6 ms·

U.S. reverses Obama-era move to phase out private prisons

62 points by finid 10y ago

I_am_neo 10y ago
In this time, where populace can be moved with a tweet and a like, instantly en mass globally in micro seconds. On platforms that are all fully capable of being handed over to the care of the autistic like abilities of neural networks, many platforms already are and publicly announce this "feature" like it is the coming messiah. In this light the idea of publicly owned prisons doesn't make sense to sovereign free citizens. Prisons for profit are bad for society, rehabilitation centers are better for them
Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
> In a memo made public on Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Obama policy impaired the government's ability to meet the future needs of the federal prison system. > The Obama administration said in August 2016 it planned a gradual phase-out of private prisons by letting contracts expire or by scaling them back to a level consistent with recent declines in the U.S. prison population. Yeah, dictators need places to lock up dissidents. Trump's foreseeing incarceration growth.
- adventured 10y ago
  > Yeah, dictators need places to lock up dissidents. Trump's foreseeing incarceration growth. You mean Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush were foreseeing incarceration growth when their policies helped to put millions into government prisons over decades? Was Bill Clinton plotting dictatorship when the active US incarceration number went from 1.3 million to 2+ million in just his eight years? Do me a favor and post the total number of people that have gone into government prisons vs private prisons, since the incarceration boom began 36 years ago. Here's a hint: nearly the entire incarceration boom was centered around government prisons until the last ten years, a time in which both the US prison and US jail population has declined.
  - Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
    What point are you trying to make? Are you suggesting that if there were less Government run prisons and more private prisons, there'd be less people in Government run prisons? Cause, ah... yeah.
    - adventured 10y ago
      I'm pointing out the extraordinary hypocrisy that is almost universal in threads when it comes to people that are afraid of and upset about private prisons - meanwhile over 90% of all those millions of people that were put into prison from 1980 forward, the boom years, went into government prisons - yet where's the fear? Just look at how my facts based challenge to the private prison hysteria is being downvoted, because nobody wants to discuss this: the government prison complex was and is drastically worse than anything the private prison industry has done, yet where's the protest? Where's the anger and fear about the government prison complex? (which is still radically larger than the private prison industry) Know who benefited the most from the war on drugs incarceration boom? Millions of government employees, who derived hundreds of billions of dollars in total pay over decades, from the vast expansion of arrests and government incarceration, from 1980 to ~2000.
      - Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
        The issue is your argument doesn't make any sense, that's why you're being down-voted. You're making a huge assumption that people's dislike (or "fear" as you've called it) of private prisons is somehow related to the distribution of prisoners between Government and private prisons. What gives you that impression?
        adventured 10y ago
        There is no argument. The government prison complex is and has been radically worse than the private prison industry, and that fact is always aggressively ignored here. I'm not making any assumptions, I've read dozens of threads on HN about this for example, spanning years. The fear is almost universally directed at private prisons, while the posters strictly ignore that almost all of the people went into government prisons during the incarceration boom. Where's the fear and hysteria for the government prison complex that has always dwarfed the private prison industry? And prior to the last ten years, dwarfed was extremely understating the situation.
kafkaesq 10y ago
Guess which industry stands to profit quite obscenely from this move. And which not-so-coincidentally donated very handsomely to his campaign: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/23/private-prisons-back-trump-and-could-see-big-payoffs-new-policies/98300394/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/23/priva...
ghouse 10y ago
When private companies profit from the state imprisoning its citizens, those companies will lobby (successfully) for more business in the form of mandatory sentencing and other crime fear-mongering. Just like Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex, we should do the same for the prison industrial complex.
- adventured 10y ago
  Care then to explain how almost all of the extreme prison population boom occurred during a time in which private prisons had a very small market share? 1980 to 2000 - which spans over 3/4 of the boom in incarceration - private prisons were a single digit percentage share of the market. US incarceration from 1980 went from about 550,000 to 2.1 million by the end of Clinton's second term. Almost all of that went to government prisons and jails. Turns out there is vast profit in government prisons. It goes into the pockets of millions of government employees and private contractors that benefit from the huge government prison complex. Those employees and their reps then spend millions of dollars lobbying to build more government prisons for their own benefit, along with lobbying against laws that would reduce incarceration. Politicians love to build government prisons to employ people in their districts, to lure tax dollars, it has been an easy vote generator for decades for them. Further, the extreme expansion of the government prison complex the last three decades, has increased the total power and size of government, another thing politicians go wild for.
  - Clubber 10y ago
    I would guess that politicians now believe (true or not) the most effective way to get elected is to pursue lobby money and use it to run scare commercials at people who are "political children," a Dan Carlin term. The fact that this is more effective than what you described is additionally troubling.
  - jacquesm 10y ago
    Supply and demand. It's a two sided market. Without the demand what's the point in creating a supply? But now that the demand has created the supply the supply becomes self-protecting and self-perpetrating.
jacquesm 10y ago
It looks suspiciously as if they're trying real hard to make sure Obama will not be remembered for anything positive. If they could bring Bin Laden back from the dead they just might.
- awqrre 10y ago
  it doesn't make it any less positive because it has been reversed...
  - Volundr 10y ago
    But it does make it less remembered.
tn13 10y ago
Prison and putting people in jail for minor things has become huge industry. It might be time to add some competition and let prisoners chose prisons they want to go to and the prisons must be incentivized if the prisoner finds gainful employment and does not turn repeat offender after release. I can totally see private prisons doing a better job of identifying normal people incarcerated incorrectly and offer them a better life than getting raped in a gruesome prison.
- Fjolsvith 10y ago
  I've been in both federal and private prisons, and in the federal ones, there is always an officer in the unit with the inmates, and in the private ones, the inmates are alone most of the time. And in all of the prisons I was in during my length time of incarceration, no one ever was raped. No one wants to become a sex offender while in prison nowadays. DNA evidence... The feds collect _everyone's_ DNA when they go to prison.
zo7 10y ago
Today the White House also indicated that they may enforce federal laws against recreational marijuana more heavily soon as well [1]. They want to incarcerate more people, and this is preparing for it. [1]: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/23/516945294/white-house-spokesman-predicts-more-federal-action-against-marijuana http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/23/516945294/...

