vs the cost and effort of monitoring to deny the effects those incentives would actually work out.
Competitive capitalism is good at being efficient. It is NOT good at avoiding examples of negative results. Even if we say "here's the desirable target" and enforce it, the incentives will be that a large number of the participants will go below that desire in their efforts to maximize profits.
If we want them to be exceeding the targets for things like safety, recidivism, and humane treatment, we can't set incentives that are "profit = how little can you do", even WITH a minimum required.
I would recommend you do some research on this topic. Your giving talking points produced by mainstream talking heads.
When in fact, research points to private prisons being better at dropping incarceration rates through the programs offered at them. Therefore increasing ones chance at correct rehabilitation.
I'm not sure one 20 year old study of 200 inmates from one state is representative of the population.
Besides that, it's inarguable that for-profit entities need profit to exist. You could claim that some for-profit prisons have lower recidivism but a non-profit entity will, on average, have more incentive to help inmates than one who's lifeblood comes from profits.
That paper is older than 20 years, and takes place during a short period of time in Florida, from a very small number of private prisons. A lot has changed since then, and the paper makes assumptions that are invalid with the current discussion, specifically the extremely small sample of private prisons (n=2?).
I don't think it's valid to draw concrete conclusions about the current crisis from the study you linked. There are far more variables at play than were studied in the paper, and those variables - such as racism, increasing societal inequality, etc - matter.
Also, reasons cited in that paper for the reduced recidivism are to do with the programs offered by the private prison. Are private prisons in all states / California allowed or incentived to offer similar programs? Do they choose not to?
These things affect the statistics, and drawing strong conclusions from that paper about private prisons in California today may lead you to invalid conclusions.
- Convicts could choose whether to be sent to a public or private prison.
- Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus.
Those changes would create enough competition and align incentives such that we could see some real innovation in the criminal justice system. Sadly, I don't think these sorts of experiments will ever be tried. If someone ever proposes such a system, they'll be branded a supporter of "private prisons".
A caveat, first: I think two of our larger-scale social issues are that incentives are often misaligned with the outcomes we actually want, and that we don't create structural room for innovation.
That said, I think this is still pretty fraught.
Incentives are just rules enforced with a carrot instead of a stick; we're just as likely to come up with bad incentives as we are to develop ineffective regulations and write loophole-ridden or misapplied laws. At sufficient scale, money tends to inspire a troublesome kind of creativity.
If the private prisons have sufficient profit motive and the problems they face prove tractable for data and bespoke or ML solutions, they'll analyze likely convicts as thoroughly as possible and do what they can to skim the most-profitable convicts off the top of the pool and leave public prisons with whatever is left. Maybe they'll just directly pay the prisoner or their family. Maybe they'll have a miserable as-bad-as-regulations-allow experience for uninvited plebians and a special experience to offer prisoners they want.
Will a certain incentive lead them to bribe judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, or witnesses to get (or avoid) prisoners? Would they do the same to keep a former inmate from being convicted again within 3 years of release?
And then some donation-funded corner of the think-tank ecosystem will endlessly torture the data to "prove" private prisons get better outcomes than public ones and shop boilerplate legislation to restrict public and promote private prisons.
And once the prisoners are within their walls, they'll be sucking up all of the data they can to hone their prediction of whether they'll reoffend when they get out. Will they use it nobly to target support, or to ensure the whoever the algorithms pick as bad apples end up in constant manufactured trouble?
Please notice how far afield you had to go to postulate bad outcomes. For your scenario to play out, the people running private prisons must commit some pretty egregious crimes. Can you imagine the chutzpah of someone who tries to bribe a judge?! That's practically instant, guaranteed jail time. Judges only get bribed when judges ask for bribes.
If you applied this same level of scrutiny to the existing prison system, I'm sure you could come up with far worse outcomes using far less speculation. For example: What's to stop state prison guards from torturing inmates? Answer: Nothing, because they have qualified immunity.[1]
Yes, sometimes there are corrupt judges. Note that the article doesn't say whether the owners of the detention centers approached the judges or whether the judges approached them. Both sides had to be evil (and know the other side was evil) for the scandal to happen.
If you read more into the cash for kids scandal, you'll see it was the tip of the iceberg. The level of nepotism in Luzerne county was absurd and the state did nothing to fix it. There were judges abusing their positions, using staff for personal errands, showing blatant bias against certain attorneys, fixing cases, etc. By the time the FBI was done, around a half dozen judges in the county were convicted of various offenses.
My takeaway from the whole thing was that judges have too much power and too little oversight. They're the one relic of the royalty/nobility system that we kept after the American revolution.
It's not that far afield (and yes, I'm certain we could; and I would love to), because the mandate is to make money. We can expect that, on average, they will do everything people do to make money.
Some of that will be corrupt.
It's not that I don't think incentives can play a role; I just wanted to emphasize how incentives, profit, and creativity can go awry.
With private prisons, lobbying is likely cheaper and more reliable than innovation.
I assume you didn't intend this in a sinister way, but exercise caution when speaking of experimenting with prisoners. Even with good intentions, remember that these people have limited choices, and will probably lack the ability to withdraw consent (assuming it was given in the first place).
Isn't my proposal giving prisoners more choice? Right now they have no choice which prison they are sent to. Are you worried that some private prisons might engage in sleazy marketing, convince convicts to choose them, and then treat them like crap? That can easily be fixed by letting prisoners switch after a certain period of time. Heck, the law could be that anyone in a private prison can at any time choose to serve the rest of their sentence in a state prison. That would ensure a baseline of care.
Also, I think the point about lobbying proves too much. If lobbying is so much cheaper and more reliable than innovation, why don't all companies lobby instead of innovating? Apple has billions of dollars sitting around. Why don't they lobby to make the iPhone the sole phone used by federal employees? Heck, why don't they lobby to get rid of the new import tariffs affecting their products? I don't think companies leave $20 bills on the sidewalk, so lobbying must not be as effective as people like to believe.
I agree that lobbying is bad, but my objection to it is that the government is allowed to pass laws that coerce people in such ways, not that some companies take advantage of that power. Basically: hate the game, not the player.
Apple can't lobby to make the "Official phone of the United States" simply because there are significant hurdles in place.
Government procurement is a very different beast than most people would be used too. Imagine an organization tasked to deliver the world, but while spending the absolute minimum, and without showing anything that could remotely resemble favoritism in the process.
That's Government. The supplier must be reliable, yet everyone should have an equal footing from which to have a chance to grab a contract.
It has to be cheap, yet must satisfy every requirement necessary to fulfill the procurement's intended purpose.
There must an always also be at least the appearance of propriety in all transactions, or losing bidders have every incentive to challenge the integrity of the decision.
Given the significant hurdles represented by having to jump through all the hoops in winning a Government supply contract, it simply makes more sense to focus mercantile efforts elsewhere where returns can be made with far less risk.
Prisons on the other hand, run into the worst of both worlds. Private prisons don't make money without convicts. So they might lobby for increased mandatory incarceration as a punishment for violation of new laws. You also have operations where prisoners are exploited as slave labor (which is explicitly allowed by the Constitution). Which if you really sit and think about it, makes the threat of increased incarceration as a result of profit-motive for the private prison industry that much more dangerous, as by definition, you are delegating people to a more abusable status in the eyes of the law.
Hard-on-crime stances notwithstanding (I'm not taking sides, just pointing it out), one really needs to take into account on what spending on prisons really says about our society.
Begone yee incarceree!
Ye has't offended in the eyes of Man and God, and to the Pit do we consign'st thee til through suffering that debt is repaid!
Vs.
Your offense has brought you here, being due to the threat to civil society your reckless and thoughtless behavior represents. Through the insecurity you suffer through here, it is our hope that you will come to understand the fragility of the civic construct, and come to see the error of your ways.
Vs. Yet still:
Clearly, our society has failed to incorporate/integrate you in a safe or constructive way. Here you must remain for a period until such time as it is deemed necessary to recompensense for the crime you have committed, or until it can be observed beyond a reasonable doubt that you no longer represent a threat to the civil life outside these walls.
A prison by it's nature does not function as anything else than a container or isolator of men and their proclivities. To create a profit making enterprise around that under the guise of "innovation shall make this system better" is foolhardy, seeing as the law, and punishments for breaking it often preclude any way to operate a prison or treat the offender in a "innovative" way.
The price of a man's years is set by the people already, that is. No private prison can innovate on that except by changing or altering the suffering they experience therein contained from the rest of society. Their Wardens' alone reaping the benefit of the custody of society's delinquents.
Furthermore, even the vaunted Market can be severely damaged by the "free labor" potential generated by prison inmates.
I just see far too much potential for negatives and far too few possibilities through which one could wave a magic wand and both dispel the wickedness of the alleged offenders heart (if it actually exists), and also extracting something resembling justice for the victims should it be appropriate.
This is incredibly easy to game. A bad actor would create a prison which focused only on convict selection, and fully ignored the bonus for recidivism and pumped people through. Prison not only needs to be ethical for individuals, but for the rest of society.
So you invented a loophole and then said it would be trivial to game if they can use that loophole. Prisons aren’t universities, there isn’t an admissions process.
> Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus.
Then the best strategy would be to make sure that the prisoners die as soon as possible.
Are you suggesting that the private prisons would murder convicts soon after they're released? That's uhh... that's just a little bit illegal and people who commit murder tend to get caught and imprisoned for a very long time.
But let's assume that the private prisons could somehow keep getting away with murder. If anyone ever looked at the stats and saw that people released from private prisons had much shorter life expectancy, then convicts would choose state prisons. Then the private prison's revenue dries up and they go out of business.
> If anyone ever looked at the stats and saw that people released from private prisons had much shorter life expectancy, then convicts would choose state prisons.
No, they would not, because there is huge information asmyettry here and, and generally convicts have lost access to the sorts of publications with this info.
By and large, I would expect inmates to choose the closest prison to their family, regardless of quality metrics. What good does it do to know that some prison 2000 miles away has a really good meal program?
Considering most inmates do not have access to the internet, do you expect the state to publish these stats in good faith? Inmates to trust them? Or do they just subscribe to print editions of The New York Times?
I guess I'm not sure if you're speaking in hypothetical or talking about inmates today. As the article is on California I'm assuming we're both discussing USA.
Incentives for this are all weird. You have literal customer lock-in, so you can promise anything and deliver nothing.
The recidivism metric would probably cause private prisons to try to avoid or eject worst prisoners, so you'd end up with a 2-tier system, where private prisons are hotels for "nice" people, and public prisons are a hell-hole for the rest.
Or maybe some prisons would run training on how not to get caught.
> The recidivism metric would probably cause private prisons to try to avoid or eject worst prisoners, so you'd end up with a 2-tier system, where private prisons are hotels for "nice" people, and public prisons are a hell-hole for the rest.
Yes, so you'd have to run the metric based on who was initially assigned to the prison. "Oh, John was assigned to your prison, but one look at his record and you decided to expel him? Well, you're still responsible for his recidivism, because you chose to not serve him. Oh, Jack was assigned to state prison, and you tried to encourage him? Well, you're not responsible for his recidivism, because you selected him."
