16 ms·

I loved to throw around "What's next? Private prisons??" when speaking about some crazy privatization ideas. That, until I learned it's an actual thing in US. W

by dgan 4y ago

I loved to throw around "What's next? Private prisons??" when speaking about some crazy privatization ideas. That, until I learned it's an actual thing in US. Who would have guessed. I think I was 32 at that time

badpun 4y ago
Re: privatization of public services, I would love to see writing up parking tickets outsourced to private companies. It's trivial to incentivise them to do a great job (just give them a fraction of money from tickets they write, and fine them for writing frivolous ones), yet no country I've heard of does that. It really shows that the world is completely dominated by car culture at the moment. Politicians are just affraid of having too good parking rules enforcement, as they suspect most of their electorate are drivers and would actually hate it. As a result, we have cities littered with cars parked at places where they cause problem for everyone (it's less of a problem in the US, because many US cities are basically parking lots with buildings in the middle - so there's no need to park illegally).
- djbebs 4y ago
  No country does it?? Portugal does it, with the associated nefarious effects.
- YawningAngel 4y ago
  Trust me, you really wouldn't. This incentive structure has existed previously in the UK and it lead to precisely the degenerate outcomes you might imagine. What you want is fewer cars
  - AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
    What kind of degenerate outcomes? Just curious. Any good links to read?
    - Peanuts99 4y ago
      I once sat in a phone queue for 3 hours to dispute a charge that I received due to signage that was obstructed by trees. There's no incentive to handle disputes so they effectively don't. There's also hundreds of different companies each with their own rules and systems. Most of the time I'll park 3 or 4 miles out of the city and walk in rather than dealing with crappy parking companies.
      - AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
        What if dispute handling is handled by the city then, while the actual job on the ground is outsourced? You think it's gonna help?
        jrimbault 4y ago
        > dispute handling is handled by the city then That would be the defintion of "socializing costs" while "privatising revenues".
        AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
        It's more like a government oversight in food industry: you're free to reap the benefits, but if you get too many complaints you'll be shagged by a hefty fine.
        badpun 4y ago
        Not if the private company gets fined for every case where the ticket was frivolous and got overthrown. It's all in my original post BTW.
- eesmith 4y ago
  > parking tickets outsourced to private companies. Chicago. "Chicago's Parking Meter Deal a Lesson in 'Worst Practices" - https://www.bettergov.org/news/chicagos-parking-meter-deal-a-lesson-in-worst-practices https://www.bettergov.org/news/chicagos-parking-meter-deal-a... ] In 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City Council agreed to lease Chicago’s parking meter business for 75 years and in return received $1.15 billion from Chicago Parking Meters LLC, a venture that includes Wall Street investment house Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital Partners and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. It also mentions: ] Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are rethinking their parking meter deals because of Chicago’s difficulties, according to Bloomberg Business News. Unlike
  - tarakat 4y ago
    > for 75 years A sure sign of corruption. An honest lease would be short, so that it can simply not be renewed if problems arise.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      > Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley... is an approximately equally sure sign of corruption.
  - ricree 4y ago
    >Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are rethinking their parking meter deals This is over ten years old. I wonder what those cities wound up doing.
- kedikedi 4y ago
  In Finland, at least, this is a thing. Parking enforcement is partially given to private companies but I don't know how it works with the underlying mechanisms (i.e. whether they are getting a fixed sum, or whether they get a fraction of the fines they fine).
- defrost 4y ago
