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I think private prisons could work if: - Convicts could choose whether to be sent to a public or private prison. - Private prisons had financial incentives fo

by chroma 7y ago

I think private prisons could work if: - Convicts could choose whether to be sent to a public or private prison. - Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus. Those changes would create enough competition and align incentives such that we could see some real innovation in the criminal justice system. Sadly, I don't think these sorts of experiments will ever be tried. If someone ever proposes such a system, they'll be branded a supporter of "private prisons".

calcifer 7y ago
> If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus. Ah, so the people who profit off of others' misery would be able to profit even further if they treat prisoners like human beings? Great incentive indeed. > If someone ever proposes such a system, they'll be branded a supporter of "private prisons". You propose such a system and I don't see how you are not supporting private prisons, so yeah. But, lets be charitable and assume you don't really mean to support private prisons and are just interested in the well being of inmates, and you'd like to motivate the prison company to do the right thing. How about a structure where they don't make any profit whatsoever (state only covers costs) unless, say, 50 year recidivism rate is below 2%? If that was my company, I'd move heaven and earth to make sure every prisoner left that place an angel. Would you support that motion?
- chroma 7y ago
  If the incentives you proposed were enacted, there would be no private prisons because any company that tried would go bankrupt. (Unless you mean that the state would cover any costs incurred by the private prison, in which case you'd just get prisons run by grifters.) California's state-run prisons have a recidivism rate of 65% within 3 years. A 2% rate of conviction over 50 years is lower than the population of non-convicts. It's not possible for any organization to accomplish that. Also, the company would have to wait 50 years for payout. Even if that payout is with interest, 50 years is beyond the time horizons of most governments, let alone companies.
- jamiequint 7y ago
  Why should we care if someone makes a profit if we get the outcomes that we want? The profit is not what is evil, the poor conditions and poor outcomes are. If incentives are effective at producing good outcomes it would be stupid to not use them. p.s. It is possible to disagree with someone without being a moralizing asshole, you should try it sometime.
  - celticmusic 7y ago
    because the incentives are bass ackwards. These companies lobby for laws, and there's no way they're lobbying for less prisoners.
- deleted 7y ago
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- criddell 7y ago
  > How about a structure where they don't make any profit whatsoever (state only covers costs) unless, say, 50 year recidivism rate is below 2%? You're creating incentives for the prison operator to make sure prisoners are never released.
  - chroma 7y ago
    It's private prisons, not private judges. The prisoner would be released when they'd served their sentence.
    - jacobush 7y ago
      If someone was up for parole, you could very easily discover bad behaviour on their part, so they would have serve the full sentence. How's that? Waddayknow, they committed a new crime while in prison. Guess they have to stay a bit longer now. Sad.
      - chroma 7y ago
        Crimes committed while in prison count as recidivism.
- deleted 7y ago
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gnarmis 7y ago
On the second point, I think folks are rightly dubious about the effectiveness of incentives broadly[1]. There's also some hilarious historical examples of incentives backfiring or having unwanted side-effects (like the Cobra Effect [2].) More broadly, I don't think it's that easy to think that private prisons can even work well as a solution, regardless of whether they should be allowed to exist as a matter of public policy and ethics. Consider one summative look at this issue provided in this evaluation[3] -- it's dubious whether they're even cost effective, one of the strongest pro-private-prison arguments there has been in public debate, and how there's much better alternatives than the kind of perverse incentives bundled with private prisons, like re-evaluating whether parolees should be allowed in public housing, and providing more transition housing so when sentences are complete, inmates aren't forced to spend even more time in prison because they don't have an address to go to. [1] https://hbr.org/2009/03/when-economic-incentives-backfire https://hbr.org/2009/03/when-economic-incentives-backfire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect [3] https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/2304-private-prisons-an-evaluation-of-economic-and https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/2304-privat...
- chroma 7y ago
  I'm not sure why but your comment was hidden as dead. I vouched for it because… WTF? It's a totally fine comment. Anyway… I agree that existing private prisons are wasteful and cruel, but I think that could change if they had different incentives. Right now, convicts can't choose between private or public prison. That lack of choice means that private prisons have no incentive to be better than state run prisons. Private prisons usually charge per head. If no prisoners want to stay at the prison because it's a hellhole, revenue dries up and they go out of business. I'm familiar with the cobra effect and ways in which adding financial incentives can cause counterproductive outcomes. I'm not particularly worried about that happening with private prisons. Financial incentives backfire in two cases: 1. When they fail to account for higher-order effects. (As happened with the cobra bounty in India.) 2. When they replace social incentives. For example: If a friend asks me to help them move, I'll probably oblige. But if I show up on moving day and I see some paid movers helping, I'll resent that. That's basically what happened with the day care that charged for being late. Previously, parents would show up on time because they felt a social obligation (guilt). When the day care added a late fee, that guilt disappeared because the transaction moved from the social realm to the financial realm. I think the motivations of wardens and guards in both private and state runs prisons are pretty similar, and I don't think they're motivated by social incentives. For them, it's a job. They want to minimize the amount of stress at work, and that usually means minimizing the amount of violence prisoners do towards one another. Adding some financial incentives isn't going to solve all the problems with prisons, but considering our existing recidivism rates, I seriously doubt it will hurt.
