Should the US change its prison system?

Plaffelvohfen

In principle, since the power of condemnation belongs to the government, the responsibility for incarceration should also fall on it, as justice should not be administered through the prism of profit because it leads actors in the system to stray from their duty to administer justice impartially.... It's on its face, unethical... The companies that build and run private prisons have a financial interest in the continued growth of mass incarceration. That is why the major players in this game invest heavily in lobbying for more punitive criminal justice policies and make hefty contributions to political campaigns that will increase reliance on prisons.

Follow the logic: a for profit prison is a business. Businesses exist to make money by selling a “product”. The “product” that private prisons sell is cell space. They sell this space to states to house prisoners and the fuller their prisons are, the more money they make. This encourages them to lobby for stricter laws and sentences for fairly minor offenses like drug possession, and they have been largely successful.

Imprisoning people for crimes should not be a money making endeavor. Decisions about how long to incarcerate people, and for what, should be made with the good of society, the victim, and the prisoner (since they are probably going to get out someday), in mind. 

Look at it this way, if private prisons make their profit from criminal society, its goes against business sense to reduce criminality. 

MayCaesar

One of the problems is the abysmal amount of regulations in the US (which takes place in every large country such as this, but does not excuse it); people sometimes go to jail for doing things they did not even realise were a crime. Another problem is the unreasonably harsh penalties for some minor crimes; in some states you can go to prison for not mowing your lawn and refusing to pay the fine, for example, which obviously should not be the case. I think the system should be much softer.

Another problem is the prison conditions themselves: they are not awful by the world standards, but they definitely leave a lot to be desired, a countries such as Norway or Switzerland show how comfortable prison conditions help people rehabilitate successfully. Unfortunately, prisons at large are seen in the US as means to punish people, not to rehabilitate them, hence there is little incentive to change anything.
It would help a lot if the prison system was based on free market competition: people would choose what prison to go to, and pay for themselves while being there through work. This would bankrupt companies that do not take care of their prisons and incentivise everyone else to improve living conditions of prisoners. But I do not see it happening any time soon.

Plaffelvohfen

@MayCaesar

You bring up interesting points and I do agree with them except for the last...

It would be nonsensical and just plain immoral... No law in the US compels prisons to compensate the inmates in any way, shape or form, for their labor, in fact it's the opposite inmate-workers (once cleared by medical) have to perform uncompensated labor under threat of punishment as severe as solitary confinement and/or (let's not pretend it doesn't exists) physical abuse... The deeply flawed 13th amendment didn't abolish slavery, it factually reinvented it... 

How would inmates pay the cost of their incarceration when they have no wages for their work?? And from a business perspective, why would any penitentiary administration pay for labor when it is given, for free?? In a market with overabundant and free labor, what would be the rationale to pay wages? Do business pay wages to robotized labor? They are costly to get, but imagine the government gave them for free, this labor only has a maintenance cost which you can (and should, as a capitalist) keep as low as possible since there is a never ending supply of free replacement, from a capitalist point of view, that's the perfect business to be in no? 

Incarcerated workers are not expressly excluded from the definition of employee in workers’ protection statutes like the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) or the National Labor Relations Act. However, in the cases where incarcerated workers have sued their prison-employers to enforce minimum wage laws or the FLSA, courts have ruled that the relationship between the penitentiary and the inmate worker is not primarily economic; thus, the worker is not protected under the statutes. By judging the relationship between prisons and incarcerated workers to be of a primarily social or penological nature, the courts have placed wage and working condition protections out of reach for incarcerated workers. There may be a case to be made when inmates are "leased" to a 3rd party business, we'll see how the courts handle this one...

You cannot have a "free market competition based prison system" because of the presence of an endless governmental supply of free labor in said market, which contradicts the principles of a free market (free from any intervention by a government or other authority and from all forms of economic privilege (no cost to acquire labor,or pay wages), monopolies (the source of labor in this case) and artificial scarcities...). 

MayCaesar

@Plaffelvohfen

Never too late to change that. To encourage competition between prisons, it makes sense to pay the prisoners wages, which obviously would be lower than on regular equivalent jobs (since prisons do need to make profit, and they are already paying a lot of money on tending to the prisoners), but nonetheless decent. 

For example, if I am unfortunate enough to one day end up in prison, I would like to be able to use my skills in data science and make some money off it. If a prison pays me 50% of the regular data science wages, I am still going to be quite well off and much more likely to choose to go to that prison, over one that does not offer a comparable job or pays less for it.

The problem, as usual in such things, is that the government has monopolised the penitentiary system; private companies only partake in a very minor competition and are heavily subsidised by the government. In such conditions there is no incentive for anyone to change anything. If the government gets out of the matter and only serves as a watchman, on the other hand, then the situation could change.

This is not what countries like Norway do, but they also have a very different culture in this regard, and the government there is not as vicious towards prisoners to begin with; in a sense, they do not need any competition. For this to be viable in the US, our culture also needs to change accordingly, and I am not confident that it is necessarily a good change overall. It is better to rely on proven market mechanisms than culture that constantly changes and offers no guarantees.

Nope

MayCaesar How will you insure that the privet prisons and companies that benefit from the cheaper labor don't try and increase there labor supply by influencing the system to increase the number of prisoners? If you want less regulations that would get more people in prison and a system where prisoners are a cheap labor force you will need some way to keep the second goal from interfering with the first.

piloteer

Dammit @Nope. I was just about to make that same argument to Maycaesar. You kinda stole my thunder there. 

