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tarakat | 3 years ago

A common argument is that, because only a small fraction of US prisons are private [1], it means private prison lobbying is a negligible problem. But this is a fallacy! The fraction doesn't matter, only the absolute amount of funds flowing through private prisons, that are available for lobbying. That, and the political connections of prison owners that make lobbying more effective.

[1] Twenty-six states and the federal government incarcerated 99,754 people in private prisons in 2020, representing 8% of the total state and federal prison population. - https://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/private-priso...

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manholio|3 years ago

True in the absolute, but you would expect that if those flows and influence would be so large, that fraction would increase too.

What's stopping a large scale privatization of the penal system? Could it be that there are incumbent interests too that compete with the private prisons, such as party appointees and horse trading in local politics which see that flow of public money as a vital resource? Could it be - since they seem to be winning the competition - that those interests in the public system have an even larger lobby power on crime prevention policies?

Not trying to take the side of the godawful private prison industry here, just tired of this simplistic leftist dichotomy: capital bad, state good. Policies are decided with political influence and power, and money is one of the many forms political power can take. A bad political system, set up to ignore the interests of society, will be gamed by both private interests and political insiders; the west tends to suffer from the first problem, but for most of the rest of the world it would be "a nice problem to have".

gadders|3 years ago

I wonder what prison unions are doing. They normally support anything that keeps their members in work.

fzeroracer|3 years ago

It's similar to the coal industry. We know that the coal lobby has an outsized influence despite the industry itself being tiny and shrinking.

Private juvenile facilities have the exact same problem because they encourage things like kickbacks for sending innocent kids into the system for funding. Neither should exist and should be fully abolished because the incentives for the companies in question go against behaving in a way that benefits society.