62 points by finid 10y ago

In this time, where populace can be moved with a tweet and a like, instantly en mass globally in micro seconds. On platforms that are all fully capable of being handed over to the care of the autistic like abilities of neural networks, many platforms already are and publicly announce this "feature" like it is the coming messiah. In this light the idea of publicly owned prisons doesn't make sense to sovereign free citizens. Prisons for profit are bad for society, rehabilitation centers are better for them

Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago

> In a memo made public on Thursday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Obama policy impaired the government's ability to meet the future needs of the federal prison system. > The Obama administration said in August 2016 it planned a gradual phase-out of private prisons by letting contracts expire or by scaling them back to a level consistent with recent declines in the U.S. prison population. Yeah, dictators need places to lock up dissidents. Trump's foreseeing incarceration growth.

adventured 10y ago
> Yeah, dictators need places to lock up dissidents. Trump's foreseeing incarceration growth. You mean Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W Bush were foreseeing incarceration growth when their policies helped to put millions into government prisons over decades? Was Bill Clinton plotting dictatorship when the active US incarceration number went from 1.3 million to 2+ million in just his eight years? Do me a favor and post the total number of people that have gone into government prisons vs private prisons, since the incarceration boom began 36 years ago. Here's a hint: nearly the entire incarceration boom was centered around government prisons until the last ten years, a time in which both the US prison and US jail population has declined.
- Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
  What point are you trying to make? Are you suggesting that if there were less Government run prisons and more private prisons, there'd be less people in Government run prisons? Cause, ah... yeah.
  - adventured 10y ago
    I'm pointing out the extraordinary hypocrisy that is almost universal in threads when it comes to people that are afraid of and upset about private prisons - meanwhile over 90% of all those millions of people that were put into prison from 1980 forward, the boom years, went into government prisons - yet where's the fear? Just look at how my facts based challenge to the private prison hysteria is being downvoted, because nobody wants to discuss this: the government prison complex was and is drastically worse than anything the private prison industry has done, yet where's the protest? Where's the anger and fear about the government prison complex? (which is still radically larger than the private prison industry) Know who benefited the most from the war on drugs incarceration boom? Millions of government employees, who derived hundreds of billions of dollars in total pay over decades, from the vast expansion of arrests and government incarceration, from 1980 to ~2000.
    - Benjamin_Dobell 10y ago
      The issue is your argument doesn't make any sense, that's why you're being down-voted. You're making a huge assumption that people's dislike (or "fear" as you've called it) of private prisons is somehow related to the distribution of prisoners between Government and private prisons. What gives you that impression?
      - adventured 10y ago
        There is no argument. The government prison complex is and has been radically worse than the private prison industry, and that fact is always aggressively ignored here. I'm not making any assumptions, I've read dozens of threads on HN about this for example, spanning years. The fear is almost universally directed at private prisons, while the posters strictly ignore that almost all of the people went into government prisons during the incarceration boom. Where's the fear and hysteria for the government prison complex that has always dwarfed the private prison industry? And prior to the last ten years, dwarfed was extremely understating the situation.