But yeah, I agree in general that the thing about metrics is that they can be gamed.
You could let the prisoners freely switch to public while they're locked up.
The main issue I have with this system is that the "consumers" making the choices (the prisoners) of product aren't paying for the cost. So incentives aren't really aligned.
>> Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior.
I bet if you just paid the felons the same amount they cost to incarcerate, relocated them away from their peer group, and forbid contact, a lot of them wouldn't re-offend, like, ever. It's down to basically a combination of poverty and peer pressure (as in "just when I thought I got out, they pull me back in") most of the time.
This is sort of how exile worked in Russia before the revolution: nonviolent offenders were sent to Siberia and simply lived there. No hard labor or anything, no incarceration per se, but you couldn't leave, and all your correspondence was subject to review and censorship.
There's a tention between "paid per prisoner day" and "fewer prisoners come back to stay".
You could get a bonus for not getting "return" prisoners - but it'd have to be better than gaining life sentences (though in general, harder to compete in three strike legislations where you'd be incentivesed to allow prisoners to commit crimes in order to trigger three strikes).
Perhaps there's a way to pay for recovery - but if your business depends on there being prisoners, it's hard to see how you could motivate anything but an increase in prisoner population.
Certainly an end to prisoners would mean bankruptcy?
[ed: you might have a goal of lowering crime, and by extention prisoner population. A private prison, paid to house prisoners, would be commercially committed to the opposite; increasing the prison population.]
then we'd have all sorts of ad campaigns from private prison aimed at at-risk communities and people, promising all sorts of things while still lobbying law enforcement for arrest quotas.
It is a nice idea, but I don't think many private companies are looking that far into the future to figure out where to best get their revenue. They can gamble on something that might not be totally under their control years out into the future, or just try to get more bodies in the prisons now. A ruthless "rational" actor would go for the second option.
There is an assumption that private prisons will perform better than public ones, and so far data does not support it. What great innovation came out of private prison system?
You we trying to optimise out the 'inefficient' government, by saddling it with much effort designing incentives and making sure they are not abused. You might as well run prisons yourself - publically.
No no no. This is exactly the mindset we need to avoid when addressing problems in our justice system. I am sorry but the entrepreneurial / venture capitalist mindset is not suitable here. Private prisons should not exist. Public prisons should be focused on rehabilitation, not retribution. As pro-capitalism as I am, the only future I see in your idea is abject market failure. We’re not talking about product here, we’re talking about human life. The market hasn’t been able to solve health care so what makes you think it’s going to be able to solve mass incarceration?
Further, this hypothetical system is ripe for exploitation. Aside from the potential exploits others have raised, have you considered the parallels to other industries such as defense contractors? Your idea creates an incentive and profit motive for crime. It’s the type of thinking that could literally result in corporations creating artificial mass shooters in pursuit of all the easy money that could be made. Sorry, but I think this is an extremely bad take and I actually worry about a dystopian future where this takes place. Pull on this thread at your own peril.
Isn't the primary issue anyone has with private prisons the same one we have with defense contractors: that they might, would, or do subvert the system to get innocent people imprisoned or their prison terms extended in the case of private prisons, or promote wars America doesn't want or need in the case of defense contractors?
What I mean is nobody really cares if prisons buy commercial toilet paper, for example. (As opposed to a hypothetical government toilet paper.) Nobody cares if the military uses the private industry for procurement of computers or whatever. We don't feel the government should be creating its own version of all private industry products.
But when the prison itself is private - and likewise when defense contractors themselves are developing, shopping around, and selling new weapons only to the military, that the military didn't ask for - then suddenly there is a new player in the budgeting process.
Ideally few or no people are committing crimes. If the prisons have excess capacity, free beds - good! But if it's a private prison, how can they fill those beds? Well, by working to imprison more people.
This is the incentive structure that people don't like about private prison.
In the United States it's de facto "illegal" to walk around while being black: there is a high chance you will eventually be jailed on non-existent charges. (And accept a plea bargain, for example, rather than risk a really long term.) I'm a white guy. If I had lived the exact, exact same life, done every single action exactly the same (and this is true of other people reading Hacker News) I likely could have been jailed for no reason at all, just for walking around while being black. That's a fact. I probably would accept the plea bargain I'm offered, too, and resolve to work for change later. What am I going to do? Tell the judge and prosecutor (who often is scored based on how often he gets a conviction/plea) that he and the system are racist? How well will that go over? Will it get me my freedom? Or will it get a vindictive term from the judge. I'd rather just sit in prison for a few months and then avoid the cops better next time, I think I would decide. (Rather than risk a 20 year prison sentence, again, totally innocent of anything. A few months' plea - which my counsel would probably advise I take - is nothing compared to that.)
So why are innocent black people jailed? Well, to fill prison beds, apparently. That is one of the reasons that people don't like private prisons.
We don't want anybody to be "selling" prison, so we don't want prison to be a private enterprise. It's quite straightforward and is something most people understand very easily.
> So why are innocent black people jailed? Well, to fill prison beds, apparently. That is one of the reasons that people don't like private prisons.
Utter nonsense. Black people are jailed for being black in America because American police are racist and American legislators are racist and American media are racist and American prosecutors are racist and American judges are racist. And then, because of this, black people in America have learnt that police, legislators, media, prosecutors and judges are best avoided.
If private prison operators have an incentive to get more people to serve more time, then they're not going to pick black people because they're just smart business people and black people represent an untapped growth market. If they've actually done anything to encourage oversentencing, they only reason they picked black people is because them and everyone around them are racists.
fair comment. if you increase quotas for number of arrests then the racist cops will just pick random black people to arrest because they're racist, can make something up, and a racist judge will believe them.
Ah I see you've never implemented an incentive program before.
EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM GETS GAMED. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MEASURE.
Every metric you could possible think of can be manipulated in ways you can't imagine. But give private companies the incentive and someone in them will figure it out.
IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.
If you look at my comments throughout this thread, you'll see that I am aware of the potential for incentives to have undesirable higher-order effects. Many people in this thread have suggested certain concrete undesirable consequences, and I've replied to them.
In contrast, you are putting forth a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure. But clearly financial incentives work in many cases. It's what sports teams use for their athletes and coaches. It's what businesses use for their leadership teams. When we need the best people possible to perform at their best, we tend to pay them money and pay them more money if they meet certain goals.
> IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.
Yes, ideally we'd have every job staffed people who are wise, kind, competent, and hard working. But we don't have nearly enough of such people and we judge traits inaccurately. So instead we have to make do with less effective but more practical methods. Financial incentives are one of those options.
> a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure.
A general counterargument is worth considering. Any incentive sufficiently powerful to draw forth extra resourcefulness in its legitimate pursuit is quite likely to also draw forth extra resourcefulness in its illegitimate pursuit.
> It's what businesses use for their leadership teams.
This is may help your case considerably less than you think if you look closely. Various forms of the principal-agent problem pop up all the time. Pink and Kohn have also forwarded some research suggesting that extrinsic incentives have diminishing returns or run counterproductive in some cases. And Goodhart's law is a proverb in the business world for a reason.
Aligning incentives is still important, but getting optimal performance is rarely as simple as tying rewards to a goal. Hell, half the time defining optimal performance is a project.
And when the underlying issues involve social safety and significantly curtailing someone's liberties via imprisonment (and the already fine tension between them), it's an especially tricky topic.
How exactly can a private prison "illegitimately pursue" having a lower recidivism rate?
Simply handwaving it away with incentives being gamed seems to complete ignore that you are suggesting that there will be widespread systemic corruption of the entire nation's judicial system. Perhaps the general counterargument could really take a moment to focus on the details.
Prisoners not being convicted of more crimes down the line seems to be a no-brainer in societal benefit, or does the line of generalised argument presented here think that's not the case with some more handwaving about optimal outcomes?
> Uncle Milton Industries has been selling ant farms to children since 1956. Some years ago, I remember opening one up with a friend. There were no actual ants included in the box. Instead, there was a card that you filled in with your address, and the company would mail you some ants. My friend expressed surprise that you could get ants sent to you in the mail.
> I replied: "What's really interesting is that these people will send a tube of live ants to anyone you tell them to."
> How exactly can a private prison "illegitimately pursue" having a lower recidivism rate?
Picking prisoners would be one obvious way.
Now, you can say "well, we'll just make sure they can't do that." That's fine; the overarching point here is that you can't simply set up an incentive system without thinking about the ways it can be gamed, among other unintended consequences.
Though: do you know that you can make sure prisons can't do that? Is it legal to forbid them a choice? Can you set up a system for distributing prisoners that's resistant to capture or influence? It's a little bit like saying "we'll just make sure our software is secure."
> you are suggesting that there will be widespread systemic corruption of the entire nation's judicial system.
I'm far from the only person suggesting that private prisons corrupt the criminal justice system, but yes, that's part of the argument.
Some people concerned about the issue believe that industry lobbyists work to back criminal code changes requiring more prison sentencing. Others believe in milder phenomena like judges internalizing lower costs of imprisonment and therefore using more of it in sentencing. The former could be described as corruption without being even slightly illegal. The latter might not even be recognized as a form of corruption, but it'd be a systemic issue unless you think imprisonment is underused in the US.
If "gaming" the system means less recidivism, that sounds good to me.
Prison ships to Australia were originally paid per passenger that boarded in Britain. The death rates were horrible, in the double-digit percentages. When the transport ships were instead paid per passenger that _arrived_ the death rates went down phenomenally.
And someone like you might say: "omg these prison ships gamed the system by saving lives!!!" Yes, that's what we want to happen.
You can lower recidivism rates by reducing rates that people are released. Or, for that matter, by providing legal assistance to ex-cons who reoffend. Not sure people who want to see real criminal justice reform would be happy about either...
(edit: not sure what the downvote is for, but I want to be clear that I'm not for gaming the rates in this way. I'm merely saying we don't want to incentivize lowering recividism rates at the expense of everything else)
What we want is not just less recidivism but fewer people going to prison in the first place. If you're getting paid for lower recidivism rates, you'll want to increase the rate of people going to prison one time, not zero times. It means you might lobby for the kinds of laws that would make that happen or you might bribe judges to get the kind of inmates you want (which might mean people who are possibly innocent or would really be better off with probation or house arrest).
Good. We can only hope prisons would try to reduce recidivism in order to make more money. That’s the point.
It’s a fantasy to think you can simple “hire people that care about the public good”. If that were the case the government wouldn’t be filled with incompetent red tape slingers vying for nothing more than a good retirement.
> EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM GETS GAMED. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MEASURE.
Yep. Thinking that you can just design a good incentive structure and be done with is hopelessly naive.
> IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.
Thinking that you can just hire people that care about the public good is just as naive as thinking that you can just devise the right incentive structure.
On the second point, I think folks are rightly dubious about the effectiveness of incentives broadly[1]. There's also some hilarious historical examples of incentives backfiring or having unwanted side-effects (like the Cobra Effect [2].)