  Easily the most iconic privately funded organisation associated with parking tickets and enforcement would be the Queensland (Australia) Surfers Paradise Meter Maids : > Unlike other meter maids, who issue parking tickets to motorists when they overstay, Gold Coast meter maids put money into parking meters which might otherwise expire, preventing vehicle owners from incurring a fine. After the introduction of pay-and-display parking meters they took on the task of explaining to motorists how the machines work. Say what now?? > The Surfers Paradise meter maids were first instituted by entrepreneur Bernie Elsey in 1965, through the Surfers Paradise Progress Association, which was opposed to the introduction of parking meters by the Gold Coast City Council. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfers_Paradise_Meter_Maids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfers_Paradise_Meter_Maids
  - AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
    Well, paid parking, among other things is a way of managing a scarce resource of public parking spots.
- tommica 4y ago
  So instead of having an entity to do the ticketing, you propose to have an entity to validate that the ticketing done by the 3rd party is valid? Does not seem to solve anything.
  - badpun 4y ago
    Not validate, only handle disputes. The dispuses will be a small minority of all cases, and, as usual, the onus of the proof will fall on the accuser, i.e. private company. So, they either must have a good documentation (photos etc.) proving the infraction, or the ticket gets overthrown and they themselves get fined for wasting everybody's time. I don't think this was really viable in the pre-smartphones era, but now every private parking cop can (and would be required to) take copious photos with a cheap device. This should really minimize any shadiness in the system.
    - marcosdumay 4y ago
      > The disputes will be a small minority of all cases Assuming the system will work the way you expect it to work, and not fail into more lucrative modes that are trivial to predict.
      - badpun 4y ago
        Name one then.
        marcosdumay 4y ago
        The company making a lot of false tickets because most people just pay, so they still come up ahead. "I can't think of a flaw, so my plan must be flawless" is a pretty arrogant position and rarely leads to good plans.
- olliej 4y ago
  Those private businesses are incentivized to make money by ticketing as many people as possible. As long as fighting a ticket is more expensive than paying a ticket there is no incentive for them to do "a great job". Because the model of all of these systems is that the private "efficient" entity gets a %age of the expenses that they inflict on people, but any cost from subsequent lawsuits are borne by the public.
  - seti0Cha 4y ago
    There are seemingly obvious ways of countering that, such as included mandatory upper limits on ticket contest rates. Are these not part of the contract? Who enters into contracts with no provision for actually delivering the service at an acceptable level?
    - olliej 4y ago
      People focus on the dollar amounts for contesting tickets, but more likely the problem is time. If you have a minimum wage job you likely don’t have the time flexibility to allow you to go to any kind of “court” to contest a fine. If you have a high paying job, then likely the time costs you more than what you save - especially if the cost of contesting a fine in capped at something “affordable”. Your other question: what is “acceptable service level” measuring for a ticketing service?
      - seti0Cha 4y ago
        That's the case for government run ticketing as well. Even if only a small percent of people contest unfair tickets, you can use that as an indicator of how many unfair tickets are being issued. If it goes up under private ticketing, and assuming you don't change the method for contesting, the odds are good that they are doing something to cause it. Hence you could write a service level agreement that says something like "Percent of issued tickets which are contested shall not vary beyond x% from y (the prior rate). Percent of successfully contested tickets will not vary beyond z%", etc. To come up with an actual service level agreement would require some knowledge of what outcomes are desired and some thought about how those numbers could be gamed, but I don't see why this is not possible. Private companies contract out work all the time and don't seem helpless in their ability to get what they want from it. Why should the government not be able to do this?
- rpastuszak 4y ago
  This reminds me a bit of (privatised) tax collection in the Ancient Rome. Didn't go that well.
- baud147258 4y ago