kafkaesq 10y ago

Guess which industry stands to profit quite obscenely from this move. And which not-so-coincidentally donated very handsomely to his campaign: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/23/private-prisons-back-trump-and-could-see-big-payoffs-new-policies/98300394/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2017/02/23/priva...

ghouse 10y ago

When private companies profit from the state imprisoning its citizens, those companies will lobby (successfully) for more business in the form of mandatory sentencing and other crime fear-mongering. Just like Eisenhower warned us of the military industrial complex, we should do the same for the prison industrial complex.

adventured 10y ago
Care then to explain how almost all of the extreme prison population boom occurred during a time in which private prisons had a very small market share? 1980 to 2000 - which spans over 3/4 of the boom in incarceration - private prisons were a single digit percentage share of the market. US incarceration from 1980 went from about 550,000 to 2.1 million by the end of Clinton's second term. Almost all of that went to government prisons and jails. Turns out there is vast profit in government prisons. It goes into the pockets of millions of government employees and private contractors that benefit from the huge government prison complex. Those employees and their reps then spend millions of dollars lobbying to build more government prisons for their own benefit, along with lobbying against laws that would reduce incarceration. Politicians love to build government prisons to employ people in their districts, to lure tax dollars, it has been an easy vote generator for decades for them. Further, the extreme expansion of the government prison complex the last three decades, has increased the total power and size of government, another thing politicians go wild for.
- Clubber 10y ago
  I would guess that politicians now believe (true or not) the most effective way to get elected is to pursue lobby money and use it to run scare commercials at people who are "political children," a Dan Carlin term. The fact that this is more effective than what you described is additionally troubling.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  Supply and demand. It's a two sided market. Without the demand what's the point in creating a supply? But now that the demand has created the supply the supply becomes self-protecting and self-perpetrating.

jacquesm 10y ago

It looks suspiciously as if they're trying real hard to make sure Obama will not be remembered for anything positive. If they could bring Bin Laden back from the dead they just might.

awqrre 10y ago
it doesn't make it any less positive because it has been reversed...
- Volundr 10y ago
  But it does make it less remembered.

tn13 10y ago

Prison and putting people in jail for minor things has become huge industry. It might be time to add some competition and let prisoners chose prisons they want to go to and the prisons must be incentivized if the prisoner finds gainful employment and does not turn repeat offender after release. I can totally see private prisons doing a better job of identifying normal people incarcerated incorrectly and offer them a better life than getting raped in a gruesome prison.

Fjolsvith 10y ago
I've been in both federal and private prisons, and in the federal ones, there is always an officer in the unit with the inmates, and in the private ones, the inmates are alone most of the time. And in all of the prisons I was in during my length time of incarceration, no one ever was raped. No one wants to become a sex offender while in prison nowadays. DNA evidence... The feds collect _everyone's_ DNA when they go to prison.

zo7 10y ago

Today the White House also indicated that they may enforce federal laws against recreational marijuana more heavily soon as well [1]. They want to incarcerate more people, and this is preparing for it. [1]: http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/23/516945294/white-house-spokesman-predicts-more-federal-action-against-marijuana http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/23/516945294/...