end of the legislative year, all bills are crammed in the last weeks

The current legislative session is about to close.

Hahaha yea right, that problem is actually hard. Cleaning up straws is much easier.

Seems like outlawing single-Family zoning should be easy, but how many NIMBYs reside in the state legislature?

Maybe if they’re ambitious they can do something about the homeless crisis next.

Many legislatures including ones in the united states have readings of many laws over time, and then revisit passing them all at onceInstead of sporadically throughout the yearCalifornia being the 5th largest world economy and relevance to the silicon valley population simply becomes of interest on this siteOther states arent just twiddling their thumbs but it is interesting what California legislature is passing

It makes you wonder what shady stuff that the public would never approve of could be flying under the radar.

September 13th is the last day for the legislature to pass bills in the current session.

signing very important things at the last minute is part of negotiations strategy.. the bills can and do change overnight

&gt; and a Democratic supermajority.This is the key. With Gov Brown, he still had a modicum of temperance that they couldn&#x27;t override. Now the legislature has carte blanche to do whatever they want, because regardless of the governor, they can override his veto.

End of legislative session (so a lot of bills that need to either be passed or die are getting final action), the first legislative session under a new governor that is slightly more progressive and much less a believer in relatively narrow focus on policy change at any one time than his predecessor, and a Democratic supermajority.

California is on a roll this week, it seems. Can someone local explain what’s going on?

They&#x27;re still making a great point. Yeah it&#x27;s progress but I think most people aren&#x27;t aware of the extent of the problem, making further progress impossible. There&#x27;s some really terrible abuses happening, like replacing visitors with video chat that you have to pay for.More info: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prisonpolicy.org&#x2F;visitation&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prisonpolicy.org&#x2F;visitation&#x2F;</a>Another example: getting rid of donated books and libraries in favor of paid tablets that also restrict the books you can buy, both for political and monetary reasons.

Progress is better than no progress..
Removing profit motives can only happen by reducing profit motives

don&#x27;t let perfection be the enemy of progress.

They don&#x27;t need phone calls in some jails that cost over $20 for 15 minutes. Please don&#x27;t make excuses for a corrupt system. Yeah, this is a win, but the problem is MASSIVE and in so many different domains. Frankly, you don&#x27;t seem aware of the many issues that they were hinting at.

Yeah it&#x27;s not great but it&#x27;s a move in the right direction and beyond closing all prisons there will always be a need for vendors to provide goods and services inside prisons. Prisoners need food and clothing at the very least and it&#x27;ll be bought from someone.

Does it really remove the profit motive from incarceration? There are still thousands of vendors of various types making probably billions of dollars off of prisons, private facility or no.

Perhaps they are concerned that they&#x27;ll end up in a private prison in another state.

Many states have cut sentences in face of prison over-crowding, including California.So, yes, some people believe private-prisons are a useful tool to deal with over-crowding in state facilities and that the likely alternative is further reduced-sentence releases.

&gt; There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better.The same criticism can be applied towards forced prison labour, and yet, it is explicitly permitted by the thirteenth amendment. (And is commonly used in state prisons.)Just because a profit incentive falls in the hands of the state&#x27;s coffers, as opposed to some corporation, does not mean the incentive is not perverse.

Prison profits are spent lobbying for tougher crime laws. Thus, unnecessarily harsh criminalization of behavior has a strong economic incentive.  Having an incentive to turn citizens into criminals is bad for society.

&gt;They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the betterNot only would you want more prisoners, but you will also be interested in keeping them as long as possible (i.e. no parole) and pushing recidivism incidents to its maximum.

&gt; Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?There are a few different strains of thought when it comes to opposition to private prisons, but I believe the common denominator is that they create a perverse incentive. They turn prisons into businesses—the more prisoners, the better.So while there are definitely people who want these prisoners freed immediately, and even people who want prisons abolished altogether, getting the profit motive out of prisons would be a significant win regardless.

The comment above specifically referenced this:&gt; instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and HawaiiOf course, no one could have rationally believed that these people -- considered to be lawbreakers -- would just get FREED automatically. That would be an idiotic assumption. And yet, the article is worded as if there actually were people who believed it.

What we believe is that a lack of private prisons will disincentivize new prisoners from being systematically introduced in an abusive fashion. More accountability. Releasing people like non-violent drug offenders is a separate issue.

No, people don&#x27;t believe that people will just be let free.

Wouldn&#x27;t the better solution to these priorities be shrinking down those definitions of crime, and not filling up the prisons we&#x27;ve got, rather than building bigger ones?

Rather than building enough prisons, what if they just set target incarceration rates, built capacity for that, and then required that the justice system sentence and parole accordingly?There&#x27;s no reason to have over half a percentage of point of the entire population in prison. Almost no other country in the world does this.Capping incarceration rates not only prevents prison overcrowding, but is a forcing function for policy changes that actually lower crime, as well as alternative sentencing options for non-violent crime (which almost always have better outcomes.)

&gt; The idea that a special interest that is financially powerful and interested in high prison population, may inject wrong incentives into the society is real and understandable.And well established as a thing that happens at all times in California, but the real major culprit of that type is the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, not the private prison industry.&gt; California&#x27;s real problem is MASSIVE prison populationIt&#x27;s been declining for nearly a decade, and despite California being the largest-population state, it&#x27;s got a smaller prison population than Texas. But, yes, the prison population is too high.&gt; Prison overcrowd is a feature of CA prison system.This is true, though that has also been reduced as prison population has.&gt; I wish they ordered their priorities right and built enough prisons to house the population safely.Better would be to reduce the prison population to the level that can be safely housed in the existing facilities. California&#x27;s problem is too many prisoners, not too few prisons.

The idea that a special interest that is financially powerful and interested in high prison population, may inject wrong incentives into the society is real and understandable.But we also have other side of the equation - politicians willing to expand definition of &quot;crime&quot; to placate people&#x27;s fears and emotions combined with prosecutors willing to throw the book to make and example and build a career on it, all while not appropriately funding the prisons.California&#x27;s real problem is MASSIVE prison population, where you have to BECOME a RACIST to survive the prison gangs. Prison overcrowd is a feature of CA prison system.I wish they ordered their priorities right and built enough prisons to house the population safely.This is one single step in a series of steps to get anywhere positive. Knowing their Governor and his political expedient past, I am skeptical.

The distance from the quote to your question seems like a pretty large leap.

&gt; Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?No. The goal of wiping out the private prisons is simply that profit motive in the justice system is always an inherent conflict of interest.The fact that ICE is getting smashed is just a side benefit.Adelanto is almost 2,000 people and is the second biggest detention center for ICE. Who knows, ICE may indeed free these prisoners rather than spend the money to transport them to facilities that can&#x27;t house them anyway. Wouldn&#x27;t that be a nice benefit?

immigration detainees and prisoners are two different groups.

&gt;Servin said that while the new law was a significant victory, there was one other thing immigrants rights groups were concerned about. When several sheriffs’ departments canceled their contracts to house Ice detainees last year, instead of freeing the detainees, Ice moved many of them to prisons in Colorado and Hawaii.Is this something that people against private prisons believe...that they just release all the prisoners when they close the prison?

I&#x27;ll be the first to admit I&#x27;m not the biggest fan of California (housing &amp; homeless crisis spring to mind) but this is great.

It&#x27;s okay to solve one issue at a time.

I&#x27;m an abolitionist* and agree with many of your points, but the political leverage to do a &#x27;big bang&#x27; reform of the entire criminal justice&#x2F;carceral system at once doesn&#x27;t currently exist, nor are there neatly packaged answers for all of the complex problems. , so in the meantime we&#x27;re still working within an incrementalist framework.* as in that&#x27;s the political position I hold, I wasn&#x27;t involved in any way with this initiative or attempting to take credit or provide insider perspective on it.

Wow bad faith all over the place... People do see problems with all of those, but the only solution to people making a profit from supplying prisons is for there to be no prisons (or for the government to make all the food and clothing soup to nuts, but that&#x27;d be crazy). Same with the others the issue with post prison jobs is that they&#x27;re not enough so hiring them is good and a step down the road to a solution.Reform is a step by step process, getting people used to the idea of thinking of rehabilitation and reintegration instead of the gut instinct to punish takes a lot of time and in the mean time address the worst abuses of the system. In the mean time make sure you&#x27;re not setting up systems that will fight for their own survival and demand (in some cases by contractual obligations for the state to fill X number of best!) to be fed.

I don&#x27;t know any activists who feel or behave in the way the activists in your comment do.