  > yet no country I've heard of does that You might have heard of France, I guess? The city where I live uses (Suresnes, just next to Paris) uses a private company to manage parking tickets in street parking; but I've got no idea how the incentives are structured and how well (or not) it works
  - orwin 4y ago
    Right-wing city dweller article on the subject: https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2018/03/08/01016-20180308ARTFIG00270-stationnement-a-paris-ces-agents-non-assermentes-qui-verbalisent-illegalement.php https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2018/03/08/01016-20... Left-wing article on the subject: http://www.regards.fr/actu/societe/article/paris-les-voyous-du-prive-gerent-les-pv http://www.regards.fr/actu/societe/article/paris-les-voyous-... Mostly center-right, rural article on the subject: https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/impots-fiscalite/pv-stationnement/sationnement-pv-automatises-des-boulettes-et-des-bevues-b5f49aee-2135-11ec-8452-a029323887c0 https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/impots-fiscalite/pv-sta... TFDR (Too French, didn't read): Basically, across all media, including the "Figaro" (notorious right-wing paper who often push for privatization), this isn't going that well.
- RajT88 4y ago
  The city of Chicago privatized parking tickets, but levies no fines (to my knowledge) on abuse of the system. So abuse in the system is rampant by parking enforcement. Everyone I know who drives in the city has crazy stories of bullshit tickets or tows. Chicago is also the city that got caught shortening yellow light duration after installing traffic cameras which wrote automated tickets.
- DaedPsyker 4y ago
  That would incentivise behaviour similar to police in the US using fines and civil forfeit to augment their budget. It's a perverse incentive that encourages lying to increase fines, and good luck challenging it.
- rsynnott 4y ago
  > It's trivial to incentivise them to do a great job (just give them a fraction of money from tickets they write, and fine them for writing frivolous ones) Congratulations; you've essentially re-invented tax farming, as was popular in the Roman Empire. We know from _literally millennia_ of bitter experience that giving private companies a cut of whatever they manage to extract from the general public is a very bad idea. If you pay someone more the more they abuse the rules (these things are virtually impossible to police), then you can't be surprised when they break the rules.
raydiatian 4y ago
Can we take a moment from this depressing article to appreciate the strange almost oxymoronic irony in the term “public prison”
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  What's oxymoronic about it? Public prison is prison run by the government, as opposed to a private company, similar to public schools and public transportation systems.
  - raydiatian 4y ago
    public: open prison: restricted
    - bheadmaster 4y ago
      public: of, relating to, or affecting all the people or the whole area of a nation or state Just because a word has one meaning, doesn't mean it's the only meaning.
      - notahacker 4y ago
        A better example of the strange use of the word "public" is in England, where "public schools" specifically means "private schools"... or more specifically the subset of privately-run secular boarding schools that opened to any member of the public that could afford for their sons to attend, long before state schooling became a thing.
        HPsquared 4y ago
        I suppose prisons are also theoretically open to any member of the public.
        pelagicAustral 4y ago
        Well, they are. Family and friends can visit there.
fit2rule 4y ago
rapnie 4y ago
Yea. What can possibly go wrong when outsourcing imprisonment to commercial parties in a hypercapitalist society, right?
- candiodari 4y ago
  Well, occasionally people who abuse people in private prisons get put to justice. This is generally made difficult by ... of course ... the public part of the system (here we have involved: judges, a supreme court justice, the public prosecutor and the governor. It's about as public as it gets, the private prison was just a way to get the money out. The corrupt parts were very thoroughly publicly funded. And of course the vast majority of the corruption (ie. the public prosecutor, who was the real central part of it) got of without any consequences) The prison with the worst reputation (deserved or not) is still Riker's island. And it's very much public. It has had it's share of corruption cases, but nobody was ever punished. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RQJq1ca7jM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RQJq1ca7jM And since people seem to really care about this part: Riker's island is very, very much violating the law constantly about the conditions. Everything from medical care, maximum occupancy, to temperatures (both in summer and in winter). The law is very clear: that means no more prisoners there until these issues are fixed. But that would cost money. So, of course, everybody in the justice system cooperates to violate the law. That, by itself, regardless of anything else, is a crime.