More broadly, I don't think it's that easy to think that private prisons can even work well as a solution, regardless of whether they should be allowed to exist as a matter of public policy and ethics. Consider one summative look at this issue provided in this evaluation[3] -- it's dubious whether they're even cost effective, one of the strongest pro-private-prison arguments there has been in public debate, and how there's much better alternatives than the kind of perverse incentives bundled with private prisons, like re-evaluating whether parolees should be allowed in public housing, and providing more transition housing so when sentences are complete, inmates aren't forced to spend even more time in prison because they don't have an address to go to.
I'm not sure why but your comment was hidden as dead. I vouched for it because… WTF? It's a totally fine comment. Anyway…
I agree that existing private prisons are wasteful and cruel, but I think that could change if they had different incentives. Right now, convicts can't choose between private or public prison. That lack of choice means that private prisons have no incentive to be better than state run prisons. Private prisons usually charge per head. If no prisoners want to stay at the prison because it's a hellhole, revenue dries up and they go out of business.
I'm familiar with the cobra effect and ways in which adding financial incentives can cause counterproductive outcomes. I'm not particularly worried about that happening with private prisons. Financial incentives backfire in two cases:
1. When they fail to account for higher-order effects. (As happened with the cobra bounty in India.)
2. When they replace social incentives. For example: If a friend asks me to help them move, I'll probably oblige. But if I show up on moving day and I see some paid movers helping, I'll resent that. That's basically what happened with the day care that charged for being late. Previously, parents would show up on time because they felt a social obligation (guilt). When the day care added a late fee, that guilt disappeared because the transaction moved from the social realm to the financial realm.
I think the motivations of wardens and guards in both private and state runs prisons are pretty similar, and I don't think they're motivated by social incentives. For them, it's a job. They want to minimize the amount of stress at work, and that usually means minimizing the amount of violence prisoners do towards one another. Adding some financial incentives isn't going to solve all the problems with prisons, but considering our existing recidivism rates, I seriously doubt it will hurt.
Why should we care if someone makes a profit if we get the outcomes that we want? The profit is not what is evil, the poor conditions and poor outcomes are. If incentives are effective at producing good outcomes it would be stupid to not use them.
p.s. It is possible to disagree with someone without being a moralizing asshole, you should try it sometime.
If the incentives you proposed were enacted, there would be no private prisons because any company that tried would go bankrupt. (Unless you mean that the state would cover any costs incurred by the private prison, in which case you'd just get prisons run by grifters.)
California's state-run prisons have a recidivism rate of 65% within 3 years. A 2% rate of conviction over 50 years is lower than the population of non-convicts. It's not possible for any organization to accomplish that. Also, the company would have to wait 50 years for payout. Even if that payout is with interest, 50 years is beyond the time horizons of most governments, let alone companies.
Does it really remove the profit motive from incarceration? There are still thousands of vendors of various types making probably billions of dollars off of prisons, private facility or no.
They're still making a great point. Yeah it's progress but I think most people aren't aware of the extent of the problem, making further progress impossible. There's some really terrible abuses happening, like replacing visitors with video chat that you have to pay for.
Another example: getting rid of donated books and libraries in favor of paid tablets that also restrict the books you can buy, both for political and monetary reasons.
Yeah it's not great but it's a move in the right direction and beyond closing all prisons there will always be a need for vendors to provide goods and services inside prisons. Prisoners need food and clothing at the very least and it'll be bought from someone.
They don't need phone calls in some jails that cost over $20 for 15 minutes. Please don't make excuses for a corrupt system. Yeah, this is a win, but the problem is MASSIVE and in so many different domains. Frankly, you don't seem aware of the many issues that they were hinting at.
Sorry I didn't provide an exhaustive list of all the evils in the prison vendor system I'm aware of. I know about the horrendously expensive phone calls and the move toward video conferencing in place of in person visitation and the massive over charging for commissary items and the nearly slave 'wages' prisoners are paid for jobs they have no option to reject.
I just didn't think I needed to provide an exacting list of thing that will probably always involve a vendor. For example though unless the state gets into growing and preparing all the food from scratch there'll always be a food vendor in place, maybe just a normal food services company but it'll always be bought from someone, similarly for clothes and furniture.
I think I was too negative in that comment. I apologize.
I do think you're minimizing the issue in the way you talk about it, but the line about you not being aware of problems wasn't justified in the slightest and was just rude.
Yeah, could have been a bit less snippy myself. This whole thread has been super frustrating though with so many responses that to me boil down to "why didn't they tackle the whole gordian knot of the prison industrial complex?"
>Servin said that while the new law was a significant victory, there was one other thing immigrants rights groups were concerned about. When several sheriffs’ departments canceled their contracts to house Ice detainees last year, instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii.
Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?
> Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?
There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better.
So while there are definitely people who want these prisoners freed immediately, and even people who want prisons abolished altogether, getting the profit motive out of prisons would be a significant win regardless.
Prison profits are spent lobbying for tougher crime laws. Thus, unnecessarily harsh criminalization of behavior has a strong economic incentive. Having an incentive to turn citizens into criminals is bad for society.
I wonder if you can raise evidence of unreasonable imprisonment. I completely agree that this can create a feedback loop that would be bad, ideally we should have a much more sophisticated system of rehabilitation. Maybe the problem lies on the state being too incompetent to even set metrics for third parties.
All drug offenses are violent. Illegal drugs channel money into large organized crime syndicates that kill, torture, terrorize and maim people. Just because those people are brown, poor, and not Americans doesn't mean we should care less.
If you ask me, we need substantially more drug enforcement. There are severe inequalities in how we police for drugs that often result in only the poor and marginalized locked up. We need to refocus our drug war on the rich and powerful and put them in jail to, to make things more equal.
Violence related to drugs is mostly caused by prohibition. If we decriminalized these drugs, we'd eliminate the price premium that can be commanded from secrecy and use of force.
I watched a really great lecture online that was about how everything that rich countries criminalize (primarily prostitution and drugs) ends up becoming powerful industries in poorer countries because the demand from rich countries persists and creates a price floor higher than normal economically productive work in those poor countries. If rich people want something and it's banned in their country, it becomes an extremely profitable endeavor in poorer nations to meet this demand. Because profit margins are greater than normal economic activity, this enables criminal to gain political power within those countries. The speaker had a name for this idea which I can't remember, something like "hedonic exportation" - if anyone knows what I'm talking about I've been looking for this lecture for a few years.
> Violence related to drugs is mostly caused by prohibition
The rising violence rate due to the marijuana trade in California (and other states) does not agree with your made up reasoning. Although, in principle, I agree that your reasoning ought to make sense. Unfortunately, my principles and empiricism are often at odds, so it's best to side with the latter.
> The rising violence rate due to the marijuana trade in California (and other states) does not agree with your made up reasoning.
It actually does, because federal prohibition has not been lifted (even though there is non-assured enforcement forebearance).
The fact that anyone in a significant ownership, leadership, or management position in any business in the industry is technically guilty of a federal felony with a 20-year minimum sentence (and, just by being sufficiently successful, that can bumped up to a life-without-parole minimum) [0] has a fairly substantial impact on the willingness of otherwise legitimate businesses and businesspeople to participate in the industry and thus on what kind of business people do participate, even when the feds aren't actually prosecuting at the moment.
[0] the “drug kingpin” (formally, Continuing Criminal Enterprise) statute and it's later-added “super kingpin” provision.
> Also, much of violence is related to legal marijuana businesses being unbanked
Right, except for the critical fact that there are no legal marijuana businesses, that is certainly an important effect of the continued federal prohibition.
Drug dealer Y kills someone to protect territory - This is violent.
If X was willing to buy drugs from anyone, and/or if X would prefer to buy from a legal seller but none is available, Y is not the cause of the violence.
Also, you can get locked up for smoking weed that you grew yourself and had no intention of selling. What of that?
X got the drugs from somewhere. At some point, someone paid someone to get the drug. This enables Y.
> if X would prefer to buy from a legal seller but none is available
If I want to buy a nuke, but one is not available from a legal seller, does that mean I am not responsible for paying an unscrupulous seller to furnish that for me?
> Also, you can get locked up for smoking weed that you grew yourself and had no intention of selling. What of that?
Where did you get the weed plant? Last time I checked, weed doesn't magically sprout in your hydroponic set up (and I'd know).
Yes, especially if you're buying guns for recreation. If it's for survival and you live in the middle of the wilderness, perhaps you can make a case for it.
Oops, was that not the answer you were trying to bait?
If using a drug puts you in the category of someone who has committed a 'drug offense', then you have -- by definition -- taken an illegal drug.
> An excellent argument for decriminalizing them.
Indeed, but that doesn't automatically exculpate those who have -- during prohibition -- directly caused violence by their money. In my opinion, they should all be in jail for murder. For life.
> There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better.
The same criticism can be applied towards forced prison labour, and yet, it is explicitly permitted by the thirteenth amendment. (And is commonly used in state prisons.)
Just because a profit incentive falls in the hands of the state's coffers, as opposed to some corporation, does not mean the incentive is not perverse.
Agreed. However, in terms of perverse economic incentives I think the private for-profit prisons are a much much larger problem than prison work programs. They are not bringing in anything on the scale of what private prison systems bring in from the government. Also, least a few people claim to have benefited personally from the work programs.
>They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better
Not only would you want more prisoners, but you will also be interested in keeping them as long as possible (i.e. no parole) and pushing recidivism incidents to its maximum.
The idea that a special interest that is financially powerful and interested in high prison population, may inject wrong incentives into the society is real and understandable.
But we also have other side of the equation - politicians willing to expand definition of "crime" to placate people's fears and emotions combined with prosecutors willing to throw the book to make and example and build a career on it, all while not appropriately funding the prisons.
California's real problem is MASSIVE prison population, where you have to BECOME a RACIST to survive the prison gangs. Prison overcrowd is a feature of CA prison system.
I wish they ordered their priorities right and built enough prisons to house the population safely.
This is one single step in a series of steps to get anywhere positive. Knowing their Governor and his political expedient past, I am skeptical.
> The idea that a special interest that is financially powerful and interested in high prison population, may inject wrong incentives into the society is real and understandable.
And well established as a thing that happens at all times in California, but the real major culprit of that type is the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, not the private prison industry.
> California's real problem is MASSIVE prison population
It's been declining for nearly a decade, and despite California being the largest-population state, it's got a smaller prison population than Texas. But, yes, the prison population is too high.
> Prison overcrowd is a feature of CA prison system.
This is true, though that has also been reduced as prison population has.
> I wish they ordered their priorities right and built enough prisons to house the population safely.
Better would be to reduce the prison population to the level that can be safely housed in the existing facilities. California's problem is too many prisoners, not too few prisons.
Wouldn't the better solution to these priorities be shrinking down those definitions of crime, and not filling up the prisons we've got, rather than building bigger ones?
Only 1 in 5 prisoners are there for nonviolent drug crimes. You can't reduce the prison population by more than that unless you want to repeal laws against fraud, burglary, rape, assault, or murder.
