A Key Reason America is No Longer Great: The privatization of state and (especially) local governments

[Jolly_Penguin]

Speaking of private prisons:

My four months as a private prison guard

Good read.

Excellent read. thanks for posting that link

 

[scombrid]

I wouldn't exactly call that privatized. I've yet to see one of these "private" prisons that has any private clients. Every single inmate in a "private" prison is sent there by the government. The "private" prison wouldn't exist without its only customer, the government. It is contracted, not privatized.

I've yet to see a private prison. If anyone tried it, however, you'd see the person trying it being sent to a "private" prison for kidnapping, holding people against their will, enslavement, etc.

Private prison, run by company for profit. Paid by the state per inmate housed. Profit is got by maximizing intake while minimizing cost. No moral hazard there whereby a prison company might be apt to cut costs by eliminating programs that reduce recidivism. Never would be a temptation to bribe judges or lobby for laws to get longer sentences either.

 

[Trausti]

I wouldn't exactly call that privatized. I've yet to see one of these "private" prisons that has any private clients. Every single inmate in a "private" prison is sent there by the government. The "private" prison wouldn't exist without its only customer, the government. It is contracted, not privatized.

I've yet to see a private prison. If anyone tried it, however, you'd see the person trying it being sent to a "private" prison for kidnapping, holding people against their will, enslavement, etc.

Private prison, run by company for profit. Paid by the state per inmate housed. Profit is got by maximizing intake while minimizing cost. No moral hazard there whereby a prison company might be apt to cut costs by eliminating programs that reduce recidivism. Never would be a temptation to bribe judges or lobby for laws to get longer sentences either.

I'm against private prisons, but not for those reasons. I think that only the state should have the power to deprive a person of liberty, and that this power should not be delegable. But your concerns are easily addressed. Make it that the private company must include allocation of funds for this or that program in its contract bit. Government is free to require any contracting party include items it wants; otherwise, no contract. Happens all the time with public building/infrastructure contracts.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Private prison, run by company for profit. Paid by the state per inmate housed. Profit is got by maximizing intake while minimizing cost. No moral hazard there whereby a prison company might be apt to cut costs by eliminating programs that reduce recidivism. Never would be a temptation to bribe judges or lobby for laws to get longer sentences either.

I'm against private prisons, but not for those reasons. I think that only the state should have the power to deprive a person of liberty, and that this power should not be delegable. But your concerns are easily addressed. Make it that the private company must include allocation of funds for this or that program in its contract bit. Government is free to require any contracting party include items it wants; otherwise, no contract. Happens all the time with public building/infrastructure contracts.

How is a private prison having the power delegated to them? Can the private prison take people off the street and put them there?

I'm just arguing saying that prison is privatized. It's not, it's just contracted to a private company like the state contracts to a construction company to repair a road.

 

[ksen]

It's pretty disingenuous of Republicans (at all levels) to slash education funding and then turn around and blame mushrooming student debt on school administrative costs.

A good question would be how an American adult could possibly believe education funding has been slashed (at all levels) given the intewebz allow us to access data on education spending and see it obviously hasn't been.

http://www.cbpp.org/research/state-...to-put-college-out-of-reach-for-more-students

obviously

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

I wouldn't exactly call that privatized. I've yet to see one of these "private" prisons that has any private clients. Every single inmate in a "private" prison is sent there by the government. The "private" prison wouldn't exist without its only customer, the government. It is contracted, not privatized.

I've yet to see a private prison. If anyone tried it, however, you'd see the person trying it being sent to a "private" prison for kidnapping, holding people against their will, enslavement, etc.

Private prison, run by company for profit. Paid by the state per inmate housed. Profit is got by maximizing intake while minimizing cost. No moral hazard there whereby a prison company might be apt to cut costs by eliminating programs that reduce recidivism. Never would be a temptation to bribe judges or lobby for laws to get longer sentences either.

For Profit prison, run by company for profit, etc, etc.

 

[Axulus]

I wouldn't exactly call that privatized. I've yet to see one of these "private" prisons that has any private clients. Every single inmate in a "private" prison is sent there by the government. The "private" prison wouldn't exist without its only customer, the government. It is contracted, not privatized.

I've yet to see a private prison. If anyone tried it, however, you'd see the person trying it being sent to a "private" prison for kidnapping, holding people against their will, enslavement, etc.

