> Correlation not causation. For-profit prisons are a byproduct of America's fascination with incarceration
Nothing that OP mentioned is specific to for-profit prisons.
The prison-industrial complex is perfectly capable of existing and generating incredibly lucrative profits for the industry even if the prisons themselves are ostensibly either state entities or structured as non-profits. The "for-profit/private" vs. "public/state-run" distinction only changes how the money gets accounted for on paper; ultimately, the same entities are capable of making the same amount of money on either form of incarceration.
> I agree, but there's another way to think about this: every prison is for profit.
Even publicly owned prisons have to contract out and outsource a lot of the services they need. Private companies supply food, maintenance, cleaning, IT, supplies, construction, architecture and so on.
Private companies also benefit from the cheap to free forced labor they get from government-owned prisons, as well.
There are layers to the grift that lines the pockets of private interests in the prison industry, and those layers certainly don't end at whether a prison is privately owned or not.
> For-profit prisons, a multi-billion dollar business, are precisely incenctivised to bring and keep and many prisoners inside as possible.
For-profit prisons are obviously a bad policy, but only 8% of America's prisoners are incarcerated in them (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/11/u-s-private-...) and it's not clear that they are either necessary nor sufficient as a cause for these problems.
About 7-8% of US jail and prisoners inmates are in for-profit correctional institutions, most are in public institutions which are not operated for profit.
Private, for profit prisons are an issue, but they are very much not the norm in the US.
> So yeah it doesn't matter if the final user is for-profit if you think there is a risk that profit is driving something you don't want.
This is a gross simplification that erases the very real differences between the incentives of a government vs. a for-profit company. Not only is the government accountable to its electorate, but a government that wants to save money can take a much broader approach - for example by funding access to mental health services - to keep people out of prison. Prisoners are expensive to keep locked up!
In the final analysis, all prisons are non-profit. None of them generate any value. They're all funded with taxpayer money that could be spent elsewhere. It's just that in the case of private prisons that money goes to a company that has no interest in saving the government money by reducing the prison population. Sure they'll try to run the prison efficiently, so they can pocket the difference, but they want as many prisoners as possible to get a bigger check from Uncle Sam.
> A real issue IS who owns or manages the prisons. If the profit motive is what drives prison expansion, then society will experience a form of regulatory capture in hyperacceleration.
The thing is, profit motive is there regardless of whether you call the prisons "private" or "public," because the people constructing, supplying, and running the prisons are (presumably) getting paid, and those people don't suddenly stop having personal incentives if you start calling them government employees.
>Is there anything redeeming about “for profit” prison?
No. But there's nothing redeeming about state prisons either. The whole system is broken regardless of who's letterhead the warden's pay stubs are on.
The typical argument for "for profit" prisons is that it provides a motive to keep costs under control, a motive that is very obviously in too short supply in most other government endeavors. Furthermore, the government is far more willing to screw its contractors to satiate public outrage (when the prisons are inevitable caught abusing prisoners and failing to deliver the services the state is paying for) than it is to screw its own departments. In my observation this breaks down in practice because of the revolving door and the government's willingness to absolve itself of responsibility for actions of its contractors and people's willingness to entertain that.
I think 3rd party contractor prisons could work in a state where the people both have high expectations of ethical behavior in both government and business AND strongly care about controlling the costs of government. The catch is that no state satisfies both those criteria as far as I can tell and state operated prisons would work just fine in any state that did so IMO it's a wash.
The reason we hear so much about for profit prisons and not the abuses within state prisons and jails is mostly one of ideological convenience. It's harder to get the people who care about prison reform to get angry at the .gov for mismanaging prisons than it is to get them angry at private contractors doing the same thing.
I said "prisons...are for-profit enterprises", not "prisons are privately owned". Government-owned prisons still rely on, and provide revenue to, companies specifically designed to profit from the prison population.
> Part of the problem in the US is of course that prisons are big business.
This is directly debunked in the article: "By now it has become almost conventional wisdom to think that private prisons are the 'real' problem with mass incarceration. But anyone seriously engaged with the subject knows that this is not the case. Even a cursory glance at numbers proves it: Ninety-two percent of people locked inside American prisons are held in publicly run, publicly funded facilities, and 99 percent of those in jail are in public jails."
> private prisons maintain costs far better than public prisons
possibly, but the issue is not cost conservation; the problem is that there are shareholders who benefit the more people are sent to prison. This creates perverse incentives (lobbying for stricter/longer sentencing, bribing officials, etc.).
> You can't have prisons run by for-profit companies
IIRC only ~10% of prisoners are held in privately run prisons. It's kind of a red herring.
The bigger (and much harder to solve issue) is that all prisons, public or private, work with a slew of private companies in order to run (think food, phones, etc.) who have big incentives to keep the prison population high. And they can easily prey on prisoners, who are generally much poorer than the general population, because of America's concept of "justice".
But these huge costs of, say, video calls, are borne by the families of the incarcerated, who, like the prisoners that they're supporting, skew poor. As you pointed out, it's a vicious cycle.
> This problem is not limited to the private prison business. In California, for example, the prison guard union is similarly motivated by profits to increase incarceration rates.
I happen to think that you're both right. I'd rather not see union-owned or for-profit private prisons due and I'm not convinced that we really have to choose one or the other.
Correlation not causation. For-profit prisons are a byproduct of America's fascination with incarceration. Incarceration rates started skyrocketing in the 1970s. The number of people in private prisons, in contrast, was minuscule even in 1990: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/history-of-ameri....
> Taken to its logical conclusion, private companies are making money hand over fist with private prisons, from the amount taxpayers pay to house inmates, and from modern day slave labor of prison “jobs” making products.
Tho it's not just private prisons, even federal prisons and state jails have massive rat-tails of private industries servicing them [0]
Nor are private companies the only ones outsourcing labor to prisons, the US military is also doing it [1]
Nothing that OP mentioned is specific to for-profit prisons.
The prison-industrial complex is perfectly capable of existing and generating incredibly lucrative profits for the industry even if the prisons themselves are ostensibly either state entities or structured as non-profits. The "for-profit/private" vs. "public/state-run" distinction only changes how the money gets accounted for on paper; ultimately, the same entities are capable of making the same amount of money on either form of incarceration.
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