One alternative would be to reduce sentences for those crimes, but good luck getting the public to vote for any politician who would propose such a thing.
Rather than building enough prisons, what if they just set target incarceration rates, built capacity for that, and then required that the justice system sentence and parole accordingly?
There's no reason to have over half a percentage of point of the entire population in prison. Almost no other country in the world does this.
Capping incarceration rates not only prevents prison overcrowding, but is a forcing function for policy changes that actually lower crime, as well as alternative sentencing options for non-violent crime (which almost always have better outcomes.)
What we believe is that a lack of private prisons will disincentivize new prisoners from being systematically introduced in an abusive fashion. More accountability. Releasing people like non-violent drug offenders is a separate issue.
> instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii
Of course, no one could have rationally believed that these people -- considered to be lawbreakers -- would just get FREED automatically. That would be an idiotic assumption. And yet, the article is worded as if there actually were people who believed it.
Many states have cut sentences in face of prison over-crowding, including California.
So, yes, some people believe private-prisons are a useful tool to deal with over-crowding in state facilities and that the likely alternative is further reduced-sentence releases.
I saw their comment and frankly I think it's a perfectly reasonable sentiment. That objecting to incarceration practices in America is viewed as contributing to a "political flamewar" by the mods here is surprising to me.
"[F]acists" and "concentration camps" are intentionally incendiary and do not promote a constructive discussion. There is nothing reasonable about that wording at all.
These are descriptive terms for what currently exist in the US (and have existed before in the US). If hearing them causes you to feel emotions that don’t allow you to engage in civil discussion I think it’s worth investigating why that is —- not insisting we find less precise terminology.
If I'm allowed to ask "What should we do about the Jewish Question" in a manner that appears civil, it's still not a civil discussion, regardless of the tone. If someone responds "don't you dare ask the Jewish Question," they aren't at fault for the lack of civility; the premise of the question was deeply uncivil.
Contextually, if someone on HN is asking "what should we do about the prisoners?" about people detained by ICE, the premise of the comment is uncivil. They are not prisoners, they have committed no crime (even by the standards of US law), and they are being held in deeply inhumane conditions. By any reasonable moral standard, the question is not "what should we do about the prisoners", but "how should we free people who are inhumanely detained." Allowing such an uncivil premise while banning emotional responses only reinforces the view that these people have committed some crime, and that they somehow 'deserve' the abhorrent treatment.
Furthermore, "concentration camp" has never meant "death camp", as many people seem to assume. I don't understand how it is incendiary to state they are concentration camps, when they largely meet the standards of a concentration camp.
I don't expect my posts to help these people, but I also refuse to remain silent about their inhumane treatment. If you still think this is inappropriate, I accept my ban, but I ask that you consider banning posts with such uncivil premises as well, even if they are written in an inoffensive tone.
Denunciatory rhetoric breaks the site guidelines regardless of what you're denouncing. If you hurl the buzzword weapons of the moment, it will take the thread further into political flamewar regardless of whether your position is right or wrong. Yelling a right position doesn't help; it will only trigger others into yelling their position back. We know what sort of comments take internet forums further into flamewar. What good does it do if this place burns down?
We took the word "civil" out of the HN guidelines because people kept lecturing us about it, as if we were ignorant of the objections against that word or somehow on the wrong side of them, when the truth is we know as much about it as the people doing the lecturing, couldn't care less about that word, and aren't motivated by the concept.
If you're bringing up "the Jewish Question" as a way of insinuating something about HN moderation, that's pretty offensive.
> Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?
No. The goal of wiping out the private prisons is simply that profit motive in the justice system is always an inherent conflict of interest.
The fact that ICE is getting smashed is just a side benefit.
Adelanto is almost 2,000 people and is the second biggest detention center for ICE. Who knows, ICE may indeed free these prisoners rather than spend the money to transport them to facilities that can't house them anyway. Wouldn't that be a nice benefit?
This is incredible. I can't believe it's happened so soon, putting people (especially such a stigmatized group) above profits really gives hope for the future of the country. Thanks for leading us in this, California.
The cynic and me sees this as a win... for the prison guards union.
It seems to me that whether public or private, prisons should have good, independent oversight. Pretending that the "profit motive" is the biggest issue overlooks the horrific abuses committed by guards in California's public prisons.
Not that I've been to prison in California, public or private, but if you look up a guy named Wes Watson on youtube, who recently got out after >10 years in a mix of private and public California prisons, he mentions that the guards at state run prisons were actually much more effective and actually tried to do their job the right way, because they're paid well with state benefits and pensions and such, compared to the staff at private facilities, who he likened to WalMart employees.
You're right. People scream bloody murder about "omg! This means a financial incentive for imprisonment" and then ignore how the exact same thing happens with public prisons, in particular how prison guard organizations pushed for Three Strikes to pad demand for their work -- same dynamic.
Wow bad faith all over the place... People do see problems with all of those, but the only solution to people making a profit from supplying prisons is for there to be no prisons (or for the government to make all the food and clothing soup to nuts, but that'd be crazy). Same with the others the issue with post prison jobs is that they're not enough so hiring them is good and a step down the road to a solution.
Reform is a step by step process, getting people used to the idea of thinking of rehabilitation and reintegration instead of the gut instinct to punish takes a lot of time and in the mean time address the worst abuses of the system. In the mean time make sure you're not setting up systems that will fight for their own survival and demand (in some cases by contractual obligations for the state to fill X number of best!) to be fed.
It's deeply confused to see a farm selling food to a prison as some kind of evil. It seems you've dove head-first into an anti-market position that sees any for-profit production as bad, which should be a big red flag.
Hiring a felon should not be regarded as evil, either; just the opposite.
I don't see how it's bad faith to assume activists don't advocate full abolition of markets. If you want to take the position that all profit is evil (or at least is evil if it ever touches any part of the prison system), that just makes your position harder to defend.
I'm an abolitionist* and agree with many of your points, but the political leverage to do a 'big bang' reform of the entire criminal justice/carceral system at once doesn't currently exist, nor are there neatly packaged answers for all of the complex problems. , so in the meantime we're still working within an incrementalist framework.
* as in that's the political position I hold, I wasn't involved in any way with this initiative or attempting to take credit or provide insider perspective on it.
Next we have to remove all for-profit 'prisoner support' services such as the staggeringly expensive communications firms that are bleeding prisoners and their relatives dry.
This applies for four prisons. But, from the article:
The contracts for these four prisons expire in 2023 and cannot be renewed under AB32, except to comply with a federal court order to reduce crowding in state-run facilities.
That court order is still in effect and doesn't seem likely to go away any time soon. So... the contracts can be renewed? It's not clear to me if this law is going to make a difference.
So does this also ban private companies from operating inside prisons? Most of them don't care who holds the actual keys so long as they can take advantage of the prisoners. They may not be the warden, but they can still control the purse strings.
It is very silly to be happy about something you not yet know the results, it's interesting and can be a case study. As long as the government doesn't fiddle with the numbers to manipulate voters.
> The contracts for these four prisons expire in 2023 and cannot be renewed under AB32, except to comply with a federal court order to reduce crowding in state-run facilities.
Hmm, something tells me these will end up being renewed considering getting budget approval and completing construction in 3 years is basically impossible so unless Californa has some prisons with spare space or in-progress new construction. OR, even better, reduces it's prison population... we may still have some private prisons for a while.
The next step is for the Governor to pardon all the people who are in for possession and other "lesser crimes" and the release them over the next there years, alleviating the need for additional prison space.
Yeah, seems there will just be frequent bribes for court ordered private facilities. Or lobby (bribe) to have maximum occupancies in state prisons reduced in order to make over crowding more likely.
California has been busy the past couple weeks, they passed the rent control law, a labor law about contract workers(mainly about Uber and Lift drivers), and now this.
Reforming private prisons is just a small part of criminal justice reform. This is a good step but it seems like many are unaware or are ignoring the impact that labor unions have on overcriminalization. Police and corrections unions exist all across the country and share many of the perverse incentives that private prisons do.
Very true. The California Correctional and Peace Officer's Association is one of the largest unions in the state and exercises a good deal of political power, albeit less than it used to.
Part of the problem is the division into trade unions, in which different economic sectors have their own unions and can then be rolled over or pandered to as is convenient for business or state interests. Syndicalism is an idea of people in different businesses and employment sectors to combine their labor power more efficiently by avoiding the fragmentation problem.
> The California Correctional and Peace Officer's Association
There is no “and”, just “California Correctional Peace Officers Association” (and, as the absence of the “and” suggests, it is just prison guards, and not other law enforcement.)
I was busy doing God's Work (upvoting any downvoted posts) and was considering the article.
So far as I can tell, the point of the article is that this is another salvo in the war between California and the federal government in terms of who gets to run immigration law, not some sort of newfound distaste for private prisons.
Curious that all the posts are about private vs. public prisons. I did poke around a bit and the private prisons don't appear to be cheaper, and it's rather surprising that they even exist given the amount of power public unions have.
Perhaps someone in the biz could pipe up, just what is the point of a private prison? All that occurs to me is the opportunity to ramp up a facility quickly or perhaps just the need for a law enforcement organization to park people when they don't want to be in that business. Dunno.
In "Locked In" John Pfaff makes the point that private prisons are not the problem. It is a more nuanced problem, but prosecutors play a large part in our national incarceration problems. Definitely recommend the read (or listen as an audiobook as I did).
> but prosecutors play a large part in our national incarceration problems
The problem is pro-punishment politicians. Singling out any particular office/position misses the point.
Even when judges practice discretion, pro-punishment legislators step in and introduce mandatory minimums.
And even when prosecutors practice discretion, pro-punishment judges will step in and force them to prosecute cases that the prosecutors don't want to prosecute [1].
Pfaff has pretty good data to back up his claim. He looks at legislation. He looks at mandatory minimums. Everyone plays their part, but prosecutors have a lot of power over sentencing. Plea deals play a role here.
And in many places prosecutors are politicians in a sense, because they are elected. One recommendation is to go back to appointing prosecutors rather than electing them.
So no, singling out prosecutors doesn't miss the point. It is an important point.
Yes, but it's become in the past couple years an out dated point in major cities (Boston, Philly, LA) where activist prosecutors attempting to prosecute fewer crimes and hand out lighter sentences are now being stymied by (appointed!) judges.
The problem with focusing on any particular role is that the other parts of the system will step in to force punishment.
While probably a good idea, I fear somehow the execution will be butchered by incompetence and then blamed on cops or racism. Issues have a tendency to go left unsolved when maintaining a narrative takes precedent over actual problem solving.
Are there any private prison models that were shown to be more effective than their peers or public counterparts?
While I agree that the vast majority (if not all) of private prisons, and those who participated in profiting from them, are ugly spots on the progress of modern humanity, I'm weary about an overall ban on the concept altogether.
Rather than creating rules against an evil business model or incentives to promote a beneficial one, this "unabashedly California" move cuts off any hope of someone with an ounce of morality to disrupt and ideally create a prison system that truly aims to reform inmates.