cezart 4y ago
I have an even "better" idea: private courts! Imagine a corporation who's sole goal is to maximise it's profits based on judging if people/corporations have broke the law, or not! Surely they'll be more efficient than public courts. What could go wrong?
- AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration
- dathinab 4y ago
  You mean like (quasi-)forced arbitration, as spear headed by the US. Let's be honest the US has sold out the mental, physical and economic well being of most of it's populations for the benefit of a handful of especially wealthy citizens. Worse it wasn't even done with long term geo political benefits or anything like that in mind, actually the opposite if anything. I.e. just pure greed.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    Have you ever been involved in litigation? I have and it would have saved me a year of bullshit an $100k of legal fees if the contract I was litigating had a forced arbitration clause.
    - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
      Isn't this why companies love Delaware, Hong Kong, and Singapore? AFAIK the courts in these jurisdictions are fast and uphold the rule of law (contract law included).
      - b112 4y ago
        I doubt Hong Kong is that way today. Virtually every other aspect of Hong Kong civil administration is now the same as China's, or subverted to be the same.
    - 4y ago
isodev 4y ago
The penal system in the US is perplexing. It's built on the premise that people should not only lose their freedom but also get subjected to the worst possible conditions and exploited as free labor. I honestly can't comprehend how a modern nation can get to this point.
- x86x87 4y ago
  It's basically slavery. Lose your freedom and be forced to work for basically free. A lot of "businesses" would straight up collapse without this free labor
- parkingrift 4y ago
  Worst possible conditions? Seriously? It’s the worst conditions that can possibly exist. Nothing could be worse than being in a prison in the United States? On the labor issue I don’t see why prison populations shouldn’t get put to work on public works projects. It’s not a vacation, it’s jail.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    I read that as "worst possible conditions as legally allowed". So no, they are not "the" worst conditions imaginable, but they are as bad as the system allows. Which is still pretty bad. >>On the labor issue I don’t see why prison populations shouldn’t get put to work on public works projects. No one is arguing against that. The problem is that prison populations are being used for profit making - anyone can contract with a prison to use their labour to make whatever thing you want to do or make. So companies use prisoners to make products that they then sell for profit. Which obviously creates perverse incentives for prisons to have a large workforce they can hire out for profit. No one is arguing against using prisoners to clear out public pathways or whatever. >> It’s not a vacation, it’s jail. Also, I just want to say I'm not a fan of this argument because people use it to excuse all kinds of things. "People get beaten up in prison? It's not a vacation, it's jail". "Prison rape happens? It's not a vacation, it's jail". And so on and so on. Like, yeah, it's not a vacation, but a basic standard of human dignity should be allowed.
denton-scratch 4y ago
The UK has private prisons: 14 out of a total of 117 are privately-run, apparently. I have no idea of what influence the operators are able to bring to bear on the government; the government we have at the moment is shamelessly corrupt, so I assume it's widespread and invisible.
klooney 4y ago
Interestingly, private prisons house a higher percentage of prisoners in the UK than in the US.
conanbatt 4y ago
If you don't like private prisons, wait until you hear about the public ones.
- toiletfuneral 4y ago
pkaye 4y ago
Private prison exist in many countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison

