re: So XI Joe is banning private businesses

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Do you have data that shows that private prisons have any affect on incarceration rates?

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Washington State University did a study last year

Link to study

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The study found that private prisons lead to an average increase of 178 new prisoners per million population per year. At an average cost of $60 per day per prisoner, that costs states between $1.9 to $10.6 million per year, if all those additional prisoners are in private prisons.

The length of sentences also increases when private prisons come into a state, especially in nonviolent crimes that have more leeway in sentencing guidelines.

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The authors found two potential reasons for the effect of private prisons. The first is corruption, where judges or legislators may be influenced to give out harsher sentences or write laws with harsher penalties.

The most prominent corruption example is the ‘kids for cash’ scandal in Pennsylvania, where two judges were bribed by a private prison company to give harsher sentences to juvenile offenders instead of probation to increase occupancy at for-profit detention centers.

The other potential reason for the findings is increased capacity.

“If a judge knows prisons are at or over capacity, he or she is likely more hesitant to send marginal criminals to prison,” Galinato said. “But when you have private prisons that don’t have capacity concerns, that induces more people to be incarcerated.”

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“We aren’t saying private prisons are bad,” he said. “But states need to be careful with them. If your state has previous and regular issues with corruption, I wouldn’t be surprised to see laws being more skewed to give longer sentences, for example. If the goal is to reduce the number of incarcerated individuals, increasing the number of private prisons may not be the way to go. One can study sentencing reform and even anti-corruption policies that improve the efficacy and fairness of judicial outcomes.”

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Gee, I wonder if the people on an LSU forum might be familiar with a particular state that has a long history of political corruption? It is also a state with the highest incarceration rate in the nation (although that is obviously a result of MANY factors)

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I am pro private prisons,

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Why?

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You don't see a problem with having a profit incentive to keep as many people incarcerated as possible?

The prison industrial complex acts as a lobbying influence to keep more people in prison

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100%. It’s why we can’t have any meaningful prison reform, why we have the largest incarceration rate in the world, etc. There shouldn’t be a financial incentive to lock up as many people as possible.

One example.

Throw out everything else. Believe in science until it’s inconvenient.

I'm not necessarily against banning private prisons and lessening the influence of Icarceration, Inc. Prisons for profit just lead to more people becoming residents.

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Prisons for profit just lead to more people becoming residents.

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For both private and public prisons