scj 7y ago
With private prisons, lobbying is likely cheaper and more reliable than innovation. I assume you didn't intend this in a sinister way, but exercise caution when speaking of experimenting with prisoners. Even with good intentions, remember that these people have limited choices, and will probably lack the ability to withdraw consent (assuming it was given in the first place).
- chroma 7y ago
  Isn't my proposal giving prisoners more choice? Right now they have no choice which prison they are sent to. Are you worried that some private prisons might engage in sleazy marketing, convince convicts to choose them, and then treat them like crap? That can easily be fixed by letting prisoners switch after a certain period of time. Heck, the law could be that anyone in a private prison can at any time choose to serve the rest of their sentence in a state prison. That would ensure a baseline of care. Also, I think the point about lobbying proves too much. If lobbying is so much cheaper and more reliable than innovation, why don't all companies lobby instead of innovating? Apple has billions of dollars sitting around. Why don't they lobby to make the iPhone the sole phone used by federal employees? Heck, why don't they lobby to get rid of the new import tariffs affecting their products? I don't think companies leave $20 bills on the sidewalk, so lobbying must not be as effective as people like to believe. I agree that lobbying is bad, but my objection to it is that the government is allowed to pass laws that coerce people in such ways, not that some companies take advantage of that power. Basically: hate the game, not the player.
  - scj 7y ago
    To both of your points of having more choice and lobbying: Market considerations matter.
    - chroma 7y ago
      Could you elaborate? I don't understand what you're getting at.
      - 7y ago
abathur 7y ago
A caveat, first: I think two of our larger-scale social issues are that incentives are often misaligned with the outcomes we actually want, and that we don't create structural room for innovation. That said, I think this is still pretty fraught. Incentives are just rules enforced with a carrot instead of a stick; we're just as likely to come up with bad incentives as we are to develop ineffective regulations and write loophole-ridden or misapplied laws. At sufficient scale, money tends to inspire a troublesome kind of creativity. If the private prisons have sufficient profit motive and the problems they face prove tractable for data and bespoke or ML solutions, they'll analyze likely convicts as thoroughly as possible and do what they can to skim the most-profitable convicts off the top of the pool and leave public prisons with whatever is left. Maybe they'll just directly pay the prisoner or their family. Maybe they'll have a miserable as-bad-as-regulations-allow experience for uninvited plebians and a special experience to offer prisoners they want. Will a certain incentive lead them to bribe judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, or witnesses to get (or avoid) prisoners? Would they do the same to keep a former inmate from being convicted again within 3 years of release? And then some donation-funded corner of the think-tank ecosystem will endlessly torture the data to "prove" private prisons get better outcomes than public ones and shop boilerplate legislation to restrict public and promote private prisons. And once the prisoners are within their walls, they'll be sucking up all of the data they can to hone their prediction of whether they'll reoffend when they get out. Will they use it nobly to target support, or to ensure the whoever the algorithms pick as bad apples end up in constant manufactured trouble?
- chroma 7y ago
  Please notice how far afield you had to go to postulate bad outcomes. For your scenario to play out, the people running private prisons must commit some pretty egregious crimes. Can you imagine the chutzpah of someone who tries to bribe a judge?! That's practically instant, guaranteed jail time. Judges only get bribed when judges ask for bribes. If you applied this same level of scrutiny to the existing prison system, I'm sure you could come up with far worse outcomes using far less speculation. For example: What's to stop state prison guards from torturing inmates? Answer: Nothing, because they have qualified immunity.[1] 1. https://www.newsweek.com/prison-inmate-qualified-immunity-protect-officials-constitution-civil-rights-723943 https://www.newsweek.com/prison-inmate-qualified-immunity-pr...
fnord77 7y ago
then we'd have all sorts of ad campaigns from private prison aimed at at-risk communities and people, promising all sorts of things while still lobbying law enforcement for arrest quotas.
birdyrooster 7y ago
This is incredibly easy to game. A bad actor would create a prison which focused only on convict selection, and fully ignored the bonus for recidivism and pumped people through. Prison not only needs to be ethical for individuals, but for the rest of society.
- chroma 7y ago
  Why would private prisons be allowed to refuse specific inmates? State prisons can't do that.
  - jackvalentine 7y ago