Private prison, run by company for profit. Paid by the state per inmate housed. Profit is got by maximizing intake while minimizing cost. No moral hazard there whereby a prison company might be apt to cut costs by eliminating programs that reduce recidivism. Never would be a temptation to bribe judges or lobby for laws to get longer sentences either.

Why does the government agree to reward maximizing of intake with more money? It doesn't have to be that way at all.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

The primary agency awarding the contract does define the parameters of the contract.

 

[Valjean]

Private prison, run by company for profit. Paid by the state per inmate housed. Profit is got by maximizing intake while minimizing cost. No moral hazard there whereby a prison company might be apt to cut costs by eliminating programs that reduce recidivism. Never would be a temptation to bribe judges or lobby for laws to get longer sentences either.

Why does the government agree to reward maximizing of intake with more money? It doesn't have to be that way at all.

The companies' state contracts generally guarantee a certain minimum occupancy rate, so if an occupancy guarantee of 98% falls to 90%, for example, the state still has to pay for the extra 7%.
Thus a falling crime rate will not affect arrest rates, courts will be motivated to sentence lower level criminals to stiffer sentences, and the state will be motivated to cut funding for rehab and education.

The net effect is to make the poor a commodity to be harvested and the justice system an employee of the prison company.

 

[SimpleDon]

There are prisons in the US that are built with private capital and run by private corporations. These prisons are run for profit. It is reasonable to call them private, for profit prisons even though it is the government jurisprudence system that sends the prisoners there.

Like most government to private, for profit schemes that save money over the government option they do it by paying lower wages with fewer benefits than government employees receive. Most of the savings from lower wages is converted into profits with just enough applied to the fees that the government pays to save money.

The most obvious example of privatization and the conversion to for profit entities run amuck is our healthcare system. Forty years ago healthcare costs in the US were on par with the rest of the developed world. Then private, for profit corporations started to buy up the hospitals that had previously been non-profit owned by charities or government. After forty years we now pay two to even three times more than the other developed countries. (Referring to medical costs per capita as a percentage of GDP)

Medicare Advantage is another example, when it was passed it included a supposed temporary additional payment of 25% above what it cost the government to be administer the Medicare system. Over time and due to the miracle of competition this extra fee would disappear as the insurance companies competed with one another. It should come as no surprise that the fee has never gone away, although it has been reduced among much protest by the health care insurance companies that they can't do the work for the lower fee accompanied by a public relations campaign that the government is cutting Medicare. This is the source of the claim that ObamaCare was reducing Medicare by 300 million dollars a year. It was, in payments to the private insurance companies, but it wasn't a cut in benefits like the insurance companies hoped that the general public would believe.

Yes, the Medicare Advantage programs include more benefits than standard, government run Medicare. But the insurance companies have to include these extra benefits or no one will buy a Medicare Advantage program, because no Medicare Advantage program is as well accepted as standard Medicare. They pay doctors less than standard Medicare. Government run Medicare pays much faster with less hassle than with any private company.

During my time in the military, I worked along-side both civil servants and contractors. The contractors sat at a government desk doing a government job on a government computer with a government email address. They got a military ID that said "contractor" on it. They company that provided them as labor made a profit by selling labor to the government.

It is an interesting arrangement. Not necessarily a good one, but an interesting one.

Now the name on their paycheck was that of the company that hired them to do that government job. Were they employed in the private sector or the public sector?

While it is very reasonable to call these prisons "for profit" it is not reasonable to call them "private", until and unless even one of them has a single private client. I've yet to see one. Nobody has ever been able to show me one. If anyone can show me one I'll gladly call it a private prison.

Even Medi/Medi doesn't compare to the prisons. The clients are the patients, the insurance is the government. It's an awful mixture of private and public, but it is more private than a for-profit prison. The for-profit prison's status as "private" is so much an illusion that it takes a deliberate effort of will to think that it is private.

In both cases the client is the government. They are paying private, for profit companies to do the work that the government use to do. What you are doing is straining a rather straightforward description of what a private, for profits company is. It is easy, private means privately owned, i.e. not government, and for profit means that try to make more in as income than what goes out as expenses.

I am curious, is it just stubbornness that prevents you from admitting that you are wrong or are you really this obtuse?

 

[coloradoatheist]

Why does the government agree to reward maximizing of intake with more money? It doesn't have to be that way at all.

The companies' state contracts generally guarantee a certain minimum occupancy rate, so if an occupancy guarantee of 98% falls to 90%, for example, the state still has to pay for the extra 7%.
Thus a falling crime rate will not affect arrest rates, courts will be motivated to sentence lower level criminals to stiffer sentences, and the state will be motivated to cut funding for rehab and education.