I heard a very interesting take on this topic on local radio. Basically, on average private prisons are no worse than public prisons as both make many of the same mistakes. The only difference is that public prisons are invulnerable to reform. https://wfhb.org/news/kite-line-september-6-2019-the-busines...
> The only difference is that public prisons are invulnerable to reform.
None are invulnerable to legislative reform. However, _private_ ones are closer to it, since they're, well, private.
> No worse
If you mean they're both terrible, exploitative, have guard violence, don't provide reasonable facilities, don't provide opportunities for personal development and education, and underfunded - maybe you're right. (although frankly I doubt it.)
Mass incarceration in general is a perverse US government sport / poor people population management/behavior shaping mechanism, anyway.
Wondering from where it comes the optimism in this thread for this ban.
Ive traveled to more than 40 countries, and lived for some time in 5, all of them with public prison monopolies. In all of them the prison systems turn to be terrible. And by terrible, I mean that the US prisons look like 5 stars hotels compared to them.
For reference, I was in most south american and caribbean countries, Spain, Portugal among others.
What is it with Spanish prisons? I live here and have heard about the problem of foreigners from UK and US not wanting to serve time in their owne country. They prefer here, but overpopulation is a problem, hence the articles about the cases.
Wholly supported. There’s no way a private prison would be incentivized to lower recidivism but is instead incentivized to increase it. Here’s to hoping we foster rehabilitation over punishment in our prisons and put an end to what is effectively slave labor (inmates making things for pennies on the dollar).
The sad and bitter truth: as the anecdotal Silicon Valley startup CEO is a closet right leaning Republican donor, and with the amount of military money up for grabs, I'm surprised to not see a flurry of startups "disrupting" prisons yet /0.5s
I'm pretty happy about the laws california has been enacting recently, this plus the uber / lyft law both align with my views. I'm glad that politicians are actually doing what we vote them in todo.
I've always wanted to see a lambda school model for private prisons. they get some share of an inmates future tax revenue but pay a significant penalty if ex-inmates re-offend.
What's going to happen to the existing private prisons? I assume this involves tearing up very expensive contracts. Will the government purchase them and convert them to public ones?
The law says that current contracts can run until expiration, which is a few years from now. They'll have to either release prisoners, move them, or incarcerate fewer people (or a combination thereof) otherwise they'll have to renew the private contract, which is also allowed under the law if necessary to alleviate overcrowding.
Great news! I first learned about private prisons over a decade ago and since then I am in disbelief by how many people aren’t aware there are for profit prisons.
It's frustrating that most reform and change is happening at the state level. It just means a completely fractured political environment where some states are progressive around data and prisons, whereas others are regressive. As a company, how do you even enforce things like privacy standards at a state level instead of national? Seems like a terribly complicated and inefficient system.
GOOD, if we can start rehabilitating prisoners, giving them skills to succeed outside of prison then there might be a chance. Yes, I know many have psychological issues and they can't be fixed without a complete brain rewire or hard drugs but many are non-violent and poor.
If the government does not want to run prisons, don't send so many people to prison. Prisons and other core governmental services should never be outsourced.
I watched an episode of last week tonight in which John Oliver covers issues of private prisons. Basically it's inmates being exploited by extremely low paid labor and various unreasonable charges for necessities.
But I don't see how government run prisons can solve or mitigate the problems.
I remember when a good friend was forcibly sterilized without consent by California state official directed medical staff. Eugenics and genocide has been a fundamental part of the Golden State's agenda for over a century.
End of legislative session (so a lot of bills that need to either be passed or die are getting final action), the first legislative session under a new governor that is slightly more progressive and much less a believer in relatively narrow focus on policy change at any one time than his predecessor, and a Democratic supermajority.
This is the key. With Gov Brown, he still had a modicum of temperance that they couldn't override. Now the legislature has carte blanche to do whatever they want, because regardless of the governor, they can override his veto.
> With Gov Brown, he still had a modicum of temperance
That's a difference between Brown and Newsome, yes.
> that they couldn't override.
There was a Democratic supermajority for a session under Brown, too, but (both now and then) the Democrats in the legislature aren't marching in lockstep on the rare issues where there is a majority in conflict with the Democratic governor, so while the supermajority is significant, it's more because (1) it means swinging a few votes isn't enough to deny a majority, and (2) some legislation requires a supermajority even without a veto, not because of he possibility for veto overrides of a same-party governor.
That sort of cynicism is needless. Considering that this thread is about private prisons, a very serious issue, bringing up a literal straw man is disingenuous and completely unnecessary.
It's not a strawman argument if that's really what they are spending time on that should be spent addressing far more important issues like homelessness. They shouldn't spend 1 second talking about an issue so meaningless on the list of issues they need to tackle. If you can't see that they are grabbing at low hanging fruit so that they can say they accomplished something then I think you might be a bit naive. A ban is literally the easiest cop-out for legislatures to do. No deep thinking required to blanket ban everything you don't like or perceive as problematic.
You must have not read the article considering it mentions at best
> eliminating “regulatory barriers” that White House officials believe increase the cost of building new housing. Developers have said these restrictions drive up prices on housing and limit the supply.
You can argue whether or not he's actually gonna do something or just tweet out hot air, but proclaiming concentration camps is not contributing any meaningful insight.
> I'm so happy about this. Private health care insure are the scum of the earth. They're totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum health care coverage in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as clients). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent on research and education. Next up should be criminalizing charging huge quantities for basic health care by private hospitals and the usurious fees on drugs.
I'd wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.
Yes, I'm also in favor of socialized medicine for basically exactly these reasons. Shocker, I know. The system works!
I grew up in socialized medicine, and you get sick, you go to the hospital, they treat you and you leave. There's no step 4. Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems is beyond me. It's all in y'alls control.
Because they've been sold lies for years and most of them can't really believe everything they know about such an important aspect of their life is bull.
Because when people talk about how terrible healthcare is here, it's usually people who don't have or can't afford good insurance. And by good, I mean covers most everything and doesn't have a huge out of pocket.
If you have good health insurance, the healthcare in the US is absolutely top tier.
Many people that complain are getting a plan with a huge deductible either because they are being cheap or can't afford better. But I think in a lot of cases it's the former. People just don't prioritize health care. Many would rather trade in their 2 year old car for a brand new one.
Even people with good health insurance find all the paperwork a pain in the ass. I'd far rather have decent, not luxury healthcare and no damn paperwork, when I'm sick I am not interested in dealing with administrative nonsense. The entire health insurance industry is parasitical.
> Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems
They've been told socialized medicine is evil communist plot to steal their hard earned money. Many Americans have not been outside of the states and have no concept of what life in other countries might be like. There's a good percentage of Americans that are completely ignorant of how the rest of the world does things, and also dismiss this as inferior. They've been told their entire life that the US is the greatest country, so, why would we do it any other way?
All of the people I know who are strongly opposed to government run healthcare are veterans. They are people who have spent 4-20 years of their life with government run healthcare.
One guy I knew went to the doctor complaining about blood in his poop. Was prescribed pepto bismal. Went back a few months later. Same thing. Went back a few months later, same thing. This pattern repeated for a little bit over a year. Eventually, he got a colonoscopy. Stage 4 colon cancer. He passed away a few months later.
A friend of mine went to the doctor with a fucked up ankle. Swollen to the size of a grapefruit. They wrapped it and gave him 800mg Motrin. Week later, same thing. Repeat x4. During the last trip, the doctor was giving him the scrip for another bottle of Motrin, when another (higher ranked) doctor recognized him and ordered the junior doctor to do an x ray. The junior doctor protested but did it anyway because it's the military. Fractured ankle. By this point it was mostly healed, so too late to put a cast on it. Fortunately it hadn't healed wrong, so it didn't need to be rebroken.
Vet communities are full of stories like this. And veterans, people who have had government healthcare for years to decades, are the population group most opposed to government run healthcare.
This doesn't necessarily mean government run healthcare is bad; the military is disfunctional in many ways. But your assertion that opposition to government run healthcare is based in ignorance is absolutely, completely false.
> But your assertion that opposition to government run healthcare is based in ignorance is absolutely, completely false.
Socialized medicine is in no way equivalent to the VA system or the issues of the DoD and VA. So if you're using that as an example to disprove ignorance, to me that just proves how ignorant people are. Pointing to the VA as an argument against universal socialized medicine is such an absurd take that I'm not sure how to respond.
If anything, your comment proves my point. Americans are completely ignorant on the basics of the topic to the point where they compare a poorly designed military system as some kind of argument against socialized medicine. The incentives of the VA are so radically different from any national healthcare system. I appreciate the debate.
Can you elaborate on why Tricare and the VA aren't government run healthcare? I define government run healthcare as healthcare that is run by the government.
The fact that it's poorly run is actually the point. Few Americans want to replace their experience at the doctor's office with the experience from the government run Post Office or DMV. The point is that many Americans have relatively little faith in the government to design a good system, and association with government run systems correlates strongly with lack of faith in the government to operate smoothly.
Note that my position, not that it really ought to matter, is as a proponent of universal basic income. Cut everybody in the country a check for $1500 a month, keep the ACA requirements that everyone buys health insurance and that insurance companies can't reject coverage on preexisting conditions, and let the market solve the problem. The problem is that healthcare is too expensive, not that it's bad. The government, for everything it sucks at, is really good at sending a check every month.
> Can you elaborate on why Tricare and the VA aren't government run healthcare
They are in the technical sense that the US govt "runs it". They are not socialized medicine as every Western country has implemented. They hardly have the scale, participation or political pull.
> I define government run healthcare as healthcare that is run by the government.
This is a bit naive, because the VA and DoD have a strong vested interests in short term solutions to keep soldiers going and back on the field. Also, many of the VA's problems stem from the fact that only a small % of Americans actually use the VA and care about its performance. So politically, it's hardly something that anyone focuses on, despite many promises to the contrary.
> experience from the government run Post Office
The post office is actually really efficient and is an example of a very well run government service. They're on par with any private company, easily, in both price and service. If anything, cuts to the post office have hurt it more than any operational problems or mismanagement.
> The point is that many Americans have relatively little faith in the government to design a good system
This is because many Americans actively vote against their best interest and elect politicians whose sole purpose is to hamstring the government from doing anything effectively. It's the classic conservative self fulfilling prophecy: cripple the government, point to the fact that the "government doesn't work", then privatize and reap the rewards. It's just a political game to make rich voters richer.
He implies the reason is that US voters are ignorant. As well as being a bit impolite I'm not sure that's case. The strange US system started I think as a stitch up between US insurance companies and Richard Nixon and there are ongoing vested interests making it very hard to change.
Here's a survey result:
>Even Republican voters seemed to disagree with certain conservative ideology on health care. The Hill-HarrisX survey found that 26 percent of GOP voters said they wanted the government to stop paying for health care, while a total of 53 percent favored some form of universal government-provided insurance. Twenty-one percent said they want to keep the current health care system in place.
So it seems more like the public would prefer universal government-provided insurance but the political system is not good at following their wishes rather than those of the various lobbyists etc.
> They've been told socialized medicine is evil communist plot to steal their hard earned money.