    They wouldn’t do it overtly but they’d develop some signal to dissuade undesirable inmates from wanting to go there.
- kortilla 7y ago
  So you invented a loophole and then said it would be trivial to game if they can use that loophole. Prisons aren’t universities, there isn’t an admissions process.
  - birdyrooster 7y ago
    I didn't invent the loophole, the parent comment did and I was pointing it out.
codedokode 7y ago
> Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus. Then the best strategy would be to make sure that the prisoners die as soon as possible.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- chroma 7y ago
  Are you suggesting that the private prisons would murder convicts soon after they're released? That's uhh... that's just a little bit illegal and people who commit murder tend to get caught and imprisoned for a very long time. But let's assume that the private prisons could somehow keep getting away with murder. If anyone ever looked at the stats and saw that people released from private prisons had much shorter life expectancy, then convicts would choose state prisons. Then the private prison's revenue dries up and they go out of business.
  - verall 7y ago
    > If anyone ever looked at the stats and saw that people released from private prisons had much shorter life expectancy, then convicts would choose state prisons. No, they would not, because there is huge information asmyettry here and, and generally convicts have lost access to the sorts of publications with this info.
    - kortilla 7y ago
      Of course they would. Prisons inmates are not isolated from information.
      - jellicle 7y ago
        You're not too familiar with prison, I guess. By and large, I would expect inmates to choose the closest prison to their family, regardless of quality metrics. What good does it do to know that some prison 2000 miles away has a really good meal program?
pornel 7y ago
Incentives for this are all weird. You have literal customer lock-in, so you can promise anything and deliver nothing. The recidivism metric would probably cause private prisons to try to avoid or eject worst prisoners, so you'd end up with a 2-tier system, where private prisons are hotels for "nice" people, and public prisons are a hell-hole for the rest. Or maybe some prisons would run training on how not to get caught.
- acchow 7y ago
  > You have literal customer lock-in You could let the prisoners freely switch to public while they're locked up. The main issue I have with this system is that the "consumers" making the choices (the prisoners) of product aren't paying for the cost. So incentives aren't really aligned.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
  > The recidivism metric would probably cause private prisons to try to avoid or eject worst prisoners, so you'd end up with a 2-tier system, where private prisons are hotels for "nice" people, and public prisons are a hell-hole for the rest. Yes, so you'd have to run the metric based on who was initially assigned to the prison. "Oh, John was assigned to your prison, but one look at his record and you decided to expel him? Well, you're still responsible for his recidivism, because you chose to not serve him. Oh, Jack was assigned to state prison, and you tried to encourage him? Well, you're not responsible for his recidivism, because you selected him." But yeah, I agree in general that the thing about metrics is that they can be gamed.
the-pigeon 7y ago
Ah I see you've never implemented an incentive program before. EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM GETS GAMED. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MEASURE. Every metric you could possible think of can be manipulated in ways you can't imagine. But give private companies the incentive and someone in them will figure it out. IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.
- chroma 7y ago
  If you look at my comments throughout this thread, you'll see that I am aware of the potential for incentives to have undesirable higher-order effects. Many people in this thread have suggested certain concrete undesirable consequences, and I've replied to them. In contrast, you are putting forth a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure. But clearly financial incentives work in many cases. It's what sports teams use for their athletes and coaches. It's what businesses use for their leadership teams. When we need the best people possible to perform at their best, we tend to pay them money and pay them more money if they meet certain goals. > IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety. Yes, ideally we'd have every job staffed people who are wise, kind, competent, and hard working. But we don't have nearly enough of such people and we judge traits inaccurately. So instead we have to make do with less effective but more practical methods. Financial incentives are one of those options.
  - wwweston 7y ago
    > a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure. A general counterargument is worth considering. Any incentive sufficiently powerful to draw forth extra resourcefulness in its legitimate pursuit is quite likely to also draw forth extra resourcefulness in its illegitimate pursuit. > It's what businesses use for their leadership teams. This is may help your case considerably less than you think if you look closely. Various forms of the principal-agent problem pop up all the time. Pink and Kohn have also forwarded some research suggesting that extrinsic incentives have diminishing returns or run counterproductive in some cases. And Goodhart's law is a proverb in the business world for a reason. Aligning incentives is still important, but getting optimal performance is rarely as simple as tying rewards to a goal. Hell, half the time defining optimal performance is a project. And when the underlying issues involve social safety and significantly curtailing someone's liberties via imprisonment (and the already fine tension between them), it's an especially tricky topic.
m0zg 7y ago
>> Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. I bet if you just paid the felons the same amount they cost to incarcerate, relocated them away from their peer group, and forbid contact, a lot of them wouldn't re-offend, like, ever. It's down to basically a combination of poverty and peer pressure (as in "just when I thought I got out, they pull me back in") most of the time. This is sort of how exile worked in Russia before the revolution: nonviolent offenders were sent to Siberia and simply lived there. No hard labor or anything, no incarceration per se, but you couldn't leave, and all your correspondence was subject to review and censorship.
goalieca 7y ago
Why do we need competition for prisons?
salty_biscuits 7y ago
It is a nice idea, but I don't think many private companies are looking that far into the future to figure out where to best get their revenue. They can gamble on something that might not be totally under their control years out into the future, or just try to get more bodies in the prisons now. A ruthless "rational" actor would go for the second option.
thrwaway3489 7y ago
Isn't the primary issue anyone has with private prisons the same one we have with defense contractors: that they might, would, or do subvert the system to get innocent people imprisoned or their prison terms extended in the case of private prisons, or promote wars America doesn't want or need in the case of defense contractors? What I mean is nobody really cares if prisons buy commercial toilet paper, for example. (As opposed to a hypothetical government toilet paper.) Nobody cares if the military uses the private industry for procurement of computers or whatever. We don't feel the government should be creating its own version of all private industry products. But when the prison itself is private - and likewise when defense contractors themselves are developing, shopping around, and selling new weapons only to the military, that the military didn't ask for - then suddenly there is a new player in the budgeting process. Ideally few or no people are committing crimes. If the prisons have excess capacity, free beds - good! But if it's a private prison, how can they fill those beds? Well, by working to imprison more people. This is the incentive structure that people don't like about private prison. In the United States it's de facto "illegal" to walk around while being black: there is a high chance you will eventually be jailed on non-existent charges. (And accept a plea bargain, for example, rather than risk a really long term.) I'm a white guy. If I had lived the exact, exact same life, done every single action exactly the same (and this is true of other people reading Hacker News) I likely could have been jailed for no reason at all, just for walking around while being black. That's a fact. I probably would accept the plea bargain I'm offered, too, and resolve to work for change later. What am I going to do? Tell the judge and prosecutor (who often is scored based on how often he gets a conviction/plea) that he and the system are racist? How well will that go over? Will it get me my freedom? Or will it get a vindictive term from the judge. I'd rather just sit in prison for a few months and then avoid the cops better next time, I think I would decide. (Rather than risk a 20 year prison sentence, again, totally innocent of anything. A few months' plea - which my counsel would probably advise I take - is nothing compared to that.) So why are innocent black people jailed? Well, to fill prison beds, apparently. That is one of the reasons that people don't like private prisons. We don't want anybody to be "selling" prison, so we don't want prison to be a private enterprise. It's quite straightforward and is something most people understand very easily.
- squiggleblaz 7y ago
ClumsyPilot 7y ago
There is an assumption that private prisons will perform better than public ones, and so far data does not support it. What great innovation came out of private prison system? You we trying to optimise out the 'inefficient' government, by saddling it with much effort designing incentives and making sure they are not abused. You might as well run prisons yourself - publically.
e12e 7y ago
There's a tention between "paid per prisoner day" and "fewer prisoners come back to stay". You could get a bonus for not getting "return" prisoners - but it'd have to be better than gaining life sentences (though in general, harder to compete in three strike legislations where you'd be incentivesed to allow prisoners to commit crimes in order to trigger three strikes). Perhaps there's a way to pay for recovery - but if your business depends on there being prisoners, it's hard to see how you could motivate anything but an increase in prisoner population. Certainly an end to prisoners would mean bankruptcy? [ed: you might have a goal of lowering crime, and by extention prisoner population. A private prison, paid to house prisoners, would be commercially committed to the opposite; increasing the prison population.]
supernintendo 7y ago
No no no. This is exactly the mindset we need to avoid when addressing problems in our justice system. I am sorry but the entrepreneurial / venture capitalist mindset is not suitable here. Private prisons should not exist. Public prisons should be focused on rehabilitation, not retribution. As pro-capitalism as I am, the only future I see in your idea is abject market failure. We’re not talking about product here, we’re talking about human life. The market hasn’t been able to solve health care so what makes you think it’s going to be able to solve mass incarceration? Further, this hypothetical system is ripe for exploitation. Aside from the potential exploits others have raised, have you considered the parallels to other industries such as defense contractors? Your idea creates an incentive and profit motive for crime. It’s the type of thinking that could literally result in corporations creating artificial mass shooters in pursuit of all the easy money that could be made. Sorry, but I think this is an extremely bad take and I actually worry about a dystopian future where this takes place. Pull on this thread at your own peril.