The net effect is to make the poor a commodity to be harvested and the justice system an employee of the prison company.

and problems like that can happen whether the government uses its own resources or outside resources. How we do we prevent the government from spending more than it has to for its duties?

 

[SimpleDon]

A private firm is owned and operated by a person, partners or a corporation. The "private" refers to the ownership not to the clientele.

When an activity or organization is "privatized" that means that it is either run or owned by the private sector not the government, as any literate person who can read a dictionary would know.

Then we already have private roads since the government uses private firms to do road maintenance and building of roads. I'm curious how many people say we have private roads based on that? Our national defense is also private then since the government contracts out to defense firms.

As Jason said, for privatization the people have to go directly to the private firms to purchase the product/service instead of the government. That's not the case with prisons. Charter and private schools yes.

No, we have public roads, that is, open to the use by all, built and maintained by privately owned companies paid by the owners of the the roads, the government, the collective "we" as in we own the public roads.

Have we tripped over some obscure libertarian apologetic for your crazy philosophy? Similar to the "libertarian deregulation wasn't responsible for the Great Financial Crisis and Recession of 2008 because it was the Republican's deregulation that caused it."

This one would be something along the line of "it isn't the libertarian idea of privatizing government functions that has gone to shit because this Republican privatization isn't Real© Libertarian privatization?"

 

[coloradoatheist]

Then we already have private roads since the government uses private firms to do road maintenance and building of roads. I'm curious how many people say we have private roads based on that? Our national defense is also private then since the government contracts out to defense firms.

As Jason said, for privatization the people have to go directly to the private firms to purchase the product/service instead of the government. That's not the case with prisons. Charter and private schools yes.

No, we have public roads, that is, open to the use by all, built and maintained by privately owned companies paid by the owners of the the roads, the government, the collective "we" as in we own the public roads.

Have we tripped over some obscure libertarian apologetic for your crazy philosophy? Similar to the "libertarian deregulation wasn't responsible for the Great Financial Crisis and Recession of 2008 because it was the Republican's deregulation that caused it."

This one would be something along the line of "it isn't the libertarian idea of privatizing government functions that has gone to shit because this Republican privatization isn't Real© Libertarian privatization?"

In the case of the prisons the government still sets the contracts that the prison owns, the government is responsible for the number of people that go there directly and indirectly. The difference is that its done through a private contractor, not privatized. So if the prison system was privatized, the entire system would be be owned, operated, and directed by the private market. For example, landscaping is privatized and it would not be if people had to go to the government to get landscaping. So there is a difference between privatizing something and using private contractors. At least say the problem is using a private contractors. And actually for the case we are talking about, I don't think using these private prisons are the answer and should be re-evaluated.

 

[Valjean]

The companies' state contracts generally guarantee a certain minimum occupancy rate, so if an occupancy guarantee of 98% falls to 90%, for example, the state still has to pay for the extra 7%.
Thus a falling crime rate will not affect arrest rates, courts will be motivated to sentence lower level criminals to stiffer sentences, and the state will be motivated to cut funding for rehab and education.

The net effect is to make the poor a commodity to be harvested and the justice system an employee of the prison company.

and problems like that can happen whether the government uses its own resources or outside resources. How we do we prevent the government from spending more than it has to for its duties?

Government run prisons have open records and their operation is open to public oversight and regulation. They are non-profit and have no motivation to cut costs or hide records and operating procedures

"Private" prisons are businesses. Unlike public institutions that operate at cost, a business must figure cost+profit.
To generate a profit at a lower cost than a state-run institution, they have to cut corners. To hide this they must keep operations private.

I used to work as an RN in the Maryland state prison system, Jessup.
Shortly after they privatized, I quit.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Why does the government agree to reward maximizing of intake with more money? It doesn't have to be that way at all.

The companies' state contracts generally guarantee a certain minimum occupancy rate, so if an occupancy guarantee of 98% falls to 90%, for example, the state still has to pay for the extra 7%.
Thus a falling crime rate will not affect arrest rates, courts will be motivated to sentence lower level criminals to stiffer sentences, and the state will be motivated to cut funding for rehab and education.

The net effect is to make the poor a commodity to be harvested and the justice system an employee of the prison company.

Yeah, contracts with guaranteed utilization almost always end up screwing the citizens.