The Court concluded, and I concur, that outsourcing your prisoners to private companies is a fundamental violation of human rights and the social contract between man and government.
The US Supreme Court and other countries where punishment of your citizens is a "for-profit" business should take heed.
I challenge readers (anyone out there?) to make a good argument for the privatization of prisons.
I'm interested in how you would address the ethical questions of whose responsibility it is to punish members of society when they violate the law, and who is accountable when corporations violate the very laws they are meant to be enforcing.
Of course, state prisons are also susceptible to violating prisoners rights, but at least there is some semblance of accountability, government oversight, and an ideal that seeks to maximize justice rather than profit.
Prisons are big business in the US, and not surprisingly, there are more people incarcerated there than anywhere else in the world. This shouldn't be a source of pride for Americans.
King’s College London International Centre for Prison Studies, found that in the U.S. 756 out of every 100,000 is incarcerated. Here are the numbers:
The United States has the highest prison population rate in the world, 756 per 100,000 of the national population, followed by Russia (629), Rwanda (604), St Kitts & Nevis (588), Cuba (c.531), U.S. Virgin Is. (512), British Virgin Is. (488), Palau (478), Belarus (468), Belize (455), Bahamas (422), Georgia (415), American Samoa (410), Grenada (408) and Anguilla (401).
Anyone want to go into the prison business?
3 comments:
in theory there is nothing that cannot be effectively outsourced.. so there shouldnt be any operational reason that governments are prevented from outsourcing the jail system..
however - i think the state is normally partly (and in some cases close to wholly) culpable for criminal behaviour and should do "its time" with these people.. just as the criminal cannot outsource their jail sentence.. the state shouldnt outsource its jail time either..
the nexus needs to remain tight so criminal behaviour can be studied and where possible averted.. the wrong doers should be rehabilitated by the state (where appropriate) and the social contract (breached as it may have been) should be remedied..
two parties cannot make up without contact.. an outsourcing company potentially increases the distance..
Your objections, like the couirt's, to private prisons is entirely theoretical: It simply sounds unfair or wrong that someone would literally be imprisoned by a private corporation whose motive is profit. But the real test shouldn't be theoretical, or you will find yourself coming to all kind of incorrect conclusions, at least in correct by the only true standard of social policy, which is empirical.
Let's exmaine the profit motive. On paper it sounds terrible to put vital resources such as our food supply, drugs, water and power, and health system in the hands of companies whose only interest is profit. They will charge high prices and distribute their products/services inequitably in favor of the customers who can pay the most. But, of course, this isn't what happens in nearly every case. Any society that has sought to do these things through government-controled entities has failed. There has been no communist society that ever succeeded in providing enough food for its citizens under public ownership. The fact that the private sector produces less than perfect food from a dietary point of view is still far and away an improvement over insufficient food. On the other hand, the privately controlled health system in America has been a failure compared to its peers in Europe. That just goes to show that people who say capitalism is the solution too all societal needs must make their claims stand up to the empirical test. They won't always pass.
As to private prisons, the scope of a privately owned corporation to control its prison population is severely constrained. Prisonsers are sentenced by a court and freed by a parole board, not by a private company. Their day-to-day conditions are, of course, subject to the companby's policies, but those are constrained by its contract with the government. Given the conditions that we typically see in government-run penitentiaries, and that inclues the wealthiest and must demcoractic countries, it is hard to see how badly a privately owned prison will do.
The only case you can make, and its a weak one, is that the "consumer" that corporate jailer has to serve as a captive, i.e., he can't opt to serve at a better prison if the one he is in now provides inadequate conditions. But that is theoretical. Let's put it to the test. I don't see how badly off a private sector prisoner will be versus his public sector counterpart in the worst-case failure of the experiment.
I admit my argument is entirely theoretical. It is an argument that rests not on competence, but entirely on principle and accountability. Government run prisons are not always the bastions of human rights, but they should be (Principle). And when prisons are less than satisfactory, then the government in power should be held responsible (Accountability). My main problem is that the only entity a private company must answer to are their shareholders, whereas, at least in theory the government must answer to the people in a democratic system. Your argument that if the private company is not satisfactory, then the government can simply fire them means adding another link to the chain which means another way for politicians to pass the buck of responsibility to a third party.
That being said, I would be curious to learn of an existing empirical study on the effects of prison privatization on human rights.
I put the penal system into a different category than the privatization vs. socialization arguments for water, food supply, health care, etc, which can and should go on ad infinitum as there are wonderful examples that attest to the success and failure of each method. This debate should be a recurring theme in healthy democratic discourse (as we see now in the US with respect to health care), the outcome of which should be intrinsically tied to the competence of government vs. private sector in administering said services/commodities.
If government is not competent/wealthy enough to administer punishments and preserve the rights of its criminals, then perhaps said government shouldn't be convicting people in the first place.
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