by chroma 7y ago

calcifer 7y ago

> If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus. Ah, so the people who profit off of others' misery would be able to profit even further if they treat prisoners like human beings? Great incentive indeed. > If someone ever proposes such a system, they'll be branded a supporter of "private prisons". You propose such a system and I don't see how you are not supporting private prisons, so yeah. But, lets be charitable and assume you don't really mean to support private prisons and are just interested in the well being of inmates, and you'd like to motivate the prison company to do the right thing. How about a structure where they don't make any profit whatsoever (state only covers costs) unless, say, 50 year recidivism rate is below 2%? If that was my company, I'd move heaven and earth to make sure every prisoner left that place an angel. Would you support that motion?

chroma 7y ago
If the incentives you proposed were enacted, there would be no private prisons because any company that tried would go bankrupt. (Unless you mean that the state would cover any costs incurred by the private prison, in which case you'd just get prisons run by grifters.) California's state-run prisons have a recidivism rate of 65% within 3 years. A 2% rate of conviction over 50 years is lower than the population of non-convicts. It's not possible for any organization to accomplish that. Also, the company would have to wait 50 years for payout. Even if that payout is with interest, 50 years is beyond the time horizons of most governments, let alone companies.
jamiequint 7y ago
Why should we care if someone makes a profit if we get the outcomes that we want? The profit is not what is evil, the poor conditions and poor outcomes are. If incentives are effective at producing good outcomes it would be stupid to not use them. p.s. It is possible to disagree with someone without being a moralizing asshole, you should try it sometime.
- celticmusic 7y ago
  because the incentives are bass ackwards. These companies lobby for laws, and there's no way they're lobbying for less prisoners.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
criddell 7y ago
> How about a structure where they don't make any profit whatsoever (state only covers costs) unless, say, 50 year recidivism rate is below 2%? You're creating incentives for the prison operator to make sure prisoners are never released.
- chroma 7y ago
  It's private prisons, not private judges. The prisoner would be released when they'd served their sentence.
  - jacobush 7y ago
    If someone was up for parole, you could very easily discover bad behaviour on their part, so they would have serve the full sentence. How's that? Waddayknow, they committed a new crime while in prison. Guess they have to stay a bit longer now. Sad.
    - chroma 7y ago
      Crimes committed while in prison count as recidivism.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

gnarmis 7y ago

On the second point, I think folks are rightly dubious about the effectiveness of incentives broadly[1]. There's also some hilarious historical examples of incentives backfiring or having unwanted side-effects (like the Cobra Effect [2].) More broadly, I don't think it's that easy to think that private prisons can even work well as a solution, regardless of whether they should be allowed to exist as a matter of public policy and ethics. Consider one summative look at this issue provided in this evaluation[3] -- it's dubious whether they're even cost effective, one of the strongest pro-private-prison arguments there has been in public debate, and how there's much better alternatives than the kind of perverse incentives bundled with private prisons, like re-evaluating whether parolees should be allowed in public housing, and providing more transition housing so when sentences are complete, inmates aren't forced to spend even more time in prison because they don't have an address to go to. [1] https://hbr.org/2009/03/when-economic-incentives-backfire https://hbr.org/2009/03/when-economic-incentives-backfire [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect [3] https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/2304-private-prisons-an-evaluation-of-economic-and https://publicpolicy.wharton.upenn.edu/live/news/2304-privat...

chroma 7y ago
I'm not sure why but your comment was hidden as dead. I vouched for it because… WTF? It's a totally fine comment. Anyway… I agree that existing private prisons are wasteful and cruel, but I think that could change if they had different incentives. Right now, convicts can't choose between private or public prison. That lack of choice means that private prisons have no incentive to be better than state run prisons. Private prisons usually charge per head. If no prisoners want to stay at the prison because it's a hellhole, revenue dries up and they go out of business. I'm familiar with the cobra effect and ways in which adding financial incentives can cause counterproductive outcomes. I'm not particularly worried about that happening with private prisons. Financial incentives backfire in two cases: 1. When they fail to account for higher-order effects. (As happened with the cobra bounty in India.) 2. When they replace social incentives. For example: If a friend asks me to help them move, I'll probably oblige. But if I show up on moving day and I see some paid movers helping, I'll resent that. That's basically what happened with the day care that charged for being late. Previously, parents would show up on time because they felt a social obligation (guilt). When the day care added a late fee, that guilt disappeared because the transaction moved from the social realm to the financial realm. I think the motivations of wardens and guards in both private and state runs prisons are pretty similar, and I don't think they're motivated by social incentives. For them, it's a job. They want to minimize the amount of stress at work, and that usually means minimizing the amount of violence prisoners do towards one another. Adding some financial incentives isn't going to solve all the problems with prisons, but considering our existing recidivism rates, I seriously doubt it will hurt.

