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.
> 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.
> 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.
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]
> 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 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.
> 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.).
> 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.
>> The majority of prisons are still state owned and run.
Do you also have privatisation happening by the back-door?
i.e. how many private services do the public prisons use? You get some weird situations where public institutions use staff from contractors, rent buildings and buy in all their services.
> 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."
Citation for the "Many"?
Only about 5% of prisoners are in private prisons.
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