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Why Are Private Prisons “Immoral?”
The Phoenix suburb of Mesa is Arizona’s third largest city, the spring training home to the Chicago Cubs, and, most famously, home to yours truly. Unlike most cities, our leadership is always looking for costs to cut, rather than expensive new programs to create. But their latest budget-minded initiative is angering the local powers that be.
For decades, Mesa has sent its misdemeanor offenders to Maricopa County jails, but that comes with a steep price tag. Over the past 10 years, the county has increased its daily housing prices by nearly 40 percent and its booking cost by more than 60 percent. So now the city is negotiating a deal with private contractor CoreCivic to house the inmates in a neighboring county. The move could save up to $2 million a year. Sounds like a win/win to me, but the county sheriff is seeing red ink:
[Sheriff Paul] Penzone was quick to condemn Mesa’s move, claiming it could increase county expenses and have a negative impact on his organization. To persuade Mesa and other cities not to search for better options, he said he would try to reduce costs and increase efficiency. He claims to have closed Tent City for just this reason.
The per-prisoner rate increases are due to reduced occupancy in the jails, according to his office. Since facilities need to remain open, they have the same hard costs regardless of how many inmates they hold. However, it’s hard not to wonder if the massive lawsuits from the Arpaio years could have something to do with it.
Penzone also is concerned about the free market interfering with government. “Any time we privatize housing inmates, there’s a profit element,” he said, suggesting that a for-profit model empowers lobbyists to try to increase the length of sentences and reduce diversionary programs. [emphasis mine.]
Profit? How icky.
The main complaint of private-prison critics is that, for some reason, profiting off prisons is immoral. Glance at the comments to my article above, and you’ll see “morals” tossed around more than Cotton Mather hosting a Puritan altar call.
California Attorney General Kamala Harris was blunter: “It is morally wrong for corporations to profit off the mass incarceration of millions of people in this country.” She doesn’t mention that vendors selling steel bars, uniforms, and fencing already profit from mass incarceration, along with countless other companies. Singling out private prisons for contempt shows a lack of understanding or honesty.
What’s left unexplained by Penzone, Harris, or lefty internet commenters is why private prisons are immoral. I know of no major religion that condemns the practice … outside of the One True Church of Progressivism. But it is stated as such a self-evident fact, I’m wondering if I’m missing something.
So I ask you, Ricochetti: Why is jailing prisoners in a public facility moral while locking them up in a private facility is sinful?
Published in Economics, Law
Hey. I’ve seen the footage. Private prisons lead to things like this:
Private prisons are more likely to have non-unionized guards. That’s immoral. Only good, unionized guards are qualified to ignore prison rape.
I think the implication is that by privatizing portions of the punishment part (holy alliteration Batman!) of the justice system, we invite a perversion of justice in practice. A common view is that the profit motive is inherently at odds with the impartial administration of justice, and that “corporations” will all too gladly trample over the latter in pursuit of the former. This purported corporate malfeasance wouldn’t stop at the prison gates, but could manifest in e.g. lobbying efforts to increase mandatory minimum sentences and thus increase demand for prison cells provided by private industry. That being said, it seems to me that this scenario is not inevitable, and at any rate government operated prisons have been demonstrated to have their own slate of problems. I’d say these concerns sound plausible at face value, but likely have less grounding in reality than one might be led to believe.
The case against private prisons is one of moral peril; the companies will lobby for more and longer sentences in an effort to increase demand for their product. That being said, several years back in California (where I live) the first ballot measure to legalize marijuana was being considered (that time it failed). The largest group to lobby against it was…drum-roll please…the prison guard union. Such a conflict of interest is not limited to private companies, but is predictable either way. I suggest caution in your home town’s case, as any short term savings could eventually become a fool’s bargain.
Because when you have a big private prison industry, you have a powerful interest group, to whose advantage it is to criminalize more and more behavior and enact longer and longer sentences for crime. That’s why.
And that is enough. With 1/20 American adults already having hard prison experience, we do not need that.
I applauded last year when the fed govt announced it wouldn’t be continuing with the private prison trend. But most people incarcerated in this country are not in federal prison but in state prisons or county jails, and there, privatization continues apace. It’s gotta stop. Did you read about the Luzerne Co, Pa “Kids for Cash” scandal? If privatization becomes the norm, so will such scenarios.
Last, I wouldn’t call this a “moral” objection, more of a “civic religious” objection: the state has deprived these individuals of their liberty pursuant to due process of law. The state should oversee the administration of the penalty as well, and the taxpayers in whose name and for whose protection the prisoner was sentenced should bear the cost
Right. Many of the assumptions are based on a false premise that a private corporation will be necessarily corrupt in pursuing its ends, and public-run institutions are necessarily incorrupt.