You&#x27;re right. People scream bloody murder about &quot;omg! This means a financial incentive for imprisonment&quot; and then ignore how the exact same thing happens with public prisons, in particular how prison guard organizations pushed for Three Strikes to pad demand for their work -- same dynamic.<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cjcj.org&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;cjcj&#x2F;documents&#x2F;the_undue_influence_of_californias_prison_guards_union-californias_correctional_industrial_complex.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cjcj.org&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;cjcj&#x2F;documents&#x2F;the_undue_influen...</a>And IMHO is bizarrely inconsistent outrage.Want to make a profit from supplying prisons? Activists see no problem with that!Want to make a profit from hiring felons, who are cheaper due to having limited options? Activists give you the thumbs up!Want to make a profit for your private corporation from building a public prison? AOK!But run it for profit? No matter how much oversight or regulation is applied, it&#x27;s somehow inherently evil.It feels like a distraction.

Look no further than the Mother Jones story where the reporter went undercover as a prison guard -- 
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motherjones.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.motherjones.com&#x2F;politics&#x2F;2016&#x2F;06&#x2F;cca-private-pri...</a>

Not that I&#x27;ve been to prison in California, public or private, but if you look up a guy named Wes Watson on youtube, who recently got out after &gt;10 years in a mix of private and public California prisons, he mentions that the guards at state run prisons were actually much more effective and actually tried to do their job the right way, because they&#x27;re paid well with state benefits and pensions and such, compared to the staff at private facilities, who he likened to WalMart employees.

The cynic and me sees this as a win... for the prison guards union.It seems to me that whether public or private, prisons should have good, independent oversight. Pretending that the &quot;profit motive&quot; is the biggest issue overlooks the horrific abuses committed by guards in California&#x27;s public prisons.

&gt;Has the legality of their immigration been determined at that point?By that logic, how do you even know they&#x27;re immigrants to begin with, then? All it takes is flashing your visa or any documentation proving your status which you are required to carry at all times, just like I am. You were not expecting bartenders to give you a free pass in your teenage because you left your ID at home, did you?&gt;Regardless, the statement as written is accurateAccuracy by omission is deceit, not journalism.&gt;How many modifiers are necessary?One: illegal immigrant. Now I re-iterate my question: why is it so hard for The Guardian to use the correct terminology?

Has the legality of their immigration been determined at that point? Or is the detention center used to hold them until that has been determined?Regardless, the statement as written is accurate. How many modifiers are necessary?

The &#x27;undocumented immigrants&#x27; part, which is simple semantic bleaching.

&gt; battle with Trump over treatment of immigrants&gt; Immigrant detainees&gt; immigration detention facilities&gt; undocumented immigrants&gt; immigrant rights advocates&gt; immigration attorneyWhich of those offends you and needs the illegal part?

&gt; given the fact that US citizens have been detained in them for extended periods despite clear proof of citizenshipI&#x27;d be curious to hear more about these cases as well as their proportion relative to the illegal immigrants detained at these facilities. I&#x27;m not aware of lawful residents being detained in such proportions that this would suddenly warrant tipping the terminology on the side of indetermination.

Because the detention facilities don&#x27;t house exclusively illegal immigrants (in fact, given the fact that US citizens have been detained in them for extended periods despite clear proof of citizenship, even calling them immigrant detention facilities is somewhat misleading.)A more accurate label would be “arbitrary detention facilities”.

The article makes no mention of asylum seekers. This is pure speculation on your part.

Wow.20,000 granted asylum to the US in 2016.70,000 granted asylum to Sweden in 2016.

Many immigrants (especially those from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) in ICE detention facilities presented themselves at the border and legally requested asylum. For more information on &quot;northern triangle&quot; and why these immigrants are fleeing their homeland, read <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cfr.org&#x2F;backgrounder&#x2F;central-americas-violent-northern-triangle" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cfr.org&#x2F;backgrounder&#x2F;central-americas-violent-no...</a>This is an ongoing and growing challenge for our immigration system. In FY 2017, as instability in Central America’s Northern Triangle showed few signs of ending, immigration judges decided over 30,000 asylum cases, a considerable increase over the roughly 22,300 asylum cases decided in FY 2016, and the most [since] FY 2005. (source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;immigrationforum.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;fact-sheet-u-s-asylum-process&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;immigrationforum.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;fact-sheet-u-s-asylum-p...</a>)

Because it houses both &quot;legal&quot; and &quot;illegal&quot; immigrants.Can you explain why it&#x27;s so important that the word be included even if it&#x27;s detrimental to objective truth?

I am referring to the terminology used by the department of homeland security [1] and other legal institutions that oversee their cases. If they are predominantly asylum seekers, then why not refer to them as asylum seekers?&gt;Illegal usually implies something criminal.No, illegality does not usually imply something criminal. These are two different concept that have precise definitions in court. Nor does your &quot;usually&quot; carry any weight, for else we should abide by this probabilistic distribution and call them asylum seekers.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhs.gov&#x2F;topic&#x2F;immigration-and-customs-enforcement" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dhs.gov&#x2F;topic&#x2F;immigration-and-customs-enforcemen...</a>

1) Because they&#x27;re not necessarily all illegal immigrants. AFAIU, ICE puts asylum seekers who are otherwise following the letter of the law into these detention centers--show up at the border, request asylum, get put into detention while awaiting disposition of your case.2) Are you an illegal driver for driving over the speed limit? Illegal usually implies something criminal. Crossing the border illegally is a misdemeanor--no more than 6 months in prison. That is criminal strictly speaking, but within a certain grey area where we very often refrain from branding people as criminals.I&#x27;m not really hung up on the phrase. I understand both sides, which really come down to wanting to emphasize different aspects of the situation to highlight different political priorities.I&#x27;m curious, though, if newspapers have style guides regarding usage of &quot;illegal&quot;. If I Google &#x27;site:theguardian.com &quot;illegal immigration&quot;&#x27; I find many hits, so perhaps at least for The Guardian it&#x27;s at the discretion of the particular journalist.

I&#x27;m not sure what you&#x27;re getting at. The term illegal is expressed in Oxford and Merriam Webster.Its also expressed and used quite a lot in legal documents and written law.Neither mean to use it as a racist term.

&gt;Two of Ice’s largest immigrant detention centers in CaliforniaCan somebody explain to a legal immigrant why The Guardian keeps omitting the illegal part over twelve times throughout the article?

That&#x27;s charitable. The incentive isn&#x27;t just to get rid of rehabilitation, it&#x27;s for the private prison to do everything in their power to ensure that their inmates are trapped in a never-ending cycle of crime and recidivism.

What is efficient for society is to focus on rehabilitation, which is not a &quot;pit sucking resources&quot;.

What is even scarier is an entity NOT motivated by profits that spends endlessly into a pit sucking resources away from solving bigger issues such as Climate Change, creating a high speed rail network, or educating children.Lets not be against efficiency for the sake of political orthodoxy.

...and had some means to determine that it was happening.I don&#x27;t see a way where the incentives to cut corners vs the cost and effort of monitoring to deny the effects those incentives would actually work out.Competitive capitalism is good at being efficient. It is NOT good at avoiding examples of negative results. Even if we say &quot;here&#x27;s the desirable target&quot; and enforce it, the incentives will be that a large number of the participants will go below that desire in their efforts to maximize profits.If we want them to be exceeding the targets for things like safety, recidivism, and humane treatment, we can&#x27;t set incentives that are &quot;profit = how little can you do&quot;, even WITH a minimum required.

&gt;A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits. Expensive rehabilitation is therefore immediately off the table, or given at the minimum allowable level.There&#x27;s no reason a for-profit company wouldn&#x27;t be able to provide a high quality service here if the customer actually insisted on (and paid for) such.

Just to note, &quot;libertarian literature&quot; is a very broad phrase, and there is certainly plenty of reasonably prominent literature from both the left and the right that describes itself as &quot;libertarian&quot; and would also oppose the idea of centralized state law enforcement and justice systems.On the right you&#x27;ve got some varieties of anarcho-capitalism that support systems of polycentric law that emerge from markets for law enforcement and criminal justice. On the left you&#x27;ve got anarchist movements like anarcho-syndicalism which propose a decentralized or federated system of social institutions that would be determined by direct action and direct democracy.