by dgan 4y ago

badpun 4y ago

Re: privatization of public services, I would love to see writing up parking tickets outsourced to private companies. It's trivial to incentivise them to do a great job (just give them a fraction of money from tickets they write, and fine them for writing frivolous ones), yet no country I've heard of does that. It really shows that the world is completely dominated by car culture at the moment. Politicians are just affraid of having too good parking rules enforcement, as they suspect most of their electorate are drivers and would actually hate it. As a result, we have cities littered with cars parked at places where they cause problem for everyone (it's less of a problem in the US, because many US cities are basically parking lots with buildings in the middle - so there's no need to park illegally).

djbebs 4y ago
No country does it?? Portugal does it, with the associated nefarious effects.
YawningAngel 4y ago
Trust me, you really wouldn't. This incentive structure has existed previously in the UK and it lead to precisely the degenerate outcomes you might imagine. What you want is fewer cars
- AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
  What kind of degenerate outcomes? Just curious. Any good links to read?
  - Peanuts99 4y ago
    I once sat in a phone queue for 3 hours to dispute a charge that I received due to signage that was obstructed by trees. There's no incentive to handle disputes so they effectively don't. There's also hundreds of different companies each with their own rules and systems. Most of the time I'll park 3 or 4 miles out of the city and walk in rather than dealing with crappy parking companies.
    - AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
      What if dispute handling is handled by the city then, while the actual job on the ground is outsourced? You think it's gonna help?
      - jrimbault 4y ago
        > dispute handling is handled by the city then That would be the defintion of "socializing costs" while "privatising revenues".
        AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
        It's more like a government oversight in food industry: you're free to reap the benefits, but if you get too many complaints you'll be shagged by a hefty fine.
        badpun 4y ago
        Not if the private company gets fined for every case where the ticket was frivolous and got overthrown. It's all in my original post BTW.
eesmith 4y ago
> parking tickets outsourced to private companies. Chicago. "Chicago's Parking Meter Deal a Lesson in 'Worst Practices" - https://www.bettergov.org/news/chicagos-parking-meter-deal-a-lesson-in-worst-practices https://www.bettergov.org/news/chicagos-parking-meter-deal-a... ] In 2008, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and the City Council agreed to lease Chicago’s parking meter business for 75 years and in return received $1.15 billion from Chicago Parking Meters LLC, a venture that includes Wall Street investment house Morgan Stanley, Alliance Capital Partners and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority. It also mentions: ] Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are rethinking their parking meter deals because of Chicago’s difficulties, according to Bloomberg Business News. Unlike
- tarakat 4y ago
  > for 75 years A sure sign of corruption. An honest lease would be short, so that it can simply not be renewed if problems arise.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    > Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley... is an approximately equally sure sign of corruption.
- ricree 4y ago
  >Indianapolis, Pittsburgh and Los Angeles are rethinking their parking meter deals This is over ten years old. I wonder what those cities wound up doing.
kedikedi 4y ago
In Finland, at least, this is a thing. Parking enforcement is partially given to private companies but I don't know how it works with the underlying mechanisms (i.e. whether they are getting a fixed sum, or whether they get a fraction of the fines they fine).
defrost 4y ago
Easily the most iconic privately funded organisation associated with parking tickets and enforcement would be the Queensland (Australia) Surfers Paradise Meter Maids : > Unlike other meter maids, who issue parking tickets to motorists when they overstay, Gold Coast meter maids put money into parking meters which might otherwise expire, preventing vehicle owners from incurring a fine. After the introduction of pay-and-display parking meters they took on the task of explaining to motorists how the machines work. Say what now?? > The Surfers Paradise meter maids were first instituted by entrepreneur Bernie Elsey in 1965, through the Surfers Paradise Progress Association, which was opposed to the introduction of parking meters by the Gold Coast City Council. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfers_Paradise_Meter_Maids https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surfers_Paradise_Meter_Maids
- AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
  Well, paid parking, among other things is a way of managing a scarce resource of public parking spots.
tommica 4y ago
So instead of having an entity to do the ticketing, you propose to have an entity to validate that the ticketing done by the 3rd party is valid? Does not seem to solve anything.
- badpun 4y ago