Mind reading a bit, here: This line might be taken as an ungenerous representation of a different point of view, and likely to generate more emotional argument than productive discussion.
When you remove all private insurance payments for health the US still spends more than other countries. The US government pays huge amounts for healthcare for lousy outcomes.
I live in a European country with a public health care system.
The lowest tax bracket is ~34% and the highest ~44%.
However due to a minimum below which no taxes are paid and other features, the effective rax rate for a $35k salary is ~15%. For a $90k salary it’s about 32%.
A median salary is about $70k.
This is excluding pension (the employer pays that on top to a pension fund).
Public services are pretty good and not expensive for me, they are even cheaper for people in lower income levels.
(Putting a kid in kindergarten is about $100-200/month for example)
If you take everything into account, I suspect it’s the US system is a much worse deal for everyone except the top 5-10%.
Different systems have different problems. In Canada, some people die due to wait times for treatable conditions, or are forced to wait so long that their condition worsens to be beyond repair and they are permanently debilitated. Over 50k people leave Canada per year to get their healthcare in the United States instead.
The trope that wait times are materially worse in single-payer systems is precisely that: a trope. You do not have to dig hard to find examples of wait-times measured in months to get diagnostic procedures scheduled, and where I live — the San Francisco Bay Area — the wait time for an initial consultation with, e.g., a dermatologist has been about the same, for as long as I've lived here. I know doctors who work in hospitals who've had to wait months for a breast cancer scan.
A thing that sucks in both systems can not legitimately be used to argue against only one of them.
That has to be weighed against both the wait times in the US and the amount of people who do not even try to go to the doctor to check out potential treatable conditions. Sure, the wait may (haven't verified) be longer, but I've never heard "can't afford to go to the doctor to check it out" / "don't call an ambulance, I don't have an insurance" from people outside of the US.
So sure, the amount of patients is pretty much guaranteed to be higher once they can afford the care. If you optimise only for wait times, then the obvious solution is to have no doctors and 0 wait time.
Ambulance rides are not socialized in Canada, and people skip going to the doctor for all sorts of reason. Stubborness is not an exclusively American trait.
Maybe if you have really great insurance in the US wait times aren't that bad, but the vast majority do not have great insurance, and wait times can still be many months to get in to see a specialist. Generally speaking critical care in Canada is not something you have to wait for. Cancer treatment and surgery, it's when you need it. Wait times for some things may be longer: Hip replacement big the issue isn't acute, for example.
Whether or no wait time varies greatly, the overall quality of care can be assessed in terms of patient outcomes life expectancy which are generally very similar while spending significantly less money. In fact many countries with socialized healthcare actually surpass the US on some factors like infant mortality, in part because the US has a higher poverty rate and those in poverty have less access to healthcare.
In Canada, conditions covered by the socialized plans are illegal to be treated by private practice. More than 50k people leave Canada every year to get treatment in the US to either avoid wait times or the government refuses to pay for the procedures.
> More than 50k people leave Canada every year to get treatment
Yes, like I said, anybody who can afford it can travel to get healthcare elsewhere.
Travelling from US to UK and paying 150% of the English tariff price for health care turns out to often be cheaper than getting care in the US, even if you include the travel costs.
The information is readily available - you could have taken 5 seconds and searched for it yourself instead of leaving a sarcastic unconstructive comment.
The site you link to mentions nothing about deaths nor about people going to the United States for treatment, including in the linked PDFs. Perhaps you could have tried to address the claims made instead of leaving a sarcastic unconstructive comment.
Don't forget that the US's rapid access to all the healthcare the patient wants leads to huge amounts of harm in the form of over-testing, over-diagnosis, and over-treatment.
Take 1000 men over 50 and give them PSA screening for prostate cancer for about 11 years.
Take 1000 different men over 50 and don't give them PSA screening for prostate cancer for about 11 years.
For the group without screening about 7 die from prostate cancer. But for the group who do have screening we see the same number of deaths. The screening hasn't prevented deaths from prostate cancer.
The group without screening didn't have any false alarms and didn't have any needless biopsies. 160 men in the group with screening had false alarms and unnecessary biopsies. 20 men in the screening group had treatment (which can include incontinence and impotence) for non-progressive prostate cancer.
It absolutely can be. The reason you don’t get colonoscopies until you’re in you’re 40s isn’t because they’re not fun. It’s because the risk of a false positive times the negative consequences thereof outweighs the benefit of you finding something early. People are wierd gooey lumps of random stuff. Scan anyone and you’ll find something out of place. The vast majority is irrelevant until some break even point where it’s not. Hence the recommendations and guidelines.
Just like you could have picked a credible source instead of a libertarian think tank. You are surely aware that the burden of proof for an assertion is on the proponent, not the disputant.
Ontario income tax rate: 12.16%
Canada federal tax rate: 26%
Employment Insurance and Social Security are deducted seperately and made up the rest of my deductions.
Connecticut state income tax rate: 5.50%
US federal tax: 22%
Unless social security rates are worse than Canada, I don't see how your situation is possible.
He’s incorrect because he has misquoted the evidence. Canada’s wait time data is restricted to medically necessary but non-emergent procedures. It is inaccurate to say that millions of people are dying while waiting for treatment. The average wait time for a cancer patient to be seen is 3 weeks. Average. Remember, not everyone with cancer is dying.
I appreciate the value of debate, but i ask that you please do your homework before you start citing the evidence
The US government already spends at least 10k per capita on healthcare - without even having a socialized medecine. More than double that of Canada at 4.8k per capita.
The United States is not a free market healthcare system - it's literally the worst parts of both capitalist and socialized systems with none of the benefits of either.
Also: I am Canadian, I spent nearly 50% of my earned income last year on just taxes. I also live in the most expensive city in the country. 90% of my medical expenses I've had in the past 10 years came from private practices that I paid out of pocket with a smidgen of private insurance that cushioned the blow a bit. The Canadian system is nowhere near as great as ignorant Americans like to believe.
I grew up in Canada, have family there I visit regularly and live in America. The tax rate in California top marginal is higher than Ontario and yet one includes healthcare. You don’t think you can spent 50% of your marginal income on taxes in California? I think with the state taxes no longer deductible it’s closer to 55%. I’ve only ever had great interactions with OHIP.
I prefer not to have beaureaucrats decide how I spend my money.
I've had a relative with a treatable condition wait so long for a surgery that her condition worsened and it couldn't be fixed and now she is permanently physically disabled.
They do the best they can with the budget they're given.
Private hospitals and health insurance are still allowed. Here in Canada, every public hospital still has a billing department for the uninsured & those with private insurance (foreigners, etc.) (I wonder if you can opt to pay to "skip the queue" here?)
What you're talking (skipping the queue) about is a two-tiered system, which I would be in-favor of but it is taboo to even bring it up in Canada (or at least, that has been my experience).
This argument is long, long past its expiration date.
While the US by some measurements has a lower overall tax rate than other developed countries [1], the difference between us and, say, Canada, who enjoy high quality socialized health care, is far from "exorbitant".
There's a very reasonable argument for considering all of the consequences of our systematically broken health care system as a "tax" -- it amounts to a massive financial and quality-of-life burden for most Americans.
Health care in the United States is more expensive than in other developed countries for identical procedures [2]. Medical costs are the worst kind of lottery, where an overnight visit for tonsillitis can get you a nice little $100,000 bill [8]. Do you not consider that a tax? Why not?
Medical bills account for 60% of bankruptcies in the US [3]. High medical costs are literally causing people to commit suicide [4] or to die of entirely preventable causes [5] while others just forego care entirely [9]. For those people who do jump through the hoops to get private medical insurance, there are entire bureaucracies dedicated to denying claims [6]. There are so many perverse incentives involved that some doctors are taking it into their own hands to try to lower medication costs, and pharmaceutical companies are responding by tripling the costs of the medication [7].
Meanwhile tons and tons of Americans stay in jobs they don't like just to maintain their employer-sponsored health insurance [10], strangling their wages and preventing positions from being opened up to more enthusiastic employees.
These things are all taxes. They are taxes on American society, impacting all of us. Anybody that's opposed to socialized health care "because muh taxes" is defending this system, this embarrassing, broken, corrupt system that endangers and kills countless people every year and acts as a massive multi-faceted anchor on our economy.
There's a choice component to health. Sure, you can lose the genetic or environmental lottery and just be unhealthy.
Or you can choose to be unhealthy. Smoking, drinking, drugs, poor diet, lack of exercise. These are by far the biggest contributors to healthcare cost and they cost absolutely nothing to prevent. Many people just don't take responsibility for their health, and many others in the US don't like the idea of subsidizing other people's healthcare for preventable or self-inflicted health complications.
edit: I actually do have access to one of the best single payer systems in the world due to dual citizenship. Single-payer is far from the perfect silver bullet everyone likes to sell it as.
I actually don't think it's working out. People in general are awful at risk assessment. But, Americans like their choice, even if it means the majority of them will make poor ones.
It's also a downward spiral. The more people are responsible for their own well being, the more they're opposed to "handouts". So those who do take of themselves and do responsibly manage risks I've noticed are the ones more opposed to socialized medicine.
Hm, this is a good point. US provably has the greatest incentive to live healthy due to having the provably highest health care costs. That is a rational and reasonable argument. Yet you get downvoted for it which is interesting. I think you make a good point though.
It doesn't seem to be working. U.S. has obesity epidemic and shorter life expectancy than most countries with socialized healthcare.
This system throws caring-but-unlucky people under the bus.
And even people who really care about their health still have to endure this absolutely bizarre implementation (how can you have an efficient market where prices are secrets or fiction?)
In the USA there are plenty of perfectly normal, educated people, taking care of themselves, eating right, jogging every morning and doing the "right thing" entire life who get literally financially destroyed, savings wiped out, and go bankrupt because of "complicated" illness that is perfectly solvable but "costs a lot" due to the state of medicine in this country.
Why "educated" people in this country still keep voting in the same crooks (dems & reps) is beyond me.
This election cycle is going to be the same thing - this crook or that crook. Pick one that will do less damage. There is no difference anymore. This two party system BS has to go.
But there is a solution to that. Anything that can be easily identified as being the result of someone's own choices they are on the hook for and/or can get insurance for. Yes, these things would have to be enumerated, with some things debated and others refined, but insurance companies didn't seem to have any trouble enumerating what they will or will not cover and this isn't any different. Most if not all of the issues with implementing a system like this will be things that have been done before.
How expensive is health care in the US? IE, in my country dentistry is fully private, and it costs about 100 USD for a teeth cleaning. How much is that in America?
Dental isn't really indicative of "how expensive health care is" though. Lots of U.S. dental and vision "insurance" plans are really just mandatory subscription plans since their bills are pretty consistent, and anything that might cost more gets you a referral to a hospital.
It's when you visit a hospital (voluntarily or via emergency ambulance) that you'll start getting the $1,000 - $100,000 bills that'll kill ya.
> It's when you visit a hospital (voluntarily or via emergency ambulance) that you'll start getting the $1,000 - $100,000 bills that'll kill ya.
