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.
> 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.
> 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."
> 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.
> 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.
> Broken down to prison type, 19.1% of the federal prison population in the United States is housed in private prisons and 6.8% of the U.S. state prison population is housed in private prisons.
> the overall trend over the past decade has been a slow increase
> In the past two decades CCA has seen its profits increase by more than 500 percent.[22] The prison industry as a whole took in over $5 billion in revenue in 2011.[23]
> A 2016 report by the U.S. Department of Justice asserts that privately operated federal facilities are less safe, less secure and more punitive than other federal prisons
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.
> 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]
> 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.).
> 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.
Less than 5% of prisoners in the US are in privately run prisons.
reply