Those who worry that private companies will push for more and longer incarcerations ignore public entities like District Attorneys who doggedly pursue cases seeking convictions long after their case has begun to disintegrate in pursuit of their own career advancement.
On the other hand, the public sector is never going to give us those cool, exploding collars that blow your head off if you try to escape. That’s the private sector, baby!
Did you ever hear about the Kids for Cash scandal? A private juvenile detention center paid kick-backs to judges who sentenced the kids to the center. This kind of abuse may not be inevitable, but it has been known to happen, and I don’t blame anyone for being concerned about it.
I take the view that administration of justice is one of the few proper responsibilities of government. The Lockean social contract of government is one in which we outsource law enforcement and administration of justice to it instead of doing ourselves. A government that has to outsource justice to the private sector because they can’t do it properly is a government that has bigger problems than prison funding. Instead of just using the private sector to paper over their wasteful and ineffective spending, they need a thorough housecleaning.
In that case, why do we allow punitive damages to be paid to private parties in civil suits? Punitive damages are punishment. Compensatory damages make the plaintiff whole. If we were being pure, shouldn’t punitive damages go to the government (which assumes the responsibility of punishing offenders in exchange for individuals abandoning feud rights) rather than an individual? I know lawyers would hate it, but trial lawyers are private parties, too.
(As for when the government is the defendant is a civil suit, have punitive damages go to the Federal Government in all cases except where the Federal Government is the defendant. In those cases punitive damages would go to a state government.)
Seawriter
Isn’t the threat of private prisons lobbying for longer sentences counter-intuitive? Generally, companies prefer to provide short-term products, as high turnover = repeat business & increased profits. If there’s a “booking cost” as mentioned in the OP — I assume this is a fee charged at the time of booking, as opposed to the recurring housing cost — that it would be more profitable to make more bookings rather than fewer bookings. Then there’s also the housing cost. If there’s any kind of rent control model for long-term incarcerees, it would also behoove prisons to get more short-term tenants who can be billed at the latest higher housing fee rather than a lifer who may be on some kind of lower legacy housing fee.
The U.S. uses the services of private vendors in the criminal justice system known as Bail Bondsmen. For a commission they put up the bail of those accused of crimes but technically become warders of the accused thus insure bailees return to face trial on pain of forfeiting the bail money. Bail Bondsmen have more legal authority than government to persue bail jumpers because the bailee had surrendered his legal rights to the bondsman.
Perhaps convicts could avail themselves of a similar service. Call them Goal Bonds Corporations who for a commission, at the expense of the convicts, put up a bond for the release of convicts into the custody of said corporation. At the convicts expense they will be housed and fed in a secure location for the duration of the custodial term. Obviously this service could only be available for convicts of means and the accomadation afforded would likely be far superior than in most penitentiaries.
Rather than sending white collar criminals to some Club Fed at the expense of the public purse they could serve out their term on their own dime.
I agree completely— there is the potential for malfeasance and a certain amount of vigilance is called for.
You make a good point, I had thought the idea would simply be maximizing “tenancy”.
Granted that anything whatsoever can become good or evil in and of itself (fire can roast your food or burn your house down), I think there is a greater likelihood of help being given to inmates when the jails are local and community supported. The risk of out of sight, out of mind for large institutions is great no matter who funds them, but it strikes me as much higher at profit-model prisons. There’s simply no connection to moral humanitarianism in a for-profit institution of this sort.
We have a local jail program that has actually won awards in terms of rehabilitation and helping drug addicts and mentally ill convicts. The former district attorney for Cape Cod was a good friend, and one time when I asked him about it, he confirmed for me that most of our inmates were very young, definitely worth helping given that they had their whole lives ahead of them. We also found in a study done locally that 80 percent of our inmates were functionally illiterate. When I see that, I worry about how able these people were to advocate for themselves when accused of crimes. How well do they understand what’s happening to them? Are they able to work effectively with their attorney? Do they understand the ramifications of the “deals” they are making with prosecutors?
Our current sheriff, a Republican, Jim Cummings, said, to the head-shaking “Yup” amusement of his audience that he wished that 80 percent of the inmates would stop taking the drugs they were on and that the other 20 percent would take the ones they had been prescribed!
Based on my own observations in the bad old days of the state warehousing of mentally ill people in the 1970s, I’ve seen the ugly and inhumane side of big institutions.
It’s a local issue, and the prison will reflect how the local people feel about the inmates. Do they see prison as an opportunity to help them live a normal life, or do they see prison as a necessary severe punishment, no rehabilitation desired?