As a kid I had a 2 day hospital stay for an appendectomy that cost about $1000.
An appendectomy now runs around $100,000. An airlift to the emergency room will also cost around $75,000.
This is a common childhood ailment and is not related to living the so-called sinful lifestyle that people like to bring up as justification for high medical costs.
My typical doctors visit costs me $40 out of pocket. My wife, who sees more specialists and physical therapists because of her scoliosis ends up paying about $250/mo in premiums. I have the 'premium' insurance that my employer offers, which means that I'd pay no premiums for inpatient hospital care. My family health plan costs about $240 per bi-weekly paycheck or $6,240 per year. My employer pays a little over $600 per bi-weekly paycheck for my health insurance or $15,600 per year. Even with that and my employer-sponsored long-term disability insurance, I'm sure I'd still probably be permanently bankrupted if I got a disease like cancer.
My wife and I needed prophylactic rabies vaccinations after a bit of an adventure involving a bat in a guest house. Had that happened when we didn't have health insurance it would have cost $38,000 out-of-pocket. Blood-based medicines are expensive everywhere in the world, but I personally think it's completely immoral that we would even entertain a system which would completely sink someone financially over something like that.
OK so you're paying $15600+$6240=$21,840 a year for health insurance. That is a common rate in the US for family coverage.
You also pay $40 for a $100 teeth cleaning, so you're on the Bronze plan that has a 60% coverage and 40% copay. That's the most common plan.
You mention bankruptcy due to cancer. That is true. If you undergo cancer treatment the billed costs can run over $1 million. And you'll have that 40% bronze plan copay. This bankrupts everyone. Those not bankrupted had plans with 10 or 20% copays because they were of the elite class.
Some consider this affordable and reasonable. I don't, and I think you agree.
You mention your rabies vaccine costing $38,000 in the US and this is true. Did you know the rabies vaccine, without insurance, runs around $400 a dose in most of the world? With a 5 shot sequence that comes to about $2,000.
Dentistry is private with some insurance options in the US, and I (in the suburbs of a large city in the Midwest) would have paid about $100 for a teeth cleaning had my dental insurance not paid for it. (My dental insurance is about $25 a month and covers most of major oral surgery if needed. My root canal cost about $350 with insurance recently)
Once in the US, I was quoted $200 for busting a cyst that had developed on my finger due to small cut/infection (this service in my European country is offered for nearly free in any pharmacy).
Instead I went to a Walgreens, bought a pin, a lighter, some ethanol, and a band-aid for like $5, and did it myself...
For each chemo session, our hospital is currently charging around $25k. A complete breast cancer treatment, including surgery and reconstruction, is $500k or so.
This is through insurance. Cash payment is negotiable and possibly much less, but that’s negotiated case per case.
My relative had $1.2 million in "treatment" for lung cancer that made her horrifically ill and miserable in her last months. The 20% copay with great insurance was $240,000, annihilating her modest estate. The "treatment" didn't extend her life, but did make her last moments filled with misery and horror, as the overwhelming majority of so-called "cancer" treatments do. Interestingly she was averse to treatment because she had seen how useless and painful treatment had been to certain previous friends and family. Thus she got the oncologist's solemn assurance that treatments had massively improved and hers would almost certainly be effective and extend her life. Neither of these claims were true and the oncologist knew it.
It's far worse than treatment with leeches. Far far far worse. It's inhumane, oncologist merchants of death are aware they are causing suffering for their own financial gain, and most oncologists have committed severe crimes against humanity by simply practicing their vocation. Oncology for the most part is on par with being a Nazi SS soldier torturing and killing people, only much worse. It's a sadistic enterprise of pseudoscience which harms innocent people for profit. Those that promote it are vile evil people who should be permanently locked away from decent human beings.
They key difference is that health care clients want their services.
But while the exact rationale doesn't hold, there are inherent problems on competition and freedom of choice on health care that kinda break capitalism. There is also the rationale that one does want minimum health care coverage in a society, and a market is not able to provide that.
Exactly. Crime is a social and economic problem that prisons and police do little to solve, with great harm to society. Our resources would be better spent elsewhere.
We have different economic & market tools. We should use the right tool for the problem.
Some markets are best served with a free market system, others with a single payer system, others with a monopoly.
There are studies (no reference) which indicate that every euro spent by government on education has a 10 times return on investment: better educated people, have better jobs, pay more taxes, create more companies, create more jobs, attract more companies, have less health issues, etc.
Making people pay for their own education, and thereby limiting the education level of the population of a country, a country is doing itself a disservice.
> Dogmas are a disease… We should use the right tool for the problem.
It's bizarre to me how rare this stance is.
I understand disagreement over what exactly the "right tool" is, because these things are complex. But people who believe there is only one right tool for every job -- big government, small government, free markets, more regulation, whatever -- strike me as intellectually lazy.
The US system is actually the worst of both worlds (capitalist and socialist). It combines heavy regulation costs, high litigation costs, high public funding, AND profiteering. Literally anything would be better. It's based on a government-protected trade union married to a system of geographic monopolies... yet it's still allowed to charge whatever it wants to a captive market - and then price discriminate on top! It's overburdened with CYA and barrier-to-entry regulations, yet falsely labelled as "free-market" and "capitalist" by its status-quo PR & lobbyists to get that political support. Same thing as Universities.
If it was truly "capitalist" then literally anyone would be free to hang a shingle and provide medical services (kind of like car mechanics), there would be competing professional accreditations (trademarked brands) as well (kind of like private technical certificates). But when the "market" is so perverted, "capitalism" (whatever is left of it) gets a bad rap because the incentives are fked to begin with.
There are negative side effects of capitalism for sure, but it's possible to identify these effects and work to counteract them.
In a democratic country, the populace regularly campaigns for new regulations to counteract some of the bad behavior incentivized by capitalism and the negative externalities produced by capitalism. We're chatting in a thread about California banning private prisons, for example.
In fact, I'm not even sure regulation by a state is something opposed to capitalism. Rather, regulation enables capitalism.
One could view capitalism as a system of regulations that attempts to limit the ways that people can profit from one another, ideally by limiting them to value-creating activities, but at a minimum blocking them from nefarious and value-destroying activities. If you want money, it's far easier to take it by force, or trickery, or monopoly, or coercion, or bribery, or espionage, or cutting corners, or nourishing addiction, or any number of unsavory things.
Capitalism is an attempt to cut off these options, at least to the extent that many people abandon them, and instead decide to create value for others instead.
The problem is that those who get unfathomably rich off of "business" will employ this tremendous power to erode the barriers between what's an acceptable business venture and what is not.
Capitalism is not a "disease" really, it's a legacy system whose fundamental mechanisms are becoming an increasingly large source of dysfunction.
Nonsense. There are things where the pricing mechanism of allowing free enterprise allow us to search for and converge to an optimum. There are other things where information asymmetry, problem opacity, and transaction costs mean that it's better handled a different way.
It isn't an ideological problem. You'll see this choice in places like companies, where people band together to solve a problem rather than invoicing each other to get to some objective.
I don't disagree, but our current socioeconomic/government system leads us to wildly bad situations where we have privatized industries hellbent on extracting every last cent possible from disadvantaged populations (in every sense of the word) and then using that money to further their aims and resource extraction via influencing legislature.
It spreads, it's self perpetuating, it's sick, and it is a disease.
I am in agreement on there being a problem where you can turn money into legislation. That does destabilize the system through regulatory capture. Haven't encountered satisfactory solutions yet.
That's markets, not capitalism. Capitalism is specifically the arrangement where the means of production can be bought and sold (on the market). It's only been around since the industrial revolution - prior to that the means of production were too simple to do this sort of thing with, and there was just land and labor. Markets have been around a lot longer.
Non-capitalist but still market-based systems are possible. You can have worker ownership (worker co-ops like Bob's Red Mill), consumer ownership (consumer co-ops like REI), state ownership (national healthcare or municipal utility companies), or some mix of them. These organizations can and often do still compete with each other on the market.
Capitalism is great for some things, and awful for others. Capitalism works best when there's no power differential between customers and service providers because the goal is to maximize profit. If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system. If I get no choice in which prison I go to, well, I get bilked.
Basically anywhere you have no choice should be socialized or two-tier: Medicine, Prison, Army, Education.
On the other hand, nobody's forcing me to buy phones.
> If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die
In a socialized medicine system, someone else is making this choice for you. Medical costs (drugs, doctors' education and time, research costs, equipment) are unbounded, while resources are not (no matter what kind of insurance you have), so tradeoffs have to be made. ("What? My daughter is dying from an extremely rare disease and you're not having 1000 PhD researchers working on the cure?! You're spending the resources on curing breast cancer instead?!? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU!!!") AFAIK (though I haven't deeply researched this topic) society-level recommendations aren't made on what is best, but on what is most cost effective (e.g. how often you should have mammography, when you should start having regular colon cancer scans) so it's perfectly reasonable, if you're rich(er), to supplement the public medical system with some extra resources of your own to improve the health outcomes of yourself and/or people close to you. In addition, that funds new research (e.g. the anti-aging craze currently happening in SV, funded mostly by rich billionaires that don't want to die... the medical system doesn't even recognize aging as a disease (so drugs can't be approved to be "anti-aging")!)
In a capitalist system someone else is making the choice for me too: VISA. I’d rather the government take a wholistic view of resource allocation than a luck based bank account balance strategy.
> If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system
One provider might charge a fortune. But then another will come along and realize he can get all this business by charging slightly less than a fortune. Then another comes along and charges slightly less. And so on until they are charging just enough to make a slight profit.
That’s how a healthy market works. But if you put up tons of barriers and rules about who can provide a service and how the service must be performed, the whole competitive system breaks down.
Might I suggest perusing the Farm Bill? The government is literally paying farmers to grow crops people wouldn’t pay for. That doesn’t sound like a very free market system... frankly I wish they’d stop.
That's to insure we aren't undersupplied on food and famines caused by a bad season/trade with another country are absolutely terrible. Seems like a cheap insurance for a terrible possible outcome especially considering that any consistent oversupply from the subsidies will get weeded out due to the subsidies.
Would you prefer a shortage of food every few years?
That hardly supports your argument that it’s a free market, and that’s the point I was making. The rest was an aside. I don’t know there’s evidence that not subsidizing corn (the vast majority isn’t for human consumption anyways) to below the cost of production is the only way you ensure lack of famine. Either way I’m not sure why this socialism is okay but medicine is beyond the pail.
For instance grain crops can be stored long-term by the government [1] and of course so can raisins [2]. None of this has to do with the farm bill.
> If my choice is to pay for cancer treatment or die, you can (and do) charge me literally whatever you want in a capitalist system.
Erm, no. Because if people can't pay for it, then your drug get no sales, and you lose your investment. The problem right now is that there are several payers involved and nobody sees the real cost of things. Were you to pay directly for drugs from your own pocket without intermediaries I'd wage all drugs would be way cheaper.