I agree, I&#x27;ve been thinking more and more that we need to spend some serious time on defining what is and isn&#x27;t best handled by markets and drawing clear bounds around those areas.  I&#x27;m positive that there are enough real world examples out there to draw up the general structure of a system that would incorporate what we&#x27;ve learnt over the past few hundred years.  I feel like most attempts to do so so far have been rather dishonest, naive, and&#x2F;or biased in one direction or another.

most law enforcement and the justice systems are treated as exactly the type of stuff that doesn’t make sense for a market and should be handled by the government. This should apply to prisons for much of the same reasons.FWIW, one should also consider that in a Libertarian system FAR fewer people would be in jail in the first place - perhaps as few as none, since Libertarian ideology is not big on forced imprisonment in the first place. The typical Libertarian view of justice is rooted more in the idea of restitution for damages caused (where applicable) than &quot;punishment&quot;.

Even in a lot of the more mainstream libertarian literature [1] most law enforcement and the justice systems are treated as exactly the type of stuff that doesn’t make sense for a market and should be handled by the government. This should apply to prisons for much of the same reasons.Besides, most of these sorts of private&#x2F;public relationships are unlike other true markets anyway with very little competition and only one customer to appease. We end up with a system with even more opaque responsibility&#x2F;liability chains and encourage crony business deals.Without any discernible benefit for the private nature and creating negative incentives that encourage more violence by correlating the success of an industry on the greater imprisonment of people, I can’t see any net-benefit for them to exist.I tend to be a fan of markets in a practical sense but I wish we had clearer distinctions between these public&#x2F;private operations that are spun as being more “efficient”. Plus a ton of people use these failures of public&#x2F;private organizations to disparage markets. So it’s not doing anyone any favours to support these half baked pseudo market arrangements, even if you are pro market. In most situations we need purely public or market solutions. I’ve seen few examples of mixing the two that left us better off (the US health insurance ‘market’ is the shining example).[1] as opposed to the more fringe absolutist anarcho-capitalist stuff ala Mises which does push for private everything

That paper is older than 20 years, and takes place during a short period of time in Florida, from a very small number of private prisons. A lot has changed since then, and the paper makes assumptions that are invalid with the current discussion, specifically the extremely small sample of private prisons (n=2?).I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s valid to draw concrete conclusions about the current crisis from the study you linked. There are far more variables at play than were studied in the paper, and those variables - such as racism, increasing societal inequality, etc - matter.Also, reasons cited in that paper for the reduced recidivism are to do with the programs offered by the private prison. Are private prisons in all states &#x2F; California allowed or incentived to offer similar programs? Do they choose not to?These things affect the statistics, and drawing strong conclusions from that paper about private prisons in California today may lead you to invalid conclusions.

I&#x27;m not sure one 20 year old study of 200 inmates from one state is representative of the population.Besides that, it&#x27;s inarguable that for-profit entities need profit to exist. You could claim that some for-profit prisons have lower recidivism but a non-profit entity will, on average, have more incentive to help inmates than one who&#x27;s lifeblood comes from profits.

Interesting, literally every single link on the first page of the Google search for &quot;private prison recidivism&quot; appears to say the exact opposite.- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prisonlegalnews.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;may&#x2F;5&#x2F;report-says-private-prison-companies-increase-recidivism&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prisonlegalnews.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017&#x2F;may&#x2F;5&#x2F;report-says-...</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.wisc.edu&#x2F;study-finds-private-prisons-keep-inmates-longer-without-reducing-future-crime&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.wisc.edu&#x2F;study-finds-private-prisons-keep-inmat...</a>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brennancenter.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-create-more-humane-private-prisons" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.brennancenter.org&#x2F;blog&#x2F;how-create-more-humane-pr...</a>

I would recommend you do some research on this topic. Your giving talking points produced by mainstream talking heads.When in fact, research points to private prisons being better at dropping incarceration rates through the programs offered at them. Therefore increasing ones chance at correct rehabilitation.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;249718665_A_Comparative_Recidivism_Analysis_of_Releasees_From_Private_and_Public_Prisons" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.researchgate.net&#x2F;publication&#x2F;249718665_A_Compara...</a>

The purpose of prison certainly depends on the socity the prison is in. In Germany for example prison is certainly seen as a institution whose top-most goal it is to reform the inmate. Just punishing them and showing them that society doesn&#x27;t care about them will in many cases achieve the polar opposite: it hardens them, makes them more dangerous and is therfore a punishment for the rest of society too.And frankly if I had to choose between a reformed inmate who won&#x27;t do it again but wasn&#x27;t punished with cruelty and a hardened inmate who thinks he owes nothing to society I will always go for the former out of pure egoism.It takes a certain transactional mindset to believe that harsher punishment result in less crime or that the suffering of the criminal will make up for the crimes commited. The lack of effectiveness for punishment to prevent future crimes is a well researched topic.

&gt; the whole idea is to forcibly prevent criminals from breaking the law againUnless you kill them, permanently incarcerate them, or lobotomize them, this is impossible.The support group&#x27;s intent is to help prevent re-offending after they are released.

It&#x27;s not just supposed to be a punishment and it&#x27;s obviously not a deterrent. Rehabilitation and allowing for proper reintegration into society needs to happen or you end up with a former felon being stuck in a cycle of crime that they are forced into.While I agree with your assessment of private prisons, I think we&#x27;ve begun to use the legal sure and imprisonment for things it wasn&#x27;t intended for, such as minor vice crimes, based on flawed broken window thinking and making police terrified of the communities that they serve.

Exactly. Statements like the commenter above are not universal truths. Certainly, some people believe the purpose of prison is rehabilitation. That is neither a universal belief however, nor the focus of our legal system. Many people believe the point of prison is punishment, just as the point of fines (like a speeding ticket, for example) are to make someone hurt financially, not to recoup costs (one person speeding typically costs the state nothing).

I thought the imprisonment was to make society safer? Forcefully removing criminals and using deterrent punishment is one way to try to do this, but it&#x27;s not the only way.Crime rates in the U.S. vs other developed countries, where rehabilitation is the focus, suggests rehabilitation is a much more efficient solution. See for example the crime rates in the Nordic countries.

&gt; The purpose of imprisonment is to punish criminals by depriving them of their liberty.This is an opinion, not a fact. And you don&#x27;t even back up your opinion with any data to support it.

The purpose of imprisonment is to punish criminals by depriving them of their liberty. As a side-effect, society benefits because a criminal has been forcibly removed from visiting further misery on law-abiding people.Imprisonment is and should be a deterrent punishment - it is not a support group.One can both be in favor of abolishing for-profit prisons and also in favor of severe deterrent sentences for law-breakers. Profiteering private corporations naturally seek to maximise the number of prisoners in their facilities, because they are paid per inmate - so they have every incentive to ensure future &quot;custom&quot;. This motive naturally conflicts with deterrent imprisonment - the whole idea is to forcibly prevent criminals from breaking the law again.

The only indisputable effect of imprisonment is that it prevents preying upon the general public for the duration. Since criminal behavior markedly decreases with age, there is a rational argument to be made that persons who prey on others should be removed from society until such time as they are old enough to knock it off.

The focus of a healthy prison system should be to rehabilitateThe operative word you used is should. You hold the view that the purpose of justice is rehabilitation, which is one theory of justice. Other popular views are deterrence and retribution.From what I&#x27;ve observed about the United States, preferences for these competing theories of justice tend to fall along well-trodden political lines. That&#x27;s why it can be so hard to make the legislative changes that California has just made.

Profit incentive is still there, but apparently it is only OK when it is California who profits. Also please do not forget who puts people in those prisons.

&gt; The focus of a healthy prison system should be to rehabilitate people and help them turn their lives around so that they contribute positively to society.Compare with this statement: &quot;A well-run private prison system would be given financial rewards based on recidivism rates and internal violence, and could do so at less cost than state-run prisons&quot;. I suspect your response will probably be along the lines of &quot;that&#x27;s nice dear, but that&#x27;s not the system we actually ended up with&quot;.The alternative to privately-run prisons that actually exists in CA is not the healthy prison system that you have described, but is the state-run prison system: a revolving door into criminal training centres, with all the abuses you could expect from a system in which certain sets of people have near-arbitrary power over other sets of people.&gt; A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits.Yep, people who make money from a thing have an incentive for that thing to continue happening. Now, I challenge you to take a less narrow view of &quot;profit&quot;, one that would include (say) a secure job that pays a good wage and comes with a cushy pension (and power over others for those that relish that sort of thing), and apply your reasoning to the state prison system.