scj 7y ago

With private prisons, lobbying is likely cheaper and more reliable than innovation. I assume you didn't intend this in a sinister way, but exercise caution when speaking of experimenting with prisoners. Even with good intentions, remember that these people have limited choices, and will probably lack the ability to withdraw consent (assuming it was given in the first place).

chroma 7y ago
Isn't my proposal giving prisoners more choice? Right now they have no choice which prison they are sent to. Are you worried that some private prisons might engage in sleazy marketing, convince convicts to choose them, and then treat them like crap? That can easily be fixed by letting prisoners switch after a certain period of time. Heck, the law could be that anyone in a private prison can at any time choose to serve the rest of their sentence in a state prison. That would ensure a baseline of care. Also, I think the point about lobbying proves too much. If lobbying is so much cheaper and more reliable than innovation, why don't all companies lobby instead of innovating? Apple has billions of dollars sitting around. Why don't they lobby to make the iPhone the sole phone used by federal employees? Heck, why don't they lobby to get rid of the new import tariffs affecting their products? I don't think companies leave $20 bills on the sidewalk, so lobbying must not be as effective as people like to believe. I agree that lobbying is bad, but my objection to it is that the government is allowed to pass laws that coerce people in such ways, not that some companies take advantage of that power. Basically: hate the game, not the player.
- scj 7y ago
  To both of your points of having more choice and lobbying: Market considerations matter.
  - chroma 7y ago
    Could you elaborate? I don't understand what you're getting at.
    - 7y ago

abathur 7y ago

A caveat, first: I think two of our larger-scale social issues are that incentives are often misaligned with the outcomes we actually want, and that we don't create structural room for innovation. That said, I think this is still pretty fraught. Incentives are just rules enforced with a carrot instead of a stick; we're just as likely to come up with bad incentives as we are to develop ineffective regulations and write loophole-ridden or misapplied laws. At sufficient scale, money tends to inspire a troublesome kind of creativity. If the private prisons have sufficient profit motive and the problems they face prove tractable for data and bespoke or ML solutions, they'll analyze likely convicts as thoroughly as possible and do what they can to skim the most-profitable convicts off the top of the pool and leave public prisons with whatever is left. Maybe they'll just directly pay the prisoner or their family. Maybe they'll have a miserable as-bad-as-regulations-allow experience for uninvited plebians and a special experience to offer prisoners they want. Will a certain incentive lead them to bribe judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, or witnesses to get (or avoid) prisoners? Would they do the same to keep a former inmate from being convicted again within 3 years of release? And then some donation-funded corner of the think-tank ecosystem will endlessly torture the data to "prove" private prisons get better outcomes than public ones and shop boilerplate legislation to restrict public and promote private prisons. And once the prisoners are within their walls, they'll be sucking up all of the data they can to hone their prediction of whether they'll reoffend when they get out. Will they use it nobly to target support, or to ensure the whoever the algorithms pick as bad apples end up in constant manufactured trouble?

chroma 7y ago
Please notice how far afield you had to go to postulate bad outcomes. For your scenario to play out, the people running private prisons must commit some pretty egregious crimes. Can you imagine the chutzpah of someone who tries to bribe a judge?! That's practically instant, guaranteed jail time. Judges only get bribed when judges ask for bribes. If you applied this same level of scrutiny to the existing prison system, I'm sure you could come up with far worse outcomes using far less speculation. For example: What's to stop state prison guards from torturing inmates? Answer: Nothing, because they have qualified immunity.[1] 1. https://www.newsweek.com/prison-inmate-qualified-immunity-protect-officials-constitution-civil-rights-723943 https://www.newsweek.com/prison-inmate-qualified-immunity-pr...

fnord77 7y ago

then we'd have all sorts of ad campaigns from private prison aimed at at-risk communities and people, promising all sorts of things while still lobbying law enforcement for arrest quotas.

birdyrooster 7y ago

This is incredibly easy to game. A bad actor would create a prison which focused only on convict selection, and fully ignored the bonus for recidivism and pumped people through. Prison not only needs to be ethical for individuals, but for the rest of society.

chroma 7y ago
Why would private prisons be allowed to refuse specific inmates? State prisons can't do that.
- jackvalentine 7y ago
  They wouldn’t do it overtly but they’d develop some signal to dissuade undesirable inmates from wanting to go there.
kortilla 7y ago
So you invented a loophole and then said it would be trivial to game if they can use that loophole. Prisons aren’t universities, there isn’t an admissions process.
- birdyrooster 7y ago
  I didn't invent the loophole, the parent comment did and I was pointing it out.