Tell that to your $600 epipen. Seriously. Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38. Drugs would be, in a perfect system with no socialist intervention, priced at whatever value they provide you. If that's your life, it's very expensive. There's no room for mercy in capitalism.
There's a reason Sovaldi is $84,000 and it's not because it costs a lot to make. It's the same reason as soon as they realized that you could treat cancer with Thalidomide the price rose two orders of magnitude.
this is not how prices work. consumers only pay the maximum they would be willing to pay for a good when there is only one provider. when there are multiple providers prices are pushed down to the cost of production. or so the theory goes.
* caveat: Assuming no power disparty between buyers and sellers.
If you need something more than the seller needs your money they're free to adjust the price up no matter how many of them there are. For instance, a hurricane comes in to town. All of a sudden, every gas station is charging $50/bottle for water and $10/gal for gas, even though the market is no more or less competitive than the day before when they charged $2.50. Externalities matter. Gouging like this is illegal in the event of bad weather but it's the status quo in the event of bad health, and much of the time, you exert equal control over both. The only real difference is one tends to skew acute and the other tends to skew chronic, I guess.
Sure I get the theory and I actually buy into it. However I’ve been on this earth long enough to know that theory doesn’t match reality a lot of the time and that’s when then the government should step in and right the scales.
> Canada doesn't even have socialized drug insurance for prescriptions and it costs $100 and in the UK $38
It's kind of easy for a country to dictate drug prices when they had no hand in developing them. Now show me a country like the US that develops just as many drugs. Ah, you can't, there is none.
You really aren't making the point you think you are. We are talking about a drug discovered (Poland) more than 100 years ago, isolated (Japan) more than 100 years ago, synthesized (England, Germany) more than 100 years ago. Then wrapped in a device basically developed by the US army in the 1970s. So how does letting an mostly uninvolved private US company set prices arbitrarily lead to more of this sort of development? For completeness, I'll note Merck did real work in improving the delivery mechanism (after a couple of recalls), but the heavy lifting was as above. Merck is of course German, not US, but it went through one or two US companies before landing there, if I recall correctly, and then Mylan acquired marketing rights in the US. Without new development, Mylan ran the price up about 6x over the 2009-2016 years (to a margin of about 95%) , which is what caused all the pricing fuss.
More generally, while I know what you are getting at you have to be careful with this sort of statement "this is the only way to do the drug development" is a pharma industry talking point but it is largely bullshit (although not entirely, the model run in the US does make it quite expensive and that can't be fully supported the way it is on, say, generics pricing).
It is true that the US is more productive in this space per capita than most places (but not as much as many think) , but it is really difficult to determine if this is primarily due to fundamental capacity, or due to financial incentives...
And check where these R&D spenders make the most money in the world. In the US. There would be no such level of investment if the US market did not exist.
Note, per capita it looks like most of the countries studied are discovering new drugs (in the study's terminology "new molecular entity") at much faster rate than the United States when adjusted for population.
The money quote:
" Our data suggest that the United States is important but not disproportionate in its contribution to pharmaceutical innovation. Interestingly, some countries with direct price control, profit control, or reference drug pricing appeared to innovate proportionally more than their contribution to the global GDP or prescription drug spending"
Denmark is so tiny compared to the US, it hardly makes sense to compare drug discovery per cápita. If Denmark happens to release just a single extra drug one year, it totally shifts their ratio.
Drug prices have absolutely nothing to do with where the drug is developed. AstraZeneca being Swedish never prevented Swedes from having a yearly out of pocket maximum at $120.
Roche, Novartis, AZN, Novo Nordisk, Sanofi,GSK and on and on. You could hardly pick a worse sector than healthcare to make this kind of nonsense America first point.
why does the healthcare discussion always regress to capitalism vs socialism? everyone cites canada as the ideal model of social healthcare but forget to mention the long wait times and the fact that their population is only a fraction of the US. i think our system could use some tweaks but throwing it out altogether for a socialist program is not it.
No we cite the entire OECD except America each of which rank higher in healthcare quality by WHO standards and cost at most half as much. It’s like a poor student saying “just because I’m the bottom of my class doesn’t make me dumb” — in a way, no but in a much more relevant and important way, definitely. It shows relative to your peers you suck at the task at hand.
It comes down to this debate because the pro market people offer zero solutions other than staying the course and the course is straight down. Offer something better.
> the fact that their population is only a fraction of the US
I don't understand why that matters. But if it does, couldn't the US implement social healthcare at the state level? Canada and California have roughly equal populations, for instance.
They totally could but for some reason no state does... Instead, I only see senators, representatives, and potential presidential candidates trying to force it upon the entire country. We are the united states, let individual states start the process and let it bubble up to the federal level once enough states enable it just like we are doing with marijuana laws.
IMO, the federal government has been getting too large just like how they dangle interstate highway funds from states for enforcing the stupid 21 year old drinking age.
> They totally could but for some reason no state does
No state alone can, because it would have (or at least would fear) a large influx of people coming for the free healthcare. If enough states set up their own systems and make them interoperable, it might have some legs. I hear rumblings of this from time to time,
What I meant was a federally-mandated, state-implemented system. Federal law can define a minimum level of healthcare that every state is obligated to provide. States set up and administer their own systems, any way they want - single-payer, mandatory private insurance etc. Isn't that how Canada actually does it?
It handles the "US is too big" objection to universal healthcare that everyone loves to bring up, by moving the systems to a lower level.
Capitalism distills incentives. It’s hard to think of a poorer incentive structure than that between prisons and prisoners. For healthcare, there is a mix of incentives, some of which incentivize improved quality and quantity of care. For prisons, I can’t think of a single incentive around capital which could lead to better outcomes for prison life compared to a public structure.
Absolutely. For example, from a societal perspective, reducing recidivism is a huge win. from the perspective of the operator of a private prison, it's lost profit.
But could public prisons have even better results if there weren't heavy lobbying for various laws and policies? It seems like it's another case ripe for regulatory capture to degrade the public option.
talking points produced by mainstream talking heads.
Dismissing other people's comments as not their own is kinda insulting and derails discussion. Obviously exceptions exist for people who spam the same thing over and over, but it's a negative debate tactic that often veers into fallacy.
I'm sorry does it? that's not what the paper says at all
"Those released from private prisons who reoffended committed less serious subsequent offenses than did their public prison counterparts. The two groups were similar in how long it took for rearrest or for the first recidivism event to occur"
You're all over this thread, and people have already put your resources under a critical light. What is your relationship with the private prison sector and why are you so passionate about it?
1) Because they're not necessarily all illegal immigrants. AFAIU, ICE puts asylum seekers who are otherwise following the letter of the law into these detention centers--show up at the border, request asylum, get put into detention while awaiting disposition of your case.
2) Are you an illegal driver for driving over the speed limit? Illegal usually implies something criminal. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor--no more than 6 months in prison. That is criminal strictly speaking, but within a certain grey area where we very often refrain from branding people as criminals.
I'm not really hung up on the phrase. I understand both sides, which really come down to wanting to emphasize different aspects of the situation to highlight different political priorities.
I'm curious, though, if newspapers have style guides regarding usage of "illegal". If I Google 'site:theguardian.com "illegal immigration"' I find many hits, so perhaps at least for The Guardian it's at the discretion of the particular journalist.
I am referring to the terminology used by the department of homeland security [1] and other legal institutions that oversee their cases. If they are predominantly asylum seekers, then why not refer to them as asylum seekers?
>Illegal usually implies something criminal.
No, illegality does not usually imply something criminal. These are two different concept that have precise definitions in court. Nor does your "usually" carry any weight, for else we should abide by this probabilistic distribution and call them asylum seekers.
But not all people are using legal terms. Nobody who objects to the phrase "illegal immigration" disputes the fact that illegal immigration and illegal immigrants exist as a technical matter. There's no 8 USC § 1325 truther movement. They're very up front about their reasons for objecting to the use of the phrase, and while perhaps extreme you can draw analogies to colloquial distinctions we've always made regarding terms like "criminal".
If you find the language games obnoxious, so be it. I wouldn't dispute that sentiment because I can understand it, I just don't openly espouse it because I personally also find it a little obnoxious to be rancorous with people who are clearly just trying to be empathetic.
Many immigrants (especially those from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) in ICE detention facilities presented themselves at the border and legally requested asylum. For more information on "northern triangle" and why these immigrants are fleeing their homeland, read https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/central-americas-violent-no...
This is an ongoing and growing challenge for our immigration system. In FY 2017, as instability in Central America’s Northern Triangle showed few signs of ending, immigration judges decided over 30,000 asylum cases, a considerable increase over the roughly 22,300 asylum cases decided in FY 2016, and the most [since] FY 2005. (source: https://immigrationforum.org/article/fact-sheet-u-s-asylum-p...)
Because the detention facilities don't house exclusively illegal immigrants (in fact, given the fact that US citizens have been detained in them for extended periods despite clear proof of citizenship, even calling them immigrant detention facilities is somewhat misleading.)
A more accurate label would be “arbitrary detention facilities”.
> given the fact that US citizens have been detained in them for extended periods despite clear proof of citizenship
I'd be curious to hear more about these cases as well as their proportion relative to the illegal immigrants detained at these facilities. I'm not aware of lawful residents being detained in such proportions that this would suddenly warrant tipping the terminology on the side of indetermination.
>Has the legality of their immigration been determined at that point?
By that logic, how do you even know they're immigrants to begin with, then? All it takes is flashing your visa or any documentation proving your status which you are required to carry at all times, just like I am. You were not expecting bartenders to give you a free pass in your teenage because you left your ID at home, did you?
>Regardless, the statement as written is accurate
Accuracy by omission is deceit, not journalism.
>How many modifiers are necessary?
One: illegal immigrant. Now I re-iterate my question: why is it so hard for The Guardian to use the correct terminology?
>By that logic, how do you even know they're immigrants to begin with, then? All it takes it flashing your visa or any documentation that you are required to carry at all times, just like I am. You were not expecting bartenders to give you a free pass in your teenage because you left your ID at home, did you?
- Private prisons has no incentive of getting rid of its income source the prisoners.
- More emphasis should be put into preventive nature. Ie to stop people from becoming criminals. This most likely involves more instruction on how to raise children.
If analog was to computer program it is cheapest to do things correct at the design phase, once late in the phase the issue hits production it is very expensive to mitigate. Thus we should as society do maximum effort into supporting young children and parents. Once the person has turned into a criminal it is very expensive for society to correct the issue if at all possible.
I'm sure there's at least a few free market purists that will decry this move as it removes competition from the market, but this happens to be one instance where public prisons actually cost less on average than when outsourced to the private market [0]
I really doubt it, most libertarians and free market purists object to the idea of anyone but government being able to violently deprive someone of their rights without repercussion. The reaction on forums like /r/libertarian is mainly positive.
California would have had legal marijuana a decade sooner except for lobbing by the union, they're a major force for mandatory minimum sentences and tougher sentencing in general.
This seems like a trivial easy-PR win for some legislators that does very little to meaningfully address the problems with criminal justice in the US. Private prisons are a tiny little piece of a much bigger problem and there's still a lot of real work to be done.