I would hope all communities have private citizen oversight committees, much like the school committees in Massachusetts. It is healthy for all government endeavors to operate with the doors open to the public. It helps prevent cruelty that can arise when people don’t think anyone cares about those inside. (Abu Ghraib comes to mind.)
Yeah … It’s icky to outsource things to private sector that should be taken care of in-house.
Let’s say your wife demands a $100 dinner date before agreeing to sex, but you can hire a prostitute for $50. By saying this arrangement is immoral, are you saying that the hooker making a profit and you saving money is immoral? Of course not! The immoral part is sex belongs in marriage, and frankly, administration of criminal justice is the responsibility of the government in the same way.
Sure, yes, Mesa may save money this way, just like hiring the hooker instead of taking the wife out to expensive dinners may save you money. But both actions are coping mechanisms for dysfunction, not solutions.
On the other hand, if the Maricopa County Sheriff had used private jails instead of building jails, now that their inmate population is down they wouldn’t be shelling out for those overhead costs, which seem to be driving up the cost of their jails.
Yuh. And those DAs are a big problem too.
To argue that alternatives to the present system involve incentives for misbehavior does not require claiming the present system does not also have such incentives. If all systems imaginable contain risks, then we can reasonably debate which potential risks are worse and which potential benefits are better.
Private prisons have a track record. I’m not familiar enough to judge. Are private prisons for federal offenses equivalent to private prisons at the state and municipal levels? I wouldn’t be surprised if incentives and challenges differed.
Not only that, but given that we already have problems in the system, do we really want to invite in another group of players?
So if the local schools are dysfunctional, we shouldn’t hire better teachers or allow for some school choice (e.g. charter schools)?
I am with Amy on this.
A) I don’t consider schools a necessary function of government. Educating children is the responsibility of parents, and they should have all possible options to do so.
B) I stand by my point that if a community is privatizing functions, it’s because they’re screwing them up. You don’t get charter schools in good school districts, and there’s a reason for that.
C) But yes, I wouldn’t really want to see superintendents of the local private and charter schools involved with local public schools, because there would be a natural conflict of interest.
It would obviously depend on the specifics of the contract but I think you’re on the right track. My gut says that running a high-vacancy prison with few long sentences is at least marginally more-profitable than running a full one, with many long-term sentences. In this particular instance, we’re talking about a county jail for misdemeanor convictions – I just can’t see bribery and kickbacks to max out those sentences for smoking in a public place or whatever.
If they are putting people in prison for smoking in a public place then I think we’ve identified a more serious issue.
See, this would be less an issue if people followed my suggestion of bringing back flogging.
Presumably you think local police departments are a necessary function of government. The same argument applies, mutatis mutandis. The point is that keeping bad actors in a broken system because you are afraid of further complicating matters isn’t obviously compelling.
Absolutely, and I imagine that if Mesa could affordably and humanely house its prisoners without introducing private parties they might do so. The story in the OP is a consequence of the fact that the municipal government can’t (doesn’t? won’t?) do that.
Fair enough – that was the only misdemeanor I could think of off the top of my head. I have lived a very straight-laced life, I can assure you…
Everything done apart from the State is immoral, Jon.
Everything.
Agreed. Hence my repeated point that the correct thing to do is reform their city government to the point that it can do its job. Maybe that means eliminating stupid laws. Maybe that means cutting waste. Maybe that means raising taxes. But the solution isn’t to hire a private prison any more than the solution to a frigid wife is to hire a prostitute.
But they were always outsourcing prison. They don’t have enough prisoners to make it worthwhile, or they don’t want them in their backyard… something. So the only question is the choice of vendor.
A distinction needs to be made between the county jail system and the state prison system. In most every state county jail time is a maximum one year of incarceration. This means that county jail inmates are mix of inmates that include those that cannot make bail while awaiting trial, those convicted of misdemeanors, and those that have had felony charges reduced to misdemeanors. State prison time is for those that have been convicted of felonies that mandate a prison time of longer than one year.
As someone noted private prisons can lead to lobbying to protect their business interests. Public employee unions can be just as aggressive in protecting their interests to include overtime, sick pay, and generous retirement plans. Private citizens are not invited to the bargaining table in either situation, so if you think your financial interests are going to be protected by public employee unions I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.
Most voters have no idea who their county commissioners are, and that includes ever going to hear their candidates that are running for county sheriff. Most local politicians are no different than national politicians, they are monument builders. Local politicians find that filling potholes and building additional jail space is not very glamorous. Local voters find that learning about what their local politicians stand for is not very glamorous. It’s a win-win for everyone, including inmates that are released because there is no space for them.