Good riddance.The whole premise of private, for-profit, prisons has always seemed deeply troubling to me. The focus of a healthy prison system should be to rehabilitate people and help them turn their lives around so that they contribute positively to society. That can take years of hard work by the individual, and require assistance from professionals (therapists, teachers, ...).A for-profit company by definition seeks to maximize profits. Expensive rehabilitation is therefore immediately off the table, or given at the minimum allowable level. That is just not in the best interest of neither the individuals in the prison system, nor the rest of society.

I&#x27;m guessing, but I suspect it&#x27;s hard to convince voters of the need to build prisons over other large capital expenditures (ex. hospitals, schools etc).  Therefore it&#x27;s easier to convince a private company to spend the money and operate it.  Unfortunate, but could be the case.

The five-eyes countries are all going down the tubes, not just the US.

Interesting Wikipedia page. Seems almost 20% of Australian prisoners are in private prisons! And 15-20% in the UK.Obviously this is not a uniquely US issue another countries are expanding their use.

Pretty sure private prisons were a Harper&#x2F;Tory [1] project that got rolled back by the Liberals. I&#x27;d imagine that remains the same as the federal Conservatives have continued their relentless march right.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.straight.com&#x2F;article-119340&#x2F;stephen-harper-opens-door-to-prison-privatization" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.straight.com&#x2F;article-119340&#x2F;stephen-harper-opens...</a>

That Canadian footnote is interesting, thanks. Apparent effectiveness of one experiment not withstanding, my intuition is privatizing prisons = bad idea.I remember the news of Ontario shutting down their privatized project and taking it over. But I also remember the Harper conservative government later suggesting private prisons could again be in Canada&#x27;s future.I know there&#x27;s lobbying going on (and probably more, now, as some of the US state gravy trains dry up) but does anyone know the state or politics of privatizing prisons in Canada?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publicsafety.gc.ca&#x2F;cnt&#x2F;cntrng-crm&#x2F;crrctns&#x2F;bt-crrctnl-sstm-en.aspx" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.publicsafety.gc.ca&#x2F;cnt&#x2F;cntrng-crm&#x2F;crrctns&#x2F;bt-crr...</a>

Classic to see the correct take get downvoted.If anyone&#x27;s interested in actually learning about the causes of mass incarceration, I&#x27;d strongly recommend John Pfaff&#x27;s _Locked In_: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B01L6SLKK8&#x2F;ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&amp;btkr=1" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.amazon.com&#x2F;dp&#x2F;B01L6SLKK8&#x2F;ref=dp-kindle-redirect?...</a>In short:
a) It&#x27;s not the war on drugs.
b) It&#x27;s not private prisons.
c) It&#x27;s not sentencing laws.You could get rid of all of those and America would still lead the &quot;free&quot; world in incarceration.

How is the prison guard union and a lobby group specifically a problem of the public sector?For all of its faults, I can&#x27;t agree with you that the public sector is just as bad as the private sector.

I have to agree on this with you. The public sector isn&#x27;t functioning as you would expect and opening this market can actually boost the state&#x27;s economy and provide decent treatment to inmates.

The public sector isn&#x27;t any better.The Price of Prison Guard Unions <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;capitalresearch.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-price-of-prison-guard-unions-2&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;capitalresearch.org&#x2F;article&#x2F;the-price-of-prison-guar...</a>PORAC&#x27;s contribution to California&#x27;s prison crisis <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cjcj.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;5423" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cjcj.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;5423</a>

Call me cynical but the entire law system in the United States is punitive, there is zero interest in rehabilitation by anyone in power.

It feels like there are just 0 incentives for a private prison to actually rehabilitate anyone. Perhaps private prisons could work if they were compensated based on recidivism rate or something

They directly benefit from not reducing recidivism... Talk about a fucked up reward structure.

&gt; They often lobby for minimum occupancy levels in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as criminals)I&#x27;m not sure that any actually do that. The ones I&#x27;ve seen turned out to be misunderstandings of the contract. The contracts were of the form that the private prison would be paid a base amount of $B to house up to C prisoners, plus an additional amount of $V per prisoner for each prisoner over C. C is typically something like 90 or 95% of the maximum capacity of the prison.The contract actually makes more profit for the private prison if it has fewer prisoners, with the total profit going down for each additional prisoner up to C. Whether profit goes up or down for additional prisoners beyond that depends on whether $V is less than or greater than $B&#x2F;C. If it is greater, than profit will go up as the last 5 or 10% of the capacity is used, but it will still be lower than the profit when the prison was at around 80 to 85%.From the state&#x27;s point of view the total cost is $B to house anywhere from 0 to C prisoners, and $B + (n-C) $V if the number of prisoners, n, is &gt; C. From the state&#x27;s point of view, $B is essentially a sunk cost.This does provide some incentive to politicians to keep the private prisons occupied up to at least C prisoners, because if they have n &lt; C prisoners, the per prisoner cost to the state is $B&#x2F;n. If that is too high, the opponents are going to say the politician is spending too much on prisons. Increasing n lowers $B&#x2F;n, so the politician might be tempted (and it also makes them look tough on crime). That&#x27;s probably easier for the politician that trying to explain to voters that the total is $B regardless of many or few prisoners are there, and so per prisoner cost is not really what you should be looking at.Also, note that this kind of incentive goes the same way with public prisons. A public prison also has a bunch of fixes costs, and so if you look at cost per prisoner you are going to see a lower cost per prisoner with higher occupancy because of those fixed costs.

I&#x27;m so happy about this. Private prisons are the scum of the earth. They&#x27;re totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum occupancy levels in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as criminals). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent rehabilitating criminals and making them functional members of society. Next up should be criminalizing charging huge quantities for prisoners to video call &#x2F; phone call and the usurious fees on commissary.I&#x27;d wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.[EDIT] Surprise surprise, when Canada experimented with private prisons, they found measurably better outcomes in public prisons [1] and took the private prisons back over.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Private_prison#Canada" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Private_prison#Canada</a>

&gt; The California Correctional and Peace Officer&#x27;s AssociationThere is no “and”, just “California Correctional Peace Officers Association” (and, as the absence of the “and” suggests, it is just prison guards, and not other law enforcement.)

Very true. The California Correctional and Peace Officer&#x27;s Association is one of the largest unions in the state and exercises a good deal of political power, albeit less than it used to.Part of the problem is the division into trade unions, in which different economic sectors have their own unions and can then be rolled over or pandered to as is convenient for business or state interests. Syndicalism is an idea of people in different businesses and employment sectors to combine their labor power more efficiently by avoiding the fragmentation problem.

Reforming private prisons is just a small part of criminal justice reform. This is a good step but it seems like many are unaware or are ignoring the impact that labor unions have on overcriminalization. Police and corrections unions exist all across the country and share many of the perverse incentives that private prisons do.

One thing that shouldn&#x27;t really be controversial. Incentives are misaligned with private prisons. It really hard to find an argument for them.

I suppose I was being a bit strong. I just don&#x27;t want anyone to get the impression that it&#x27;s anything _but_ the teensiest of baby steps.

I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;s a fair assessment. Just because it&#x27;s not a huge revolutionary reform that doesn&#x27;t make incremental improvements a red herring. These are just steps toward a better world.

The problem here is corporate capture. These companies are raking it in with huge margins which would be super attractive to large amounts of competition... if competition could compete in a free market instead of buddying up with government officials.Offering cheap phone calls isn&#x27;t exactly rocket science.

Agreed, there&#x27;s lots of work to do in public prison reform, too.FWIW, the judges you mention are probably the two in the Kids for cash scandal [1]. They&#x27;re currently serving sentences ranging from 17 to 28 years. Good riddance.[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kids_for_cash_scandal" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Kids_for_cash_scandal</a>

&gt; The FCC under Obama had capped the amount they could charge which was promptly undone with government changes.We see this time and time again. There really needs to be a better protocol for this. It takes so much time and effort to make these laws, yet they can be undone in a heartbeat. It&#x27;s an inherently flawed system.

Public jails are doing the same things because companies that provide those services lobby them to do it. The FCC under Obama had capped the amount they could charge which was promptly undone with government changes.This also ignores known stories such as an example where a judge had a stake in a private prison company (or was bribed outright?) And as a result was sentencing school kids to prison for things which probably needed detention at worst. And this went on for a decade.The prison system in the US is not good to begin with. Largely because the citizens look at prison as retribution rather than rehabilitation. But the private nature only adds to and exacerbates issues.

