Prisons should not be privatized?

Question

• Prisons should not be privatized because…

• It is not the place of private prisons to administer prisoner punishments
because…

• It is ill-advised to put a private company that must make a profit in charge of prison operations because…

• Private prisons that cut costs may risk security problems because…

Answer 1

It is the accountability!

In either case there will be management and expenses such as food, guards, electricity etc.

In a Government run system the expenses are public, the guards will have to meet state standards, and will have to be paid a competitive wage. By contrast the management people would be state bureaucrats, and thus paid substantially less than the inflated private sector management wages.

Those sentenced for crimes would not be exploited just because they had no freedoms. Any big screw up or disaster will be noted and publicly dealt with to see that it would not happen again.

In a private system, almost everything would be secret so major corruption and abuse, much less normal snafus would not be made public and therefore not dealt with. In order to increase profits the numbers and quality of guards would be reduced, decreasing safety for everyone.

Lower maintainence, lower quality food, less comfortable temperatures and a thousand other chisels would reduce expenses, but the savings would go straight to the pockets of a much more expensive management, who would not use any savings to lower costs but to place in their own pockets.

Aside from such "normal" corruption, there is another far more insidious. A private prison is paid more, the more prisoners there are, and therefore there is political pressure to increase the numbers of prisoners, and the length of the sentence, not reduce them. And in the process also reduce civil rights, that more innocent people be jailed, and reduce human rights that people be treated humanely once in.

There is also a great danger that is not talked about, that a company be run by a theocratic "Faith Based" group that would use the prison to indoctrinate a private army, or even a front for criminal gangs, Secrecy can hide anything.

Unfortunately, because there are many private prisons, all these bad results are now commonplace, and the number of unfortunate incidents are legion. Because of the secrecy and corporate friendly press, the situation is festering.

Just because you have not yet tested your civil rights lately does not mean you still have them.

Answer 2

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

Of course, prisons, and everything else should be privatized.

It is well-known that the prison population mostly consists of drug addicts (even though there is no rational reason to send drug addicts to jail and to do so is outright absurd) and that the addicts do drugs frequently while in prison. It is well-known that the government has failed to properly deal with prison rape or to prevent escapes.

The laws of (sound) economics state that the public sector always performs worse than the private sector and empirical evidence also shows that this is the case. Communist countries have no progress and actually tend to have regress instead (and therefore, it is patently absurd to call a Socialist a progressive or to refer to anything other than Capitalism as progressive).

There is absolutely no logical or coherent argument against prison privatization or privatizing anything else (including the police departments and the court systems).

While I personally believe that prisons are barbaric and should ideally be replaced by a more just and fair system of punishment such as financial compensation (which would work extremely well in the case of stealing) or permitting the victim to use up to the same amount of force on the criminal, privatizing prisons would be sound because private companies will do a far better job of running them, will prevent nasty practices, and will properly secure their prisons (if they don't do these things, they would lose their business as the customers would go elsewhere).

Answer 3

- Yes, that is a right reserved for society.
- Yes, same reason
- Yes, although a lot of security companies do supply guards for the prison system on a government contract. Government need to retain control and manage the prisons because they won’t go away, when many companies are bought out of go out of business each day.
- Yes, because you can't afford to have the prison close. You also can't afford to have to let the prisoners out because of poor treatment. You can’t let a company take over a prison, and then decide it needs to close it and move it to another state or location. How do you access the prisoners then when they are out of state or in some super prison 100 miles away from court?

Prisons administer the ultimate authority of society and that authority needs to be controlled DIRECTLY by the government. A government can support a money losing operation and maintain security and standards. There is room for private industry to take contracts, but not to control or manage the prison system. I think it would be far better for a private company to take over the medical care there, because it is notoriously bad in prison.

A good idea would be to let a private company form a business to train prisoners. There isn't much demand for license plate makers on the outside world, but there is a huge demand for good carpenters. Sure there is danger involved in any of these programs, but the prisoners admitted to them have to be the less dangerous ones.

Finally, do you want to give a private company the ability to execute a prisoner? Do you want to release the ultimate punishment from the control of society? Also how are you going to integrate the private sector with the court structure? Prisoners need to come and go to court and they have to be integrated by the police and see their lawyers. We can't prevent that because a private company thinks the transportation costs are too expensive, or because they want to close the prison. We also can't let them take over and close a local prison to consolidate a super prison. Companies do this all the time to become more profitable or when they are taken over by a larger company.

Answer 4

If the private company running the prison goes bankrupt, what happens?

Answer 5

Privatized prisons have no incentive for rehabilitation of prisoners.
Profit will encourage incarceration of trivial and non-violent offenders and innocent suspects.
It costs less money to employ someone in public service than to jail them at up to $50,000 per anum.

Answer 6

No. Prisons SHOULD be privatized. When you put one business in charge of something, they are GOING to make sure that it is efficient or effective or they will lose business. In the case of prison, that means punishing and rehabilitating/reforming offenders.

Answer 7

Another candidate to sign the petition to change Y!A to Y!Opinions

You would have a personal army of inmates

They are not god

Prisons don't make money

Guards don't guard for free

Answer 8

a privatized prison just means that the guards will all be mexicans instead of white people.