  Not validate, only handle disputes. The dispuses will be a small minority of all cases, and, as usual, the onus of the proof will fall on the accuser, i.e. private company. So, they either must have a good documentation (photos etc.) proving the infraction, or the ticket gets overthrown and they themselves get fined for wasting everybody's time. I don't think this was really viable in the pre-smartphones era, but now every private parking cop can (and would be required to) take copious photos with a cheap device. This should really minimize any shadiness in the system.
  - marcosdumay 4y ago
    > The disputes will be a small minority of all cases Assuming the system will work the way you expect it to work, and not fail into more lucrative modes that are trivial to predict.
    - badpun 4y ago
      Name one then.
      - marcosdumay 4y ago
        The company making a lot of false tickets because most people just pay, so they still come up ahead. "I can't think of a flaw, so my plan must be flawless" is a pretty arrogant position and rarely leads to good plans.
olliej 4y ago
Those private businesses are incentivized to make money by ticketing as many people as possible. As long as fighting a ticket is more expensive than paying a ticket there is no incentive for them to do "a great job". Because the model of all of these systems is that the private "efficient" entity gets a %age of the expenses that they inflict on people, but any cost from subsequent lawsuits are borne by the public.
- seti0Cha 4y ago
  There are seemingly obvious ways of countering that, such as included mandatory upper limits on ticket contest rates. Are these not part of the contract? Who enters into contracts with no provision for actually delivering the service at an acceptable level?
  - olliej 4y ago
    People focus on the dollar amounts for contesting tickets, but more likely the problem is time. If you have a minimum wage job you likely don’t have the time flexibility to allow you to go to any kind of “court” to contest a fine. If you have a high paying job, then likely the time costs you more than what you save - especially if the cost of contesting a fine in capped at something “affordable”. Your other question: what is “acceptable service level” measuring for a ticketing service?
    - seti0Cha 4y ago
      That's the case for government run ticketing as well. Even if only a small percent of people contest unfair tickets, you can use that as an indicator of how many unfair tickets are being issued. If it goes up under private ticketing, and assuming you don't change the method for contesting, the odds are good that they are doing something to cause it. Hence you could write a service level agreement that says something like "Percent of issued tickets which are contested shall not vary beyond x% from y (the prior rate). Percent of successfully contested tickets will not vary beyond z%", etc. To come up with an actual service level agreement would require some knowledge of what outcomes are desired and some thought about how those numbers could be gamed, but I don't see why this is not possible. Private companies contract out work all the time and don't seem helpless in their ability to get what they want from it. Why should the government not be able to do this?
rpastuszak 4y ago
This reminds me a bit of (privatised) tax collection in the Ancient Rome. Didn't go that well.
baud147258 4y ago
> yet no country I've heard of does that You might have heard of France, I guess? The city where I live uses (Suresnes, just next to Paris) uses a private company to manage parking tickets in street parking; but I've got no idea how the incentives are structured and how well (or not) it works
- orwin 4y ago
  Right-wing city dweller article on the subject: https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2018/03/08/01016-20180308ARTFIG00270-stationnement-a-paris-ces-agents-non-assermentes-qui-verbalisent-illegalement.php https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2018/03/08/01016-20... Left-wing article on the subject: http://www.regards.fr/actu/societe/article/paris-les-voyous-du-prive-gerent-les-pv http://www.regards.fr/actu/societe/article/paris-les-voyous-... Mostly center-right, rural article on the subject: https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/impots-fiscalite/pv-stationnement/sationnement-pv-automatises-des-boulettes-et-des-bevues-b5f49aee-2135-11ec-8452-a029323887c0 https://www.ouest-france.fr/economie/impots-fiscalite/pv-sta... TFDR (Too French, didn't read): Basically, across all media, including the "Figaro" (notorious right-wing paper who often push for privatization), this isn't going that well.
RajT88 4y ago
The city of Chicago privatized parking tickets, but levies no fines (to my knowledge) on abuse of the system. So abuse in the system is rampant by parking enforcement. Everyone I know who drives in the city has crazy stories of bullshit tickets or tows. Chicago is also the city that got caught shortening yellow light duration after installing traffic cameras which wrote automated tickets.
DaedPsyker 4y ago
That would incentivise behaviour similar to police in the US using fines and civil forfeit to augment their budget. It's a perverse incentive that encourages lying to increase fines, and good luck challenging it.
rsynnott 4y ago
> It's trivial to incentivise them to do a great job (just give them a fraction of money from tickets they write, and fine them for writing frivolous ones) Congratulations; you've essentially re-invented tax farming, as was popular in the Roman Empire. We know from _literally millennia_ of bitter experience that giving private companies a cut of whatever they manage to extract from the general public is a very bad idea. If you pay someone more the more they abuse the rules (these things are virtually impossible to police), then you can't be surprised when they break the rules.