MayCaesar

@Nope

You do it by decreasing the size of the government, by means of taking away some of its powers. But even if nothing in this regard changes and the government is incentivised to increase prisoners in order to get paid by the private companies, that is not any worse than the current situation, where the government is incentivised to do the same thing, only for slightly different reasons. The US already has the highest prisoner population per capita in the world; worrying about the perverse incentives is a bit too late, don't you think?

Fighting cronyism by nationalising industries is not a very logical approach. You fight cronyism by taking the government out of equation. When the government cannot influence the industry, then nobody in the industry has the ability to influence the system directly.

Also, bear in mind that, while private prisons are going to try to influence the system to increase the supply of cheap labor, other private companies are going to try to influence it to increase the supply of regular labor. The latter significantly outnumber the former and are going to be more successful in this competition.

Nope

MayCaesar
Other privet companies may want to increase the regular labor supplies but only if accessing the cheaper labor supply is not possible. If privet prisons market themselves as a cheap labor force for the largest and most influential companies then these companies will be incentivised to increase the prison population. You would need some system in place to keep this from happening. Companies are most often concerned about themselves. This could become problematic if the interest of the companies do not align with the interest of the people especially if a majority of companies have a common interest that is opposed to that of the people. A governments job should be primary to look out for the best interest of the people. The problem here is having a government that is effectively able to do this job which is where many government fall short. If your system works and these companies are not able to manipulate the system to increase prisoner supply rather then pursuing fair laws then no government intervention is needed. The concern with to much government involvement for me is that the current setup of governments may mean it is not able to effectively do its job as it may be to susceptible to negative influence.

piloteer

@MayCaesar

If the issue at hand is to decrease the amount of prisoners in US prisons, how would allowing private ownership of prisons do anything but increase the amount of people in prison. The US is literally a prison society with the highest prison population on earth and highest percentage of imprisoned people. The goal of private companies is profit. If lowering the amount of prisoners in the US prison system cuts into a privately owned businesses bottom line, do you really believe that they would support legislation that effectively creates laws that are focused more so on rehabilitation rather than incarceration?

At first glance, your initial post looked as though you realized the problem of overcrowding in US prisons and were making an argument to reflect on that issue and a hope that we may find a solution to it by at least recognizing it as a problem. But then in the last paragraph you demonstrated that you may not actually recognize it as a problem but instead consider it an opportunity for someone to profit from the problem at hand. Do you really believe that any privately owned prisons can actually be run without government funds for them to function? That's highly unlikely. What if someone is absolutely unable to pay for their incarceration at all? Are we to assume that the privately owned prisons will just right them off as a loss and not expect compensation for their services? Obviously we either need to expect that the privately owned prisons would expect some sort of taxpayer dollars for compensation for inmates who are unable to pay the cost of their incarceration. 

If you were to argue that the government should not compensate privately owned prisons for their services, and we know the privately owned prisons will not accept a loss in profit for accepting inmates who cannot pay, the only other option is to either force the inmates to perform free labor to help offset the cost of their incarceration, or just outright kill them. Neither of these are viable options when it comes to decreasing the crime rate, actually rehabilitating criminals, fixing the problem of overcrowding in US prisons, or letting other businesses properly compete for work that the prisons forced labor groups could automatically underbid for by using slave labor. The idea of privately owned prisons fixes nothing when it comes to decreasing the crime rate, or easing the burden on taxpayers, and it most certainly doesn't help the matter of the over-incarceration culture that has taken hold in the US.          

Privately owned prisons should be banned in the US and its territories. 

all4actt

@Nope

I believe we have a larger imprisonment rate than any other countries for the following reason:
1.  Of all western countries we have a considerably larger populaton than any other.
2.  Unlike some countries the death penalty is not used for a good majority of offences.

Saying that there are some laws that are raising the numbers that I believe are not constitutional.  I would be speaking of the laws like the ones in Nevada that arrest and jail and fibe people for being homeless.  It is basically imprisoning  and fining people for being too bore to afford a place to live.

I know that in both Nevada and California prisoners are offered jobs within the prison and paid a very low wage.  The only lending out of prisoners that I am aware of is to fight fires.  This is the highest paying job and is researved for prisoners that have good behaviour records.  When they pay out the wages to the prisoners account they deduct a certain portion of it to recover the individual prisoners living cost.  

The prisoners are also offered GED and college credit classes.  I know someonre who was given 2 years for a first time DUI in Arizona ( it was back when Az first started really cracking down on DUI"s.  I think the laws have loosened since then. ) and earned her BA while she was there.  So most prisons do offer opportunities to those who coose to take them.

There are many laws that would be better service to the public if diversion programs are used rather than long prison sentences. 

 In most California cities it seems they bend over backwards trying to help drug addicts.  They need to do the same for the mentally ill.  Also, for the homeless who are committing minor crimes as the only way of getting by.

What they do need to stop is the decriminalization of crimes.  It is showing in areas that have done so leaving law abidiing citzens vunerable with no recourse for their losses.  In areas that have decriminalized drug use again left the general public vunerable.  They have allowed something that was once done in the shadows where the general public and children never were exposed to it involutarily. Now it is something that is done out in the open where adults and children can not only see them doing it but they get exposed to the smoke from whatever they are smoking.  On top of that the addicts are not getting the benefits that come from being arrested for it.  In California and I am sure in other states the arrest can be their first exposure to getting help and encouragement to get clean.