Yeah, I&#x27;ve always thought the private&#x2F;public prison thing is a bit of a red herring. Construction and maintenance companies get paid either way. Staff gets paid.I think it makes more sense to focus on specific aspects of the criminal justice system rather than simply the private&#x2F;public distinction. There should be standards for the pay and training of prison staff, security of inmates, quality of food and nutrition, medical care, etc.. It might be true that private prisons skimp on these things more than public prisons, but the standards are what is important.Of course, this may very well mean that the best way to implement and enforce these standards is to have as much &quot;public&quot; (state) direction as possible in the development and operation of prisons, and I&#x27;m not at all against that if it is in fact the best implementation.

Are you writing this comment from prison? What&#x27;s the internet access like?

State prisons and jails, at least the ones I&#x27;ve been in and heard about (was an inmate for the better part of a decade) are much more expensive.Federal prison was progressive in many ways compared to the states.

Personal experience tells me that in federal prison you get 300 minutes a month. You pay 26 cents a minute for long distance. There&#x27;s legit virtual phone tech businesses that service the families of those incarcerated. You get it dropped down to 6 cents a minute.........That 15 minute maximum includes a mandatory waste of 38 seconds of a recorded message telling the receiver that the person on the other end of the line is in federal prison. Additionally you waste approximately 1 minute during the call when a woman&#x27;s voice reminds you all that the call was placed from federal prison. That&#x27;s just the time the voice is talking.. it doesn&#x27;t account for the fact it is seemingly random and derails any train of thought. All in all you waste over 1.5 minutes of the call...Outside of Unicor you&#x27;re screwed if you expect to make more than 20 dollars a month.Oh and the email system ha ha ha haaaa you pay by the MINUTE to email. Imagine how many people can&#x27;t type well at all? I spent so much time typing up messages for people because they couldn&#x27;t type well. It&#x27;s just pretty sad. Huge rip off for every one in a vulnerable position.

yeah the govt  seldom builds anything. it just contracts it out. A federal prisons may be staffed by govt. employees but otherwise privatized in every other respect such as construction, surveillance, and supplies.

I partially agree. I think the ban is necessary in part because once we go down the route of private prisons we create massive economic incentives to push people into prisons and keep them there. These incentives will be on top of the incentives that already exist.So I see this as cutting off a potential source of greater problems down the line.But you&#x27;re 100% right, there are already massive incentive systems in place that we need to overcome to achieve real change.Frankly, I think a great first step would be eliminating prison guard unions or at least putting pressure on them (e.g. other unions refusing to recognize them).

Well, you wouldn&#x27;t have things like the Kids for Cash scandal as likely to occur.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;23&#x2F;film-details-teens-struggles-in-state-detention-in-payoff-scandal&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;nypost.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;02&#x2F;23&#x2F;film-details-teens-struggles-i...</a>

Uh, no, that&#x27;s 2.2 million (or possibly 2.42 million) more people than deserve to be a human sacrifice to a corporation and its bottom line.

You also need to consider that several people are processed through private facilities on their way to a public facility. CCA Youngstown and others hold prisoners before they are finally transferred to a federal facility. CCA Youngstown can melt off the face of the Earth as far as I am concerned.

Just a reminder that approximately 2.2 million people are incarcerated in the United States.10% of 2.2 million is 220,000, and that is 220,000 more people than deserve to be a human sacrifice to a corporation and its bottom line.

&quot;Less than 10% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons.&quot;While this is true, that&#x27;s still 133,000 people. An attempt to make the system more ethical for over 100,000 people makes a significant difference.

Honestly, it&#x27;s a bit of a red herring.. nothing is going to change from a criminal justice perspective. Less than 10% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons. But even more importantly, there are still so many private contractors &#x2F; unions in the (public&#x2F;private) prison industry that this ban won&#x27;t really affect policies or outcomes going forward.. private interests will almost always exist in it that have perverse incentives that are contrary to what&#x27;s actually good for crime and recidivism rates. [0]An example would be the prison phones &#x2F; video visitation industry. It&#x27;s absolutely abhorrent what&#x27;s going on there (removing in-person visits, replacing them with stupidly expensive phone calls that prisoners can hardly afford).. and yet public prisons &#x2F; jails are using their services just the same. [1][0] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;worthrises.org&#x2F;picreport2019" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;worthrises.org&#x2F;picreport2019</a>[1] - <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prisonpolicy.org&#x2F;phones&#x2F;state_of_phone_justice.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.prisonpolicy.org&#x2F;phones&#x2F;state_of_phone_justice.h...</a>
Just look at how expensive those phone calls are :(

Just to throw it out there: the idea isn&#x27;t absurd; it&#x27;s evil.

It is not just that the states are paying them to house convicts (or people accused of a crime), they can even use these people to do jobs for basically no wage. These companies are in the business of slave labor.

Isn&#x27;t it? Companies that probably lobby for stricter and longer sentences, looking at a populated state as a &quot;market,&quot;
 with caged human beings as their product. It&#x27;s the most absurd concept to me, and it&#x27;s even more disgusting when it&#x27;s put in such an innocent manner. &quot;Private prison companies used to view California as one of their fastest-growing markets.&quot; It just gets more disgusting the more you look into it, and the statistics around incarceration in the US.

I&#x27;ve entertained the idea of abolishing prisons in my head, but I can&#x27;t imagine what we would do as an alternative. Suggestions?

Well done California. Hopefully this is a step towards abolishing the prison system.

Will we still have private companies making money off of public prisons by offering different services?  Will there still be individuals earning a paycheck by working at prisons?  Both of these groups will have similar incentives as companies running private prisons.

&gt; Private prison companies used to view California as one of their fastest-growing markets.This is such a bizarre and twisted sentence to hear without a hint of irony. It&#x27;s like dream&#x2F;nightmare logic except in real life. In 100 years private prisons are going to be a hideous stain on our history and this is such a huge step in the right direction that it really makes me proud to be living in California and supporting the state with my tax dollars.

This is incredible. I can&#x27;t believe it&#x27;s happened so soon, putting people (especially such a stigmatized group) above profits really gives hope for the future of the country. Thanks for leading us in this, California.

California passes a sane law, what is happening to this world?

Next we have to remove all for-profit &#x27;prisoner support&#x27; services such as the staggeringly expensive communications firms that are bleeding prisoners and their relatives dry.

California&#x27;s prison population is declining. Especially in juveniles. So there&#x27;s less need for prison space.

So does this also ban private companies from operating inside prisons?  Most of them don&#x27;t care who holds the actual keys so long as they can take advantage of the prisoners.  They may not be the warden, but they can still control the purse strings.

Yeah, seems there will just be frequent bribes for court ordered private facilities. Or lobby (bribe) to have maximum occupancies in state prisons reduced in order to make over crowding more likely.

The next step is for the Governor to pardon all the people who are in for possession and other &quot;lesser crimes&quot; and the release them over the next there years, alleviating the need for additional prison space.

Well, we&#x27;re releasing on the marijuana dudes, right? So hopefully that makes some room.

&gt; The contracts for these four prisons expire in 2023 and cannot be renewed under AB32, except to comply with a federal court order to reduce crowding in state-run facilities.Hmm, something tells me these will end up being renewed considering getting budget approval and completing construction in 3 years is basically impossible so unless Californa has some prisons with spare space or in-progress new construction. OR, even better, reduces it&#x27;s prison population... we may still have some private prisons for a while.Still fantastic news.

The law says that current contracts can run until expiration, which is a few years from now.  They&#x27;ll have to either release prisoners, move them, or incarcerate fewer people (or a combination thereof) otherwise they&#x27;ll have to renew the private contract, which is also allowed under the law if necessary to alleviate overcrowding.

What&#x27;s going to happen to the existing private prisons? I assume this involves tearing up very expensive contracts. Will the government purchase them and convert them to public ones?

Dude this is great news.  Keeping people in prison should never be a for-profit initiative.