codedokode 7y ago

> Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. Eg: If their prisoner recidivism rate after 3 years was 10% lower than the average public prison, they would get a 20% bonus. Then the best strategy would be to make sure that the prisoners die as soon as possible.

deleted 7y ago
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chroma 7y ago
Are you suggesting that the private prisons would murder convicts soon after they're released? That's uhh... that's just a little bit illegal and people who commit murder tend to get caught and imprisoned for a very long time. But let's assume that the private prisons could somehow keep getting away with murder. If anyone ever looked at the stats and saw that people released from private prisons had much shorter life expectancy, then convicts would choose state prisons. Then the private prison's revenue dries up and they go out of business.
- verall 7y ago
  > If anyone ever looked at the stats and saw that people released from private prisons had much shorter life expectancy, then convicts would choose state prisons. No, they would not, because there is huge information asmyettry here and, and generally convicts have lost access to the sorts of publications with this info.
  - kortilla 7y ago
    Of course they would. Prisons inmates are not isolated from information.
    - jellicle 7y ago
      You're not too familiar with prison, I guess. By and large, I would expect inmates to choose the closest prison to their family, regardless of quality metrics. What good does it do to know that some prison 2000 miles away has a really good meal program?

pornel 7y ago

Incentives for this are all weird. You have literal customer lock-in, so you can promise anything and deliver nothing. The recidivism metric would probably cause private prisons to try to avoid or eject worst prisoners, so you'd end up with a 2-tier system, where private prisons are hotels for "nice" people, and public prisons are a hell-hole for the rest. Or maybe some prisons would run training on how not to get caught.

acchow 7y ago
> You have literal customer lock-in You could let the prisoners freely switch to public while they're locked up. The main issue I have with this system is that the "consumers" making the choices (the prisoners) of product aren't paying for the cost. So incentives aren't really aligned.
squiggleblaz 7y ago
> The recidivism metric would probably cause private prisons to try to avoid or eject worst prisoners, so you'd end up with a 2-tier system, where private prisons are hotels for "nice" people, and public prisons are a hell-hole for the rest. Yes, so you'd have to run the metric based on who was initially assigned to the prison. "Oh, John was assigned to your prison, but one look at his record and you decided to expel him? Well, you're still responsible for his recidivism, because you chose to not serve him. Oh, Jack was assigned to state prison, and you tried to encourage him? Well, you're not responsible for his recidivism, because you selected him." But yeah, I agree in general that the thing about metrics is that they can be gamed.

the-pigeon 7y ago

Ah I see you've never implemented an incentive program before. EVERY SINGLE SYSTEM GETS GAMED. NO MATTER WHAT YOU MEASURE. Every metric you could possible think of can be manipulated in ways you can't imagine. But give private companies the incentive and someone in them will figure it out. IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety.

chroma 7y ago
If you look at my comments throughout this thread, you'll see that I am aware of the potential for incentives to have undesirable higher-order effects. Many people in this thread have suggested certain concrete undesirable consequences, and I've replied to them. In contrast, you are putting forth a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure. But clearly financial incentives work in many cases. It's what sports teams use for their athletes and coaches. It's what businesses use for their leadership teams. When we need the best people possible to perform at their best, we tend to pay them money and pay them more money if they meet certain goals. > IMO the only way to run things like prisons is to hire people that strongly care about the public good to run them. Hire people who want to run a good organization that accomplishes the organization's goals. Which for prisons should be rehabilitation and safety. Yes, ideally we'd have every job staffed people who are wise, kind, competent, and hard working. But we don't have nearly enough of such people and we judge traits inaccurately. So instead we have to make do with less effective but more practical methods. Financial incentives are one of those options.
- wwweston 7y ago
  > a fully general counterargument to any incentive structure. A general counterargument is worth considering. Any incentive sufficiently powerful to draw forth extra resourcefulness in its legitimate pursuit is quite likely to also draw forth extra resourcefulness in its illegitimate pursuit. > It's what businesses use for their leadership teams. This is may help your case considerably less than you think if you look closely. Various forms of the principal-agent problem pop up all the time. Pink and Kohn have also forwarded some research suggesting that extrinsic incentives have diminishing returns or run counterproductive in some cases. And Goodhart's law is a proverb in the business world for a reason. Aligning incentives is still important, but getting optimal performance is rarely as simple as tying rewards to a goal. Hell, half the time defining optimal performance is a project. And when the underlying issues involve social safety and significantly curtailing someone's liberties via imprisonment (and the already fine tension between them), it's an especially tricky topic.

