"The only difference is that if there are two prison companies, and one of them is really bad, citizens can fire it (through pressure on their elected representatives) and hire another with relative ease."
You don't honestly believe that, do you? For one, you're assuming that enough citizens will actually care enough to make this an issue. For two, you're discounting the number of people who think that anything other than a dank, dark dungeon where people are chained to the walls is "coddling" prisoners. Third, I do not buy the schlock that is the argument "private entities are always better than public ones."
Again, you are missing the important point here. Let me reiterate it. When you evaluate two alternatives, it is not enough to say "A is bad for these reasons" or "B is good for these reasons". You need to actually compare them, i.e. say "on this metric, A is better than B" or "on this metric, A is worse than B".
So if we apply this to your argument, we see that you argue that (most) citizens do not care, so it is hard to gather clout to fire bad private company. Let's assume for the sake of argument that this is true. How this makes government-run prison better than private? If citizens do not care, they also wouldn't care if prisoners were abused in government-run prison. Moreover, if some citizens care, what is easier for them to overcome - a lobby of one private company (which can be, ultimately, fired, its reputation destroyed, and in extreme cases, whole company bankrupt and dissolved) - against which other private companies and lobbies can be also used as allies, or the alliance of state bureaucracy and public employees unions, which can not be seriously hurt (most of their power is constitutionally protected or at least enshrined in the law so hard that you need truly exceptional clout to change it), which have access to vast amounts of budget money and control well-organized and battle-hardened political machine with national support? What is easier to fight - the ones that have the money or the ones that have the money, the law, the executive power, the people, the press and the human resources? I'm afraid the comparison doesn't come in the favor of your point.
>> Third, I do not buy the schlock that is the argument "private entities are always better than public ones."
You do not have to buy it. But if you intent to seriously evaluate it - as opposed to dismissing it without consideration because it does not fit your fixed ideological biases - you have to use proper tools. Such as actually comparing the benefits and disadvantages of both, instead of saying "this is crap, because it is". It is not about always, it is about really thinking about it as opposed to not even bothering.
I'm not missing anything. I'm asking you when you've ever actually seen something like that happen. The answer is you haven't. So saying that the public can "fire" a private prison is worthless as not only do the public not bother, but most of the private prisons have contracts making it difficult to fire them.
No, the answer is it happened, and it can be discovered by simple search, which for some reason completely incomprehensible to me you neglected to do. For example:
You don't honestly believe that, do you? For one, you're assuming that enough citizens will actually care enough to make this an issue. For two, you're discounting the number of people who think that anything other than a dank, dark dungeon where people are chained to the walls is "coddling" prisoners. Third, I do not buy the schlock that is the argument "private entities are always better than public ones."
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