I&#x27;m not sure why but your comment was hidden as dead. I vouched for it because… WTF? It&#x27;s a totally fine comment. Anyway…I agree that existing private prisons are wasteful and cruel, but I think that could change if they had different incentives. Right now, convicts can&#x27;t choose between private or public prison. That lack of choice means that private prisons have no incentive to be better than state run prisons. Private prisons usually charge per head. If no prisoners want to stay at the prison because it&#x27;s a hellhole, revenue dries up and they go out of business.I&#x27;m familiar with the cobra effect and ways in which adding financial incentives can cause counterproductive outcomes. I&#x27;m not particularly worried about that happening with private prisons. Financial incentives backfire in two cases:1. When they fail to account for higher-order effects. (As happened with the cobra bounty in India.)2. When they replace social incentives. For example: If a friend asks me to help them move, I&#x27;ll probably oblige. But if I show up on moving day and I see some paid movers helping, I&#x27;ll resent that. That&#x27;s basically what happened with the day care that charged for being late. Previously, parents would show up on time because they felt a social obligation (guilt). When the day care added a late fee, that guilt disappeared because the transaction moved from the social realm to the financial realm.I think the motivations of wardens and guards in both private and state runs prisons are pretty similar, and I don&#x27;t think they&#x27;re motivated by social incentives. For them, it&#x27;s a job. They want to minimize the amount of stress at work, and that usually means minimizing the amount of violence prisoners do towards one another. Adding some financial incentives isn&#x27;t going to solve all the problems with prisons, but considering our existing recidivism rates, I seriously doubt it will hurt.

On the second point, I think folks are rightly dubious about the effectiveness of incentives broadly[1]. There&#x27;s also some hilarious historical examples of incentives backfiring or having unwanted side-effects (like the Cobra Effect [2].)More broadly, I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s that easy to think that private prisons can even work well as a solution, regardless of whether they should be allowed to exist as a matter of public policy and ethics. Consider one summative look at this issue provided in this evaluation[3] -- it&#x27;s dubious whether they&#x27;re even cost effective, one of the strongest pro-private-prison arguments there has been in public debate, and how there&#x27;s much better alternatives than the kind of perverse incentives bundled with private prisons, like re-evaluating whether parolees should be allowed in public housing, and providing more transition housing so when sentences are complete, inmates aren&#x27;t forced to spend even more time in prison because they don&#x27;t have an address to go to.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2009&#x2F;03&#x2F;when-economic-incentives-backfire" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hbr.org&#x2F;2009&#x2F;03&#x2F;when-economic-incentives-backfire</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cobra_effect" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Cobra_effect</a>
[3] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu&#x2F;live&#x2F;news&#x2F;2304-private-prisons-an-evaluation-of-economic-and" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu&#x2F;live&#x2F;news&#x2F;2304-privat...</a>

Isn&#x27;t my proposal giving prisoners more choice? Right now they have no choice which prison they are sent to. Are you worried that some private prisons might engage in sleazy marketing, convince convicts to choose them, and then treat them like crap? That can easily be fixed by letting prisoners switch after a certain period of time. Heck, the law could be that anyone in a private prison can at any time choose to serve the rest of their sentence in a state prison. That would ensure a baseline of care.Also, I think the point about lobbying proves too much. If lobbying is so much cheaper and more reliable than innovation, why don&#x27;t all companies lobby instead of innovating? Apple has billions of dollars sitting around. Why don&#x27;t they lobby to make the iPhone the sole phone used by federal employees? Heck, why don&#x27;t they lobby to get rid of the new import tariffs affecting their products? I don&#x27;t think companies leave $20 bills on the sidewalk, so lobbying must not be as effective as people like to believe.I agree that lobbying is bad, but my objection to it is that the government is allowed to pass laws that coerce people in such ways, not that some companies take advantage of that power. Basically: hate the game, not the player.

With private prisons, lobbying is likely cheaper and more reliable than innovation.I assume you didn&#x27;t intend this in a sinister way, but exercise caution when speaking of experimenting with prisoners. Even with good intentions, remember that these people have limited choices, and will probably lack the ability to withdraw consent (assuming it was given in the first place).

Please notice how far afield you had to go to postulate bad outcomes. For your scenario to play out, the people running private prisons must commit some pretty egregious crimes. Can you imagine the chutzpah of someone who tries to bribe a judge?! That&#x27;s practically instant, guaranteed jail time. Judges only get bribed when judges ask for bribes.If you applied this same level of scrutiny to the existing prison system, I&#x27;m sure you could come up with far worse outcomes using far less speculation. For example: What&#x27;s to stop state prison guards from torturing inmates? Answer: Nothing, because they have qualified immunity.[1]1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;prison-inmate-qualified-immunity-protect-officials-constitution-civil-rights-723943" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.newsweek.com&#x2F;prison-inmate-qualified-immunity-pr...</a>

A caveat, first: I think two of our larger-scale social issues are that incentives are often misaligned with the outcomes we actually want, and that we don&#x27;t create structural room for innovation.That said, I think this is still pretty fraught.Incentives are just rules enforced with a carrot instead of a stick; we&#x27;re just as likely to come up with bad incentives as we are to develop ineffective regulations and write loophole-ridden or misapplied laws. At sufficient scale, money tends to inspire a troublesome kind of creativity.If the private prisons have sufficient profit motive and the problems they face prove tractable for data and bespoke or ML solutions, they&#x27;ll analyze likely convicts as thoroughly as possible and do what they can to skim the most-profitable convicts off the top of the pool and leave public prisons with whatever is left. Maybe they&#x27;ll just directly pay the prisoner or their family. Maybe they&#x27;ll have a miserable as-bad-as-regulations-allow experience for uninvited plebians and a special experience to offer prisoners they want.Will a certain incentive lead them to bribe judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, or witnesses to get (or avoid) prisoners? Would they do the same to keep a former inmate from being convicted again within 3 years of release?And then some donation-funded corner of the think-tank ecosystem will endlessly torture the data to &quot;prove&quot; private prisons get better outcomes than public ones and shop boilerplate legislation to restrict public and promote private prisons.And once the prisoners are within their walls, they&#x27;ll be sucking up all of the data they can to hone their prediction of whether they&#x27;ll reoffend when they get out. Will they use it nobly to target support, or to ensure the whoever the algorithms pick as bad apples end up in constant manufactured trouble?

then we&#x27;d have all sorts of ad campaigns from private prison aimed at at-risk communities and people, promising all sorts of things while still lobbying law enforcement for arrest quotas.

Why would private prisons be allowed to refuse specific inmates? State prisons can&#x27;t do that.

So you invented a loophole and then said it would be trivial to game if they can use that loophole. Prisons aren’t universities, there isn’t an admissions process.

This is incredibly easy to game. A bad actor would create a prison which focused only on convict selection, and fully ignored the bonus for recidivism and pumped people through. Prison not only needs to be ethical for individuals, but for the rest of society.

Are you suggesting that the private prisons would murder convicts soon after they&#x27;re released? That&#x27;s uhh... that&#x27;s just a little bit illegal and people who commit murder tend to get caught and imprisoned for a very long time.But let&#x27;s assume that the private prisons could somehow keep getting away with murder. If anyone ever looked at the stats and saw that people released from private prisons had much shorter life expectancy, then convicts would choose state prisons. Then the private prison&#x27;s revenue dries up and they go out of business.

&gt; Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus.Then the best strategy would be to make sure that the prisoners die as soon as possible.

&gt; You have literal customer lock-inYou could let the prisoners freely switch to public while they&#x27;re locked up.The main issue I have with this system is that the &quot;consumers&quot; making the choices (the prisoners) of product aren&#x27;t paying for the cost. So incentives aren&#x27;t really aligned.

&gt; The recidivism metric would probably cause private prisons to try to avoid or eject worst prisoners, so you&#x27;d end up with a 2-tier system, where private prisons are hotels for &quot;nice&quot; people, and public prisons are a hell-hole for the rest.Yes, so you&#x27;d have to run the metric based on who was initially assigned to the prison. &quot;Oh, John was assigned to your prison, but one look at his record and you decided to expel him? Well, you&#x27;re still responsible for his recidivism, because you chose to not serve him. Oh, Jack was assigned to state prison, and you tried to encourage him? Well, you&#x27;re not responsible for his recidivism, because you selected him.&quot;But yeah, I agree in general that the thing about metrics is that they can be gamed.

Incentives for this are all weird. You have literal customer lock-in, so you can promise anything and deliver nothing.The recidivism metric would probably cause private prisons to try to avoid or eject worst prisoners, so you&#x27;d end up with a 2-tier system, where private prisons are hotels for &quot;nice&quot; people, and public prisons are a hell-hole for the rest.Or maybe some prisons would run training on how not to get caught.

If you look at my comments throughout this thread, you&#x27;ll see that I am aware of the potential for incentives to have undesirable higher-order effects. Many people in this thread have suggested certain concrete undesirable consequences, and I&#x27;ve replied to them.In contrast, you are putting forth a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure. But clearly financial incentives work in many cases. It&#x27;s what sports teams use for their athletes and coaches. It&#x27;s what businesses use for their leadership teams. When we need the best people possible to perform at their best, we tend to pay them money and pay them more money if they meet certain goals.&gt; IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization&#x27;s goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.Yes, ideally we&#x27;d have every job staffed people who are wise, kind, competent, and hard working. But we don&#x27;t have nearly enough of such people and we judge traits inaccurately. So instead we have to make do with less effective but more practical methods. Financial incentives are one of those options.