m0zg 7y ago

>> Private prisons had financial incentives for post-incarceration behavior. I bet if you just paid the felons the same amount they cost to incarcerate, relocated them away from their peer group, and forbid contact, a lot of them wouldn't re-offend, like, ever. It's down to basically a combination of poverty and peer pressure (as in "just when I thought I got out, they pull me back in") most of the time. This is sort of how exile worked in Russia before the revolution: nonviolent offenders were sent to Siberia and simply lived there. No hard labor or anything, no incarceration per se, but you couldn't leave, and all your correspondence was subject to review and censorship.

goalieca 7y ago

Why do we need competition for prisons?

salty_biscuits 7y ago

It is a nice idea, but I don't think many private companies are looking that far into the future to figure out where to best get their revenue. They can gamble on something that might not be totally under their control years out into the future, or just try to get more bodies in the prisons now. A ruthless "rational" actor would go for the second option.

thrwaway3489 7y ago

Isn't the primary issue anyone has with private prisons the same one we have with defense contractors: that they might, would, or do subvert the system to get innocent people imprisoned or their prison terms extended in the case of private prisons, or promote wars America doesn't want or need in the case of defense contractors? What I mean is nobody really cares if prisons buy commercial toilet paper, for example. (As opposed to a hypothetical government toilet paper.) Nobody cares if the military uses the private industry for procurement of computers or whatever. We don't feel the government should be creating its own version of all private industry products. But when the prison itself is private - and likewise when defense contractors themselves are developing, shopping around, and selling new weapons only to the military, that the military didn't ask for - then suddenly there is a new player in the budgeting process. Ideally few or no people are committing crimes. If the prisons have excess capacity, free beds - good! But if it's a private prison, how can they fill those beds? Well, by working to imprison more people. This is the incentive structure that people don't like about private prison. In the United States it's de facto "illegal" to walk around while being black: there is a high chance you will eventually be jailed on non-existent charges. (And accept a plea bargain, for example, rather than risk a really long term.) I'm a white guy. If I had lived the exact, exact same life, done every single action exactly the same (and this is true of other people reading Hacker News) I likely could have been jailed for no reason at all, just for walking around while being black. That's a fact. I probably would accept the plea bargain I'm offered, too, and resolve to work for change later. What am I going to do? Tell the judge and prosecutor (who often is scored based on how often he gets a conviction/plea) that he and the system are racist? How well will that go over? Will it get me my freedom? Or will it get a vindictive term from the judge. I'd rather just sit in prison for a few months and then avoid the cops better next time, I think I would decide. (Rather than risk a 20 year prison sentence, again, totally innocent of anything. A few months' plea - which my counsel would probably advise I take - is nothing compared to that.) So why are innocent black people jailed? Well, to fill prison beds, apparently. That is one of the reasons that people don't like private prisons. We don't want anybody to be "selling" prison, so we don't want prison to be a private enterprise. It's quite straightforward and is something most people understand very easily.

squiggleblaz 7y ago

ClumsyPilot 7y ago

There is an assumption that private prisons will perform better than public ones, and so far data does not support it. What great innovation came out of private prison system? You we trying to optimise out the 'inefficient' government, by saddling it with much effort designing incentives and making sure they are not abused. You might as well run prisons yourself - publically.

e12e 7y ago

There's a tention between "paid per prisoner day" and "fewer prisoners come back to stay". You could get a bonus for not getting "return" prisoners - but it'd have to be better than gaining life sentences (though in general, harder to compete in three strike legislations where you'd be incentivesed to allow prisoners to commit crimes in order to trigger three strikes). Perhaps there's a way to pay for recovery - but if your business depends on there being prisoners, it's hard to see how you could motivate anything but an increase in prisoner population. Certainly an end to prisoners would mean bankruptcy? [ed: you might have a goal of lowering crime, and by extention prisoner population. A private prison, paid to house prisoners, would be commercially committed to the opposite; increasing the prison population.]

supernintendo 7y ago

No no no. This is exactly the mindset we need to avoid when addressing problems in our justice system. I am sorry but the entrepreneurial / venture capitalist mindset is not suitable here. Private prisons should not exist. Public prisons should be focused on rehabilitation, not retribution. As pro-capitalism as I am, the only future I see in your idea is abject market failure. We’re not talking about product here, we’re talking about human life. The market hasn’t been able to solve health care so what makes you think it’s going to be able to solve mass incarceration? Further, this hypothetical system is ripe for exploitation. Aside from the potential exploits others have raised, have you considered the parallels to other industries such as defense contractors? Your idea creates an incentive and profit motive for crime. It’s the type of thinking that could literally result in corporations creating artificial mass shooters in pursuit of all the easy money that could be made. Sorry, but I think this is an extremely bad take and I actually worry about a dystopian future where this takes place. Pull on this thread at your own peril.