> 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]
> 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.
> 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.
Given that private prisons cost less than state run ones, do you think taxpayers would prefer to pay more for prisons just so that companies running private prison don’t make a profit? Do you apply this logic also to construction projects? I.e. would you prefer to pay, say, twice as much for a bridge to be build by government construction agency, so long as no private construction company makes a profit building it?
Take for example California. There are no private prisons. Yet CA is one of the states requiring forced labor and prisoners can earn a maximum of 37 cents an hour:
Who is part of the prison industrial complex? How about the prison guard unions who directly benefit from having more prisoners?
>...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.
>As calls for reform of the state's prison system escalated during 2006, putting pressure on former governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to take a more aggressive stance on reform.
This prison system with no private prisons is a prison system where the medical care is so bad that the system was taken over by the federal government:
>...The state's prison medical care system has been in receivership since 2006, when a federal court ruled in Plata v. Brown that the state failed to provide a constitutional level of medical care to its prisoners.
One should care about the lack of accountability of prison guards and the cruelty for cruelty sake that seems to permeate the prison system. When you have the people who regulate the system are the same ones who run it, though what do you expect? Take the example of Cochran prison in CA. This was a prison which shot and killed more prisoners than any prison in the country and the guards were setting up and then betting on gladiator battles.
>...Guards and inmates described macabre scenes in which prison officers gathered in control booths overlooking cramped exercise yards in advance of fights, which were sometimes delayed so that female guards and even prison secretaries could be present.
After 60 minutes covered the story, the California Department of Corrections did an investigation and naturally found no "'widespread staff conspiracy' to abuse prisoners".
This isn't to say that CA prisons are the worst in the country - likely other state's prisons are just as bad as CA. When you have the people regulating a system be the same people who are running the system, you have an overt incentive to exploit the inmates as much as possible.
>> Private companies have a greater motivation to maximize profits than public entities do.
Corrections officers unions have strong motivations to keep prison populations high as well and unions tend to be stronger in the public sector than the private sector so its not obvious that private prisons increase the aggregate political pressure for high prison sentences.
This seems like a serious inversion of cause and effect. Our problems with prisons pre-dated the growth in private prisons and private prisons remain a small fraction of the overall prison industry so its hard to see how private prisons could be the primary source of the problem.
> Some economic interest in getting repeat offenders back into prison.
Interestingly enough, this actually exists in the US. As crazy as it sounds, there are private prisons that are paid on a per-inmate basis. These corporations typically put their political donations behind candidates who are "tough on crime" to fill their jails and line their pockets. It would be terribly interesting to see what kind of impact these companies have had on the justice system in the US.
>The best skill you can have in most prisons is plumbing/home renovation knowledge, as it's common for one of the guards or warden to have you fix their houses in exchange for a restaurant meal on the way back to the prison. If you work well you will be contracted out F/T to the local town and the guards/warden pocket 90% of your salary.
Is there any documented evidence of this happening?
> 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.).
> Is this a fact about the U.S. legal system, or about legal systems in general?
I can't speak to other legal systems, but the fact that here in the USA we have a large "private prison industry", coupled with the fact that these prisons often sell their "prisoner work services" (or whatever they call them) to other companies, and they lobby Congress for these new laws, and for more prisons to be built, etc...
Yeah - they kinda have an incentive to make more people break laws - so they continue to get more "employees" (and more "campuses") to be able to sell these services to more companies (who like the access to these cheap services - much cheaper than hiring their own employees, sometimes even cheaper than overseas workers - prisoners are pretty cheap to employee as a group!).
I'm sure that this is a trend, though, that might expand worldwide, if it hasn't already...
> 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.
> Most slaves turn a profit, while most prisons require funding.
Not even relevant in private prisons, many of which put their prisoners to work and provide third-world wages to their inmates. And the funding comes from the government.
"Companies own or manage 75% of U.S. detention facilities. Two of the biggest companies, CoreCivic and The GEO Group, are publicly traded. In the correctional system, however, less than 10% of state and federal inmates are in the care of private prisons."
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]
[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money.html
[1] https://www.bop.gov/inmates/custody_and_care/unicor_about.js...
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