Good. We can only hope prisons would try to reduce recidivism in order to make more money. That’s the point.It’s a fantasy to think you can simple “hire people that care about the public good”. If that were the case the government wouldn’t be filled with incompetent red tape slingers vying for nothing more than a good retirement.

Sure, but zero incentives don&#x27;t work either, for obvious reasons.  Neither of which implies there aren&#x27;t better or worse options along the continuum.

If &quot;gaming&quot; the system means less recidivism, that sounds good to me.Prison ships to Australia were originally paid per passenger that boarded in Britain. The death rates were horrible, in the double-digit percentages. When the transport ships were instead paid per passenger that _arrived_ the death rates went down phenomenally.And someone like you might say: &quot;omg these prison ships gamed the system by saving lives!!!&quot; Yes, that&#x27;s what we want to happen.

&gt; EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM GETS GAMED. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MEASURE.Yep. Thinking that you can just design a good incentive structure and be done with is hopelessly naive.&gt; IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization&#x27;s goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.Thinking that you can just hire people that care about the public good is just as naive as thinking that you can just devise the right incentive structure.

Please don&#x27;t use uppercase for emphasis.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;newsguidelines.html</a>.

Ah I see you&#x27;ve never implemented an incentive program before.EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM GETS GAMED. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MEASURE.Every metric you could possible think of can be manipulated in ways you can&#x27;t imagine. But give private companies the incentive and someone in them will figure it out.IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization&#x27;s goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.

&gt;&gt; Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior.I bet if you just paid the felons the same amount they cost to incarcerate, relocated them away from their peer group, and forbid contact, a lot of them wouldn&#x27;t re-offend, like, ever. It&#x27;s down to basically a combination of poverty and peer pressure (as in &quot;just when I thought I got out, they pull me back in&quot;) most of the time.This is sort of how exile worked in Russia before the revolution: nonviolent offenders were sent to Siberia and simply lived there. No hard labor or anything, no incarceration per se, but you couldn&#x27;t leave, and all your correspondence was subject to review and censorship.

It is a nice idea, but I don&#x27;t think many private companies are looking that far into the future to figure out where to best get their revenue. They can gamble on something that might not be totally under their control years out into the future, or just try to get more bodies in the prisons now. A ruthless &quot;rational&quot; actor would go for the second option.

&gt; So why are innocent black people jailed? Well, to fill prison beds, apparently. That is one of the reasons that people don&#x27;t like private prisons.Utter nonsense. Black people are jailed for being black in America because American police are racist and American legislators are racist and American media are racist and American prosecutors are racist and American judges are racist. And then, because of this, black people in America have learnt that police, legislators, media, prosecutors and judges are best avoided.If private prison operators have an incentive to get more people to serve more time, then they&#x27;re not going to pick black people because they&#x27;re just smart business people and black people represent an untapped growth market. If they&#x27;ve actually done anything to encourage oversentencing, they only reason they picked black people is because them and everyone around them are racists.

Isn&#x27;t the primary issue anyone has with private prisons the same one we have with defense contractors: that they might, would, or do subvert the system to get innocent people imprisoned or their prison terms extended in the case of private prisons, or promote wars America doesn&#x27;t want or need in the case of defense contractors?What I mean is nobody really cares if prisons buy commercial toilet paper, for example. (As opposed to a hypothetical government toilet paper.) Nobody cares if the military uses the private industry for procurement of computers or whatever. We don&#x27;t feel the government should be creating its own version of all private industry products.But when the prison itself is private - and likewise when defense contractors themselves are developing, shopping around, and selling new weapons only to the military, that the military didn&#x27;t ask for - then suddenly there is a new player in the budgeting process.Ideally few or no people are committing crimes. If the prisons have excess capacity, free beds - good! But if it&#x27;s a private prison, how can they fill those beds? Well, by working to imprison more people.This is the incentive structure that people don&#x27;t like about private prison.In the United States it&#x27;s de facto &quot;illegal&quot; to walk around while being black: there is a high chance you will eventually be jailed on non-existent charges. (And accept a plea bargain, for example, rather than risk a really long term.) I&#x27;m a white guy. If I had lived the exact, exact same life, done every single action exactly the same (and this is true of other people reading Hacker News) I likely could have been jailed for no reason at all, just for walking around while being black. That&#x27;s a fact. I probably would accept the plea bargain I&#x27;m offered, too, and resolve to work for change later. What am I going to do? Tell the judge and prosecutor (who often is scored based on how often he gets a conviction&#x2F;plea) that he and the system are racist? How well will that go over? Will it get me my freedom? Or will it get a vindictive term from the judge. I&#x27;d rather just sit in prison for a few months and then avoid the cops better next time, I think I would decide. (Rather than risk a 20 year prison sentence, again, totally innocent of anything. A few months&#x27; plea - which my counsel would probably advise I take - is nothing compared to that.)So why are innocent black people jailed? Well, to fill prison beds, apparently. That is one of the reasons that people don&#x27;t like private prisons.We don&#x27;t want anybody to be &quot;selling&quot; prison, so we don&#x27;t want prison to be a private enterprise. It&#x27;s quite straightforward and is something most people understand very easily.

There is an assumption that private prisons will perform better than public ones, and so far data does not support it. What great innovation came out of private prison system?You we trying to optimise out the &#x27;inefficient&#x27; government, by saddling it with much effort designing incentives and making sure they are not abused. You might as well run prisons yourself - publically.

There&#x27;s a tention between &quot;paid per prisoner day&quot; and &quot;fewer prisoners come back to stay&quot;.You could get a bonus for not getting &quot;return&quot; prisoners - but it&#x27;d have to be better than gaining life sentences (though in general, harder to compete in three strike legislations where you&#x27;d be incentivesed to allow prisoners to commit crimes in order to trigger three strikes).Perhaps there&#x27;s a way to pay for recovery - but if your business depends on there being prisoners, it&#x27;s hard to see how you could motivate anything but an increase in prisoner population.Certainly an end to prisoners would mean bankruptcy?[ed: you might have a goal of lowering crime, and by extention prisoner population. A private prison, paid to house prisoners, would be commercially committed to the opposite; increasing the prison population.]

No no no. This is exactly the mindset we need to avoid when addressing problems in our justice system. I am sorry but the entrepreneurial &#x2F; venture capitalist mindset is not suitable here. Private prisons should not exist. Public prisons should be focused on rehabilitation, not retribution. As pro-capitalism as I am, the only future I see in your idea is abject market failure. We’re not talking about product here, we’re talking about human life. The market hasn’t been able to solve health care so what makes you think it’s going to be able to solve mass incarceration?Further, this hypothetical system is ripe for exploitation. Aside from the potential exploits others have raised, have you considered the parallels to other industries such as defense contractors? Your idea creates an incentive and profit motive for crime. It’s the type of thinking that could literally result in corporations creating artificial mass shooters in pursuit of all the easy money that could be made. Sorry, but I think this is an extremely bad take and I actually worry about a dystopian future where this takes place. Pull on this thread at your own peril.

I think private prisons could work if:- Convicts could choose whether to be sent to a public or private prison.- Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus.Those changes would create enough competition and align incentives such that we could see some real innovation in the criminal justice system. Sadly, I don&#x27;t think these sorts of experiments will ever be tried. If someone ever proposes such a system, they&#x27;ll be branded a supporter of &quot;private prisons&quot;.

Great job CA legislators. Prisons for profit were an abomination. Good riddance.

&gt; “We have to worry about all the people who are detained right now,” said Servine. “Where will they end up?”Along those lines, what&#x27;s the plan for dealing with the inmates from other prisons that this legislation will make ineligible?For example, there&#x27;s a private correctional center in California City:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_City_Correctional_Center" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;California_City_Correctional_C...</a>

Wholly supported. There’s no way a private prison would be incentivized to lower recidivism but is instead incentivized to increase it. Here’s to hoping we foster rehabilitation over punishment in our prisons and put an end to what is effectively slave labor (inmates making things for pennies on the dollar).

While probably a good idea, I fear somehow the execution will be butchered by incompetence and then blamed on cops or racism. Issues have a tendency to go left unsolved when maintaining a narrative takes precedent over actual problem solving.