raydiatian 4y ago

Can we take a moment from this depressing article to appreciate the strange almost oxymoronic irony in the term “public prison”

bheadmaster 4y ago
What's oxymoronic about it? Public prison is prison run by the government, as opposed to a private company, similar to public schools and public transportation systems.
- raydiatian 4y ago
  public: open prison: restricted
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    public: of, relating to, or affecting all the people or the whole area of a nation or state Just because a word has one meaning, doesn't mean it's the only meaning.
    - notahacker 4y ago
      A better example of the strange use of the word "public" is in England, where "public schools" specifically means "private schools"... or more specifically the subset of privately-run secular boarding schools that opened to any member of the public that could afford for their sons to attend, long before state schooling became a thing.
      - HPsquared 4y ago
        I suppose prisons are also theoretically open to any member of the public.
        pelagicAustral 4y ago
        Well, they are. Family and friends can visit there.

fit2rule 4y ago

rapnie 4y ago

Yea. What can possibly go wrong when outsourcing imprisonment to commercial parties in a hypercapitalist society, right?

candiodari 4y ago
Well, occasionally people who abuse people in private prisons get put to justice. This is generally made difficult by ... of course ... the public part of the system (here we have involved: judges, a supreme court justice, the public prosecutor and the governor. It's about as public as it gets, the private prison was just a way to get the money out. The corrupt parts were very thoroughly publicly funded. And of course the vast majority of the corruption (ie. the public prosecutor, who was the real central part of it) got of without any consequences) The prison with the worst reputation (deserved or not) is still Riker's island. And it's very much public. It has had it's share of corruption cases, but nobody was ever punished. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RQJq1ca7jM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RQJq1ca7jM And since people seem to really care about this part: Riker's island is very, very much violating the law constantly about the conditions. Everything from medical care, maximum occupancy, to temperatures (both in summer and in winter). The law is very clear: that means no more prisoners there until these issues are fixed. But that would cost money. So, of course, everybody in the justice system cooperates to violate the law. That, by itself, regardless of anything else, is a crime.

cezart 4y ago

I have an even "better" idea: private courts! Imagine a corporation who's sole goal is to maximise it's profits based on judging if people/corporations have broke the law, or not! Surely they'll be more efficient than public courts. What could go wrong?

AlexTWithBeard 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arbitration
dathinab 4y ago
You mean like (quasi-)forced arbitration, as spear headed by the US. Let's be honest the US has sold out the mental, physical and economic well being of most of it's populations for the benefit of a handful of especially wealthy citizens. Worse it wasn't even done with long term geo political benefits or anything like that in mind, actually the opposite if anything. I.e. just pure greed.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  Have you ever been involved in litigation? I have and it would have saved me a year of bullshit an $100k of legal fees if the contract I was litigating had a forced arbitration clause.
  - ravel-bar-foo 4y ago
    Isn't this why companies love Delaware, Hong Kong, and Singapore? AFAIK the courts in these jurisdictions are fast and uphold the rule of law (contract law included).
    - b112 4y ago
      I doubt Hong Kong is that way today. Virtually every other aspect of Hong Kong civil administration is now the same as China's, or subverted to be the same.
  - 4y ago

isodev 4y ago

The penal system in the US is perplexing. It's built on the premise that people should not only lose their freedom but also get subjected to the worst possible conditions and exploited as free labor. I honestly can't comprehend how a modern nation can get to this point.

x86x87 4y ago
It's basically slavery. Lose your freedom and be forced to work for basically free. A lot of "businesses" would straight up collapse without this free labor
parkingrift 4y ago
Worst possible conditions? Seriously? It’s the worst conditions that can possibly exist. Nothing could be worse than being in a prison in the United States? On the labor issue I don’t see why prison populations shouldn’t get put to work on public works projects. It’s not a vacation, it’s jail.
- gambiting 4y ago
  I read that as "worst possible conditions as legally allowed". So no, they are not "the" worst conditions imaginable, but they are as bad as the system allows. Which is still pretty bad. >>On the labor issue I don’t see why prison populations shouldn’t get put to work on public works projects. No one is arguing against that. The problem is that prison populations are being used for profit making - anyone can contract with a prison to use their labour to make whatever thing you want to do or make. So companies use prisoners to make products that they then sell for profit. Which obviously creates perverse incentives for prisons to have a large workforce they can hire out for profit. No one is arguing against using prisoners to clear out public pathways or whatever. >> It’s not a vacation, it’s jail. Also, I just want to say I'm not a fan of this argument because people use it to excuse all kinds of things. "People get beaten up in prison? It's not a vacation, it's jail". "Prison rape happens? It's not a vacation, it's jail". And so on and so on. Like, yeah, it's not a vacation, but a basic standard of human dignity should be allowed.

denton-scratch 4y ago

The UK has private prisons: 14 out of a total of 117 are privately-run, apparently. I have no idea of what influence the operators are able to bring to bear on the government; the government we have at the moment is shamelessly corrupt, so I assume it's widespread and invisible.

klooney 4y ago

Interestingly, private prisons house a higher percentage of prisoners in the UK than in the US.

conanbatt 4y ago

If you don't like private prisons, wait until you hear about the public ones.

toiletfuneral 4y ago

pkaye 4y ago

Private prison exist in many countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_prison