I was thinking the same once I noticed this headline on the front page. California has been busy.

Gotta be something to that, end of legislative session maybe?

California has been busy the past couple weeks, they passed the rent control law, a labor law about contract workers(mainly about Uber and Lift drivers), and now this.

Can we do something about Betsy DeVos and the efforts to privatize our public school systems next?

I&#x27;ve always wanted to see a lambda school model for private prisons. they get some share of an inmates future tax revenue but pay a significant penalty if ex-inmates re-offend.I&#x27;ve reached out to Austen..

Well done California.- Private prisons has no incentive of getting rid of its income source the prisoners.- More emphasis should be put into preventive nature. Ie to stop people from becoming criminals. This most likely involves more instruction on how to raise children.If analog was to computer program it is cheapest to do things correct at the design phase, once late in the phase the issue hits production it is very expensive to mitigate. Thus we should as society do maximum effort into supporting young children and parents. Once the person has turned into a criminal it is very expensive for society to correct the issue if at all possible.

I am looking at all the other major news publishers, and none of them have this on their front page.

$3 per day per inmate on average for food, keep the wig, leave us with a wreck of a human, covering his&#x2F;her medical bills until end of life.

&gt; The only difference is that public prisons are invulnerable to reform.None are invulnerable to legislative reform. However, _private_ ones are closer to it, since they&#x27;re, well, private.&gt; No worseIf you mean they&#x27;re both terrible, exploitative, have guard violence, don&#x27;t provide reasonable facilities, don&#x27;t provide opportunities for personal development and education, and underfunded - maybe you&#x27;re right. (although frankly I doubt it.)Mass incarceration in general is a perverse US government sport &#x2F; poor people population management&#x2F;behavior shaping mechanism, anyway.

I heard a very interesting take on this topic on local radio. Basically, on average private prisons are no worse than public prisons as both make many of the same mistakes. The only difference is that public prisons are invulnerable to reform. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wfhb.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;kite-line-september-6-2019-the-business-of-incarceration-a-conversation-with-craig-gilmore&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wfhb.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;kite-line-september-6-2019-the-busines...</a>

Here in Brazil criminals riot to be transferred to private prisons because the ones ran by the state are inhuman.

These John Oliver docs were very illuminating:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=AjqaNQ018zU&amp;t=2s" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=AjqaNQ018zU&amp;t=2s</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gJtYRxH5G2k" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=gJtYRxH5G2k</a>

I really doubt it, most libertarians and free market purists object to the idea of anyone but government being able to violently deprive someone of their rights without repercussion. The reaction on forums like &#x2F;r&#x2F;libertarian is mainly positive.

I&#x27;m sure there&#x27;s at least a few free market purists that will decry this move as it removes competition from the market, but this happens to be one instance where public prisons actually cost less on average than when outsourced to the private market [0][0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.criminaljusticeprograms.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;private-prisons-vs-public-prisons&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.criminaljusticeprograms.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;private-pri...</a>

I thought such things only exist in movies.

Because they&#x27;ve been sold lies for years and most of them can&#x27;t really believe everything they know about such an important aspect of their life is bull.

&gt; Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systemsThey&#x27;ve been told socialized medicine is evil communist plot to steal their hard earned money. Many Americans have not been outside of the states and have no concept of what life in other countries might be like. There&#x27;s a good percentage of Americans that are completely ignorant of how the rest of the world does things, and also dismiss this as inferior. They&#x27;ve been told their entire life that the US is the greatest country, so, why would we do it any other way?

There&#x27;s a choice component to health. Sure, you can lose the genetic or environmental lottery and just be unhealthy.Or you can choose to be unhealthy. Smoking, drinking, drugs, poor diet, lack of exercise. These are by far the biggest contributors to healthcare cost and they cost absolutely nothing to prevent. Many people just don&#x27;t take responsibility for their health, and many others in the US don&#x27;t like the idea of subsidizing other people&#x27;s healthcare for preventable or self-inflicted health complications.edit: I actually do have access to one of the best single payer systems in the world due to dual citizenship. Single-payer is far from the perfect silver bullet everyone likes to sell it as.

There is a step 4: pay exorbitant tax rates.

&gt; Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems is beyond me. It&#x27;s all in y&#x27;alls control.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;work&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;2911271-america-and-americans-and-selected-nonfiction#quote_book_link_202399" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.goodreads.com&#x2F;work&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;2911271-america-and-am...</a>

Because when people talk about how terrible healthcare is here, it&#x27;s usually people who don&#x27;t have or can&#x27;t afford good insurance. And by good, I mean covers most everything and doesn&#x27;t have a huge out of pocket.If you have good health insurance, the healthcare in the US is absolutely top tier.Many people that complain are getting a plan with a huge deductible either because they are being cheap or can&#x27;t afford better. But I think in a lot of cases it&#x27;s the former. People just don&#x27;t prioritize health care. Many would rather trade in their 2 year old car for a brand new one.

Yes, I&#x27;m also in favor of socialized medicine for basically exactly these reasons. Shocker, I know. The system works!I grew up in socialized medicine, and you get sick, you go to the hospital, they treat you and you leave. There&#x27;s no step 4. Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems is beyond me. It&#x27;s all in y&#x27;alls control.

They key difference is that health care clients want their services.But while the exact rationale doesn&#x27;t hold, there are inherent problems on competition and freedom of choice on health care that kinda break capitalism. There is also the rationale that one does want minimum health care coverage in a society, and a market is not able to provide that.

Once in the US, I was quoted $200 for busting a cyst that had developed on my finger due to small cut&#x2F;infection (this service in my European country is offered for nearly free in any pharmacy).Instead I went to a Walgreens, bought a pin, a lighter, some ethanol, and a band-aid for like $5, and did it myself...

Dentistry is private with some insurance options in the US, and I (in the suburbs of a large city in the Midwest) would have paid about $100 for a teeth cleaning had my dental insurance not paid for it. (My dental insurance is about $25 a month and covers most of major oral surgery if needed. My root canal cost about $350 with insurance recently)

Just a cleaning without x-rays? About $100-300.Dental isn&#x27;t really indicative of &quot;how expensive health care is&quot; though. Lots of U.S. dental and vision &quot;insurance&quot; plans are really just mandatory subscription plans since their bills are pretty consistent, and anything that might cost more gets you a referral to a hospital.It&#x27;s when you visit a hospital (voluntarily or via emergency ambulance) that you&#x27;ll start getting the $1,000 - $100,000 bills that&#x27;ll kill ya.

My typical doctors visit costs me $40 out of pocket. My wife, who sees more specialists and physical therapists because of her scoliosis ends up paying about $250&#x2F;mo in premiums. I have the &#x27;premium&#x27; insurance that my employer offers, which means that I&#x27;d pay no premiums for inpatient hospital care. My family health plan costs about $240 per bi-weekly paycheck or $6,240 per year. My employer pays a little over $600 per bi-weekly paycheck for my health insurance or $15,600 per year. Even with that and my employer-sponsored long-term disability insurance, I&#x27;m sure I&#x27;d still probably be permanently bankrupted if I got a disease like cancer.My wife and I needed prophylactic rabies vaccinations after a bit of an adventure involving a bat in a guest house. Had that happened when we didn&#x27;t have health insurance it would have cost $38,000 out-of-pocket. Blood-based medicines are expensive everywhere in the world, but I personally think it&#x27;s completely immoral that we would even entertain a system which would completely sink someone financially over something like that.

For each chemo session, our hospital is currently charging around $25k. A complete breast cancer treatment, including surgery and reconstruction, is $500k or so.This is through insurance. Cash payment is negotiable and possibly much less, but that’s negotiated case per case.

&gt; it costs about 100 USD for a teeth cleaningIt&#x27;s about the same for me in the US, where we also don&#x27;t have insurance for dentistry in general.Getting a couple stitches on a Sunday on the other hand last ran me a bit over $7500.

How expensive is health care in the US? IE, in my country dentistry is fully private, and it costs about 100 USD for a teeth cleaning. How much is that in America?

Just for fun, same sentence on health care.&gt; I&#x27;m so happy about this. Private health care insure are the scum of the earth. They&#x27;re totally antithetical to a free society that values human life. They often lobby for minimum health care coverage in law (effectively requiring by law a certain percentage of citizens to be marked as clients). Any profit they skim off the top is money that should be spent on research and education. Next up should be criminalizing charging huge quantities for basic health care by private hospitals and the usurious fees on drugs.I&#x27;d wager $1 in their pockets costs society easily 